Cinders

Ian Hamilton

• Women Working: Prositution Now by Eileen McLeod
  Croom Helm, 177 pp, £6.95, August 1982, ISBN 0 7099 1717 1
• An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne by Paul Bailey
  Cape, 166 pp, £7.50, October 1982, ISBN 0 224 02037 4
• All the Girls by Martin O’Brien
  Macmillan, 268 pp, £7.95, October 1982, ISBN 0 333 31099 3

‘To me it’s just a job. They get on, they get off and get dressed and that’s it.’ Thus Sharon of Birmingham, one of several matter-of-fact working girls interviewed by Eileen McLeod for her study of Prostitution Now. Most of McLeod’s interviewees would go along with Sharon’s view of her vocation. Here’s Carol: ‘When they give me the money I say “Look then get on with it I haven’t got all day,” and they say “I hope you’re not going to rush me,” and I say “Look cock, you’ve got a certain amount of time here I don’t expect you to be in and out in two minutes, but I don’t expect you to spend two hours here”; they say “Fair enough.” ’ ‘Fair enough’ may indeed be what they say to Carol, but it’s probably not what they are saying to themselves. Yet there they are again, the punters, once more forking out good money for bad sex. Carol and Sharon have little need to brood on the niceties of customer-relations.