I think I was about 10 years old when I discovered my mother was a sex worker. I arrived home one afternoon from school and caught her at work. Hearing sounds I vaguely associated with sex, I let myself in, then quietly straight back out again. I wasn’t actually sure what I knew for quite a while. Eventually, I put it together: an unusually high level of phone calls, whispered conversations in the hall and a too-young viewing of the film Pretty Baby meant I eventually realised what her new business was. She certainly wasn’t a secretary any more, as I had always believed her to be. She was in her mid-40s, and maybe she had long ago found other ways to support us. I am unsure of much of my personal history – where one lie ends, and another begins.
Afterwards, I wasn’t sure she knew that I knew. I had opened the front door, heard all I needed to, and closed it again. Did she know I’d heard her with that man? Did she realise everything between us had changed? At that moment, I was thrust into a world of secrecy and shame. I didn’t have to be told to say nothing. I knew to tell no one what my mam did now.
I was a judgmental and priggish child – I was at Catholic school and this was encouraged. I tended to look too hard at the bad, rather than appreciate the food on the table, the clothes on my back. The youngest of three kids, I was also a bit spoiled. I certainly didn’t go without.
But radical honesty about personal characteristics and choices was not a “thing” in 1970s Leeds. Keeping my mouth bloody well shut while trying to contort my overweight brown self (mixed Jamaican/French Canadian) into a passable version of a “Yorkshire schoolgirl” very much was.
But what to do about Mam? What is a 10-year-old kid supposed to do about a wayward parent? Their only parent? (My father was distant and never lived with us.) How would I learn to accept her?
As an early and enthusiastic reader, I was used to the idea of rejected children finding a family elsewhere. From Enid Blyton’s free-roaming Secret Seven to the spoilt orphan in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, my childhood was full of books where parents had died, or discarded their kids.
And there were always secrets. Yet, at the end the secrets were always revealed – and this one never would be. At least not while I had breath in my body. Or so I thought.
Mostly, my new world of secrecy was internal. Externally, everything carried on as normal. Until my mother decided to send me to boarding school in North Yorkshire (where I fitted in even less) and everything changed again.
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It turned out her business went pretty well. I grew up a little, so it all became somewhat easier to understand. This was especially so after my mother ran a successful (for a time) brothel. A step up into management. It was a clean and fair establishment run as much for the women who worked there as for the punters who used it, until it was raided and closed down by the police.
It took me decades – until middle age – to see that in all the ways that mattered, I had become my mother. The moment when our parents shock us by peering back at us from the bathroom mirror comes to us all, and I already sounded like her. I can hear her telling me, as I tell my daughter: “You can do anything you want, anything. Anyone who says you can’t, ignore ’em.” We are a chorus of disruptive, loud-mouthed women.
Eventually I began to write about Mam. I finally saw her as not only my mother, and not only a sex worker (to my shame, a variation on the Madonna/whore complex), but as a rounded and vital human being. One with a fantastic sense of humour and a rough-and-ready love for me that had endured my snobbery with reasonable grace.
My debut novel, All Us Sinners, features a brothel madam called Maureen, who helps the police solve crimes in her demi-monde corner of Leeds. While Peter Sutcliffe attacks women outside the doors, she runs a safe and disciplined shop for the girls who work there. Maureen is, of course, my mam. She is also me. She is all women working hard to survive in a world where we are not safe, not equal and not trusted.
I’m lucky I was able to get close to my mother in adulthood. She died on the first day of lockdown, 23 March 2020, aged 88, knowing that I was grateful for her gifts to me. She was clever, free from shame, and taught me that these are qualities to trumpet, not hide away. She was proud to have her story told in my memoir Are We Home Yet?, released a few months after her death. Today, I am prouder of her than I can say.
All Us Sinners by Katy Massey is published by Sphere books.