Call girl’s descent into hell – and redemption

THE Covid years have become an introspective time, with people delving deep into past emotions and actions, exploring and journalling them, and occasionally publishing them as memoirs.

White Trash is the story of Terry Angelos, now in her early fifties, looking back at her year of misspent youth, tracing it through her school years to time spent in London as a call girl.

She grew up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, a country which in the seventies was tossing out its white colonists/settlers into the next country down, South Africa. From prosperous to eking out an existence, from a rebellious youth to wild and wanton in London, Terry Angelos recounts her trip into a hell mostly as the result of choices made.

Sex for sale has probably existed for as long as humans have existed, and when you are young, fearless, indomitable, invincible, without formal qualifications, offering your body is a timeless option. For Terry it brought in the money, a place to stay, and an insatiable desire for Chinese food, the expensive kind. For some “call girl” is quite respectable, becoming a madam when the youthful lustre wears thin, but for Terry, it became hell.

White Trash is immensely readable and at times harrowing as she finds out that some customers are unspeakably cruel, more likely with murder on their minds than a lust needing satisfying, and that she could have become cold, callous and soulless. She has a compelling style, comparing her predatory paying seducers to the wildlife of Rhodesia, often quite reptilian.

With the closest friend she has, Sally, they explore extortion as a way out of their mess, never thinking that their choice of subject – who had supported them in many ways, including a holiday to Greece – would turn ugly, and Terry would have to make her escape from what unspeakable horrors could lie ahead.

She stopped in her tracks and did something about it, and clawed her way back to being a respectable person, with clear moral boundaries, and marrying her soulmate. “I have lived extravagantly … feasting on every unsavoury pleasure … ” and changing when she met a group of people with a different view of life.

White Trash is a story of hope and forgiveness, and most of the forgiveness must be to one's own self. When we are young we make mistakes, and we need to accept ourselves as a flawed species but with the infinite capacity for love and self-improvement.