<hr/><div class="floatleft">(http://www.radioanywhere.co.uk/upload/95/1488.cover.jpg)</div><br/><strong>Name:</strong>Walter Sinnett<br/><strong>Date:</strong>1840's<br/><strong>Location:</strong>London<br/><strong>Tagged:</strong>Closed<br/><br/><em>My name's Walter Sinnet and I don't know when I was born.<br/><br/>That's not really a strange thing to be honest. They may be pretty bloody good at timekeeping in a whorehouse... 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes... but they weren't no good at dates. Who bloody needed them at the end of the day? They think I was born sometime in the mid 1840's and they think it was in the summer but really, no-one cared or gave a damn.<br/><br/>What I do know is that I was lucky to be born at all. You ever want to know about birth control you go talk to some whores. If you're getting pounded by a dozen or more cocks a day you end up pretty good at making sure you don't get knocked up. And even if you do then there's always moon tea or a long, sharp, thin wire to make sure that little accident ends ups tossed out the window with the rest of the filth that ends up a stain on the streets of London. Whores don't like getting pregnant. Even if a few freaks get their rocks off by pumping a whore while her belly's bursting with someone else's child most people don't want a pregnant whore and if a whore ain't earnin' then she's not doing too well. But somehow me mum managed to get me stuck in her belly and keep me there for nine months.<br/><br/>For obvious reasons I don't know who my dad is. No-one's exactly going to walk into a knocking shop and proudly claim a bastard as his own. Could have been one of a dozen... maybe a couple of dozen. When I was young I sometimes wondered who he was. Was he a seaman on leave? A ruffian? A docker? Just another loser? Or maybe some respectable just sneaking away from his wife for a night of forbidden passion? For a while I thought about it, eyeing every bugger as he walked into the bar, wonderin' if he had my nose or I had his eyes or any of that bollocks. But that was when I was a child and when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. It didn't matter who my dad was. He'd never wanted me, I'd never really wanted him and what bloody difference did it make. If I ever do manage to leave this blasted country and get back to sweet feckin' Britannia and some poor bastard was able to point across a smoky bar and say  “Hey, Walt, that fella over there, he's your dad he is” I'm not even sure I'd look at the bastard.<br/><br/>Or maybe I would<br/><br/>But anyway, there I was, the lucky union of one of dad's sperm and one of mum's eggs with a big sign saying “Impregnate me, I'm half of one of the nastiest buggers who'll ever be” on it and nine months later I popped out of her, a cryin', whinin', screamin', pissin' little bloody baby.<br/><br/>Now I don't really remember those first few years. I don't think anyone does. What's there to remember anyway? I cried when I was hungry, shat when I was full and kept pissin' myself. That's what bloody babys do. Oh, and every so often do something “cute” or whatever the feck it is that makes women go all weak at the knees, slap their hands on their heart and say how “adorable” the baby is. Although on account of the fact my face kinda looks like a cart ran over it I doubt there was  too much cooin' bein' done over me. My guess is I just pissed, shat and cried a lot. Not too different to today really, minus the cryin'.<br/><br/>People sometimes suggest that I must have had a crap childhood what with bein' the son of a whore and all but frankly, they can go sod off. I had a damn good childhood... hell of a lot better than some people I know... even if it weren't exactly usual. And compared to bein' carted off to the bloody orphanage the back-room of the whorehouse I lived in wasn't a bad place at all. I got more love than pretty much anyone else I knew. I lived with a bunch of whores who knew they were unlikely to have children and knew more than that it was goin' to be damn near impossible for them to ever be a “family”. So they poured all their motherly instincts and love into me. Half the fellows I know, even those who knew their mam and their pa, are lucky to have a single parent who can stand the sight of them. I had a dozen who loved me.<br/><br/>So I may not remember much, not even when I became a toddler, but I do remember a general sense of love and happiness. On a side note; toddler? Sure, I get it, when you're that age you toddle around so you're a toddler... but that bein' the feckin' case why are you called a baby and not a shitter when all you can do is lie on your back and shit yourself? And why aren't you called a crawler when you can finally move but don't have the balance to stand up without falling on your arse? And when you do manage to walk about why are you called a child, not a whiner ('cos that's all you bloody do as a child, whine). But feck it, I'm not a scholar... didn't even go to bloody school... so I'm sure there's a smarter bugger than me out there who knows.<br/><br/>What I can remember of being a toddler is that my entire life was basically that warm backroom in the whorehouse. Punters didn't want a toddler wandering around the main bar to remind them of the wives and children they'd left in their cold, wet dump of a house while they got their end away annd God forbid I'd pull open a curtain and see some fat labourer's hairy arse crack bobbing up and down on one of the women I thought of as my mother. Few times they happened I got a whipping like you wouldn't believe. I didn't go to school neither. Only school around these parts was one run by the Church of England and no-one liked the cold-eyed rector when he came round looking for children to recruit. And after one of his chaplains got em... 'distracted' when he came to visit the whores he didn't send many people round. I learnt what I know from that warm backroom and the streets of London.<br/><br/>It's about this time my mum died.<br/><br/>I don't really recall it in any detail. I was still a young bugger and everything's gone a bit hazy. I remember cryin' and some of the other ladies wiping my eyes and I remember a thin woman who I think was my mum lying on a bed, struggling to turn her head but smiling weakly. You live in the slums of London like I do and you get used to disease and death but this was the first time I experienced it. Can't say I'm upset that I can't remember it. I'd probably like to remember a bit more of my mum but feck it, all that would do would mean it would hurt more to know she died. Life's shit and then you die. Ain't that the feckin' truth.<br/><br/>You may think livin' in a whorehouse was a pretty dangerous place to be but in all honesty it weren't that bad. Listen, I ain't gonna sugar coat it... it was a feckin' whorehouse after all and that meant it had pimps, ruffians, villains and thugs. But the lady who ran the place ran a tight ship. The fact is you could walk out onto a street corner and get your dick sucked for a copper or two. If a whore wanted to charge more... and a whore charging more meant the pimp and abbess could get a bigger cut... then they had to offer more than a crooked smile and a wet mouth. The whores had to be prettier, the rooms had to be nicer and the johns had to feel like they weren't goin' to get knifed in the back. The real money came when once of those fancy da lording's wanted to get his wick wet on the down low... and no lording was going to wander into a place where there was a brawl goin' on. Was too much for their refined, high-feckin'-strung noble disposition. So the abbess kept a couple of thugs on the payroll to stand there and look menacing with big truncheons (and that ain't a euphemism), ready to wade in and crack a few heads at the first sign of trouble. The sort of men who thought nothin' of smashing some bastard's skull and dumpin' his body in the Thames or feedin' it to the pigs. They kept the place quiet and formal like... people came to the whorehouse, in-out, in-out, shake it all about, do the hokey cokey and they turn around and feck off again. No trouble, no violence and no spankings (unless you paid the goin' rate).<br/><br/>The main part of the whorehouse was the tap room which in all honesty resembled any other tap room in any other sort of low-class but not quite a dive pub in London. It weren't nothin' too special but then it weren't meant to be. It was just a place for a punter to buy and overpriced, watered down beer while waiting for a whore to finish with her current date and invite him in. That said, there were some people who didn't go there to shag and did go there for a drink and some of the sausages.  I never had the sausages; I saw them being made. But anyway, on account of the hairy bouncers keepin' everyone in line, some people did just come down for a drink. Even saw a few couples although god knows how you broke the news to your missus that the location of your romantic date was going to be somewhere you could get your knob polished for sixpence. Guess if the date went badly you could still get a happy ending at least.<br/><br/>Now, my life wasn't entirely spent in that backroom and muckin'g around in the yards of London. Eventually I got a little bit bigger, a little bit more stable on my feet and I had to start to earn my keep. Not in that sort of way... it wasn't that sort of brothel. But I had to make some money somehow or no amount of love from my many whore mothers would have prevented me from bein' booted out into the streets on my arse. And while the whorehouse may have been a mostly respectable place... for a whorehouse at least... it was still a whorehouse and a punter couldn't exactly be too upset if he found his purse a few coppers lighter than it should have been or a ring missing. And so that's what I did. I dipped my little hand into a man's purse as he romped with a whore and I relieved him of enough coin to make it worth my time but not so much that he'd bloody  make an issue out of it.<br/><br/>And that was how I spent my early childhood.</em>