Parlour games (From Bournemouth Echo)

Parlour games

7:00pm Friday 11th April 2008 in

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STRAPPED to a hospital gurney on a seemingly endless journey to the operating theatre to have her leg broken. Again.

As first memories go, it's traumatic enough, but the three-year-old girl had no idea what lay ahead.

Poole-based masseuse Kim Martin, 46, recounts her remarkable story in Born Naughty (Melrose Books, £13), following a path that led from childhood agony through teenage rebellion, marriage and motherhood to working local hotels as a call girl.

Born with spina bifida, Kim had already been in and out of hospital routinely when she was admitted for yet more surgery at the age of 10, beginning a stay that would last four tortuous years.

"I had a series of bad operations on my right leg that ended up with me getting gangrene which rotted away my hip," she says, with what turns out to be characteristic frankness.

"I walked into that hospital, but when they took me home four years later they didn't even leave me with a wheelchair. I have scars on my knees because I had to crawl everywhere."

Confined to her room for the best part of another year at home in Swanage while her parents fought to get her a wheelchair, by the age of 14 Kim had lost touch with her friends and watched from her window as life went by without her. Isolated, she begged to be allowed to go to school with able-bodied kids and was finally admitted to Purbeck School in Wareham.

"I didn't mind school so much as it got me back into circulation. Soon I had friends again who would drag my chair up steps to get me into some lessons - health and safety didn't seem much of an issue back then."

But walking again was. In spite of the metal rod that had been fitted to keep her spine straight and her heavily scarred right leg being shorter than the left, Kim was obsessed with the idea she'd soon be back on her feet. She would mark passages in her Bible at night convinced that by morning her leg would be cured. Disappointment followed disappointment until, finally, a local appeal was launched to raise money to send her to Lourdes in search of a miracle cure.

"Of course, it didn't happen. The nuns there told me my faith wasn't strong enough, but my world was shattered. That's when I set about accepting the hand that life had dealt me and just getting on with it."

Ever personable, Kim soon had a gang of close friends and would hang out at youth club discos doing the things that teenagers do.

"That was when I discovered boys," she grins. "I soon realised once they were interested it was up to me who I did and didn't end up with and I used to hear girls asking how come I had a bloke when they didn't, but I think it has been true all my life that once someone gets to know me the disability becomes invisible."

Married at 21, she has a daughter and son in their 20s ("The best things that ever happened to me."), but left their father over "some things that I cannot forgive" after seven years.

"I was desperate to become a nurse and go into theatre awake instead of asleep, but they told me I'd never be able to as I couldn't walk, so I got a clerical job in hospital."

Which was fine, until Kim sensed it was time for a change and went to college to study massage. It wasn't long before she was confronted by the seamier side of the business.

"I was always a bit bad - naughty, not horrible. I got 99 replies from my first advert in the paper, but soon realised I'd have to offer more if I wanted repeat business. In my eyes I wasn't doing any harm - the men were coming to me, I wasn't taking them, but I never liked the feeling that I got when I passed a woman in the street and wondered if it was her other half last night.

"I have a very bad concept of men and I don't like men who cheat, yet I am part of their cheating."

She married again, but the relationship evolved into friendship long before she met current partner Dave through her massage work.

"He kept on at me to do more and then when I finally did he wanted me to himself. I cut him out for weeks in the hope he'd go back to his family, but he couldn't let go even though by now I was working the hotels as an escort."

Kim was selling sex in order to pay debts. She's perfectly candid about prostitution and the book's revelations won't come as any surprise to those her know her well. There were times she didn't enjoy it and plenty more when she did, on at least one occasion happily fulfilling a client's fantasy of being with a woman in a wheelchair.

"I learned a lot about men," she says. "Women can go to the hairdresser, or the tanning salon and talk to strangers about their innermost feelings. There's nowhere for men to do that. Men just want to be cared for and made to feel special - what I did was provide a service. They paid for my time, I was very choosy and it didn't always end up in full sex."

By her own admission Kim is lucky to have got this far with her sexual health intact. She doesn't shy from some of the choices she has made - far from it - and says she hopes her story will help others.

"At the time I was doing what I felt I had to do. It wasn't until I sat down to write the book that I found any part of it traumatic - that was when the insecurity surfaced because I think I've always lacked stability.

"I'll be honest, it's a thrill - both for me and the clients - but it's highly addictive. I like pleasing people and put their needs before my own, so perhaps I was always going to end up like this, but it's a year since I've done escort work.

"People will have their say, but I just want to live a good life now for the people I love and care about. I was born naughty, but maybe I'm beyond naughty now."