TEARS streamed down my cheeks as a strange man lifted me up and dropped me into an empty washing machine box beside another little girl and closed the lid. I was just 13 years old, and my mother had told me she was saving me from a life of prostitution by smuggling me to England. For the last few years, I'd been forced to attend my gran Vera Zlatkov's 'hookery' classes - where she trained me and my cousins in the art of pleasing a man, so we could make money as child prostitutes.
Born to a fiery year-old Gypsy girl in a Romani ghetto in Slovakia, I grew up being told all I had to offer was my body and that I'd make my Ma a lot of money in sex work one day.
She told me she was waiting until I started my periods to prostitute me - yet when I was 13, she changed her mind. Shipped overseas in a washing machine box, I thought all my dreams had come true. But breathing in the fresh British air, I had no idea of the horrors awaiting me in my new, regal homeland. Before talk of England had begun, I'd come to accept that the huge, grey Soviet-style blocks where I lived, with no running water, electricity or gas, was where I'd die. But my home in the festering borough of Drovane was less a multiple-hip-hop-album-spawning ghetto and more of a "Stepped in this puddle?
LOL you got hepatitis C now" slum. We played with stained old mattresses, wore rags and lived around the likes of rapists and paedophiles. My cousins and I played with stained old mattresses, wore rags and flip-flops, stole tourists' belongings to sell for food, and lived around the likes of rapists and paedophiles. The government and police left us to our own devices, only venturing inside the borough when they had an unsolved crime and needed a random Gypsy to fill the role of suspect.
On those days, mothers would shield their sons, screaming and sobbing. My own Ma, Lenka Zlatkov, is barely a decade older than me. She was just 13 when my street-fighting Nazi father's friends bought her as a 23rd birthday present for him.
