Tour De Frances IV
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The Dark Side Of The Life Of Frances Barker free porn video
The Dark Side of the Life of Frances Barker
Michelle Baker
I decided to write this after I read a clipping from a newspaper, sent
to me as an attachment to a letter. It was a sad footnote of a tragic
life in a tiny article, meriting barely a column-inch. It recorded the
death of Frances 'Frannie the Trannie' Barker, beaten to death with a
blunt instrument in the tiny bed-sitter she lived and worked in -
working as a prostitute. Saddened because I knew her as a kid. Knew her
when she was him, actually, because they lived next door to us in the
dreadful Park Hill estate in Sheffield. This estate of apartments -
'flats' in British English - was an example of brutal modernist
architecture, built to replace a bombed-out area (thanks, Luftwaffe)
and by the 1980s, many of the flats were occupied by desperately poor,
degenerate, drug and alcohol troubled, dysfunctional families who made
life hell for neighbours who were simply poor, like us. Francis came
from one such dysfunctional 'family'.
His father was an ex coal miner. The truth of the matter was that he
worked in a pit in a small mining community that was supported by
subsidies, and hadn't an economic leg to stand on. This was concealed
from all by astute Trade Union shenanigans, until one day all was
revealed and the pit closed. Mythology has it that the pit was closed
and the community torn apart by prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but
in truth, the previous Labour Government had effectively killed it and
it was waiting for the coup de grace to put it out of its misery. The
folks who worked there were to blame: absenteeism was appalling, the
local doctors were in league with the National Union of Mineworkers and
would sign healthy miners 'off sick', and most of the coal actually
mined was used to provide miners with their 'allowance' of free coal.
There was no brass band playing Sundays in the park. A series of
political national strikes had left the miners there out of pocket and
in debt, and Francis's father was a drunken brute, a broken man, who
was often violent to his wife and child, both when drunk and when
sober, especially the latter as this was when he had no money for beer.
He'd lost not only his normal wages and the overtime payments for work
claimed but rarely done, but also his payments as a Shop Steward for
the Union.
How do I know this? Well, in later life I followed up the clues
researching the Miners' Strikes for a newspaper article - I grew up to
be a journalist. At that time, I was simply the terrified child who
lived next door, and heard the shouting, the screams, the thuds -
followed by the far more frightening silences, all of which could be
heard through the paper thin walls. I was nine going on ten when
Francis's father left, and a sort of tranquillity descended on their
flat. Without the booze and gambling, Francis and his mother seemed
better off, but he still went to school in scruffy clothing, often
torn, rarely patched. He smelt odd (basically of urine), and most of us
avoided him when we could. Living next door to him it was difficult: we
were the same age, in the same school, and worse, in the same class.
Even worse than that, my surname Baker put us next to each other in the
attendance register, and the teacher knew we were neighbours and would
quiz me about his whereabouts when he was a truant. I grew to hate
this, and hate him for a while, as the other girls in my set would call
him my 'boyfriend'.
I was ten, and looking forward to senior school and parting company
with my stinky neighbour (who often failed to turn up to school, so
wouldn't be in my class) when on a walk home from school he fell in
beside me, and struck up a conversation which I was hoping wouldn't
last long, certainly not as far as our front doors, and preferably, not
long enough for us to be seen. I contrasted my school uniform dress
with his dingy grey short trousers, and noticed that the front was
stained with the concentric rings of urine which accounted for the
smell. I didn't dare guess what his underwear was like. To my surprise,
he was rather articulate, and he praised my clothes, my hair, my skin,
my shoes and short white socks, my posture and my feminine walk. I
looked at him again, and decided that as he was a skinny and
androgynous runt, he might make it as a girl. His hair was nearly long
enough, and if brushed to get out the tangles ...
Then he surprised me some more. He said that he'd like to wear clothes
like mine. At first, I thought that he meant clean, but it became
obvious that while he meant that, he also meant girls' clothes. I
called him a sissy, and ran off.
Thefts of laundry were a perpetual problem in that area: the clothes
drying area was remote, and most people hung stuff out of windows or
dried it indoors, so the flats were always humid, with windows and
walls running with condensation, and encrusted with black mould. One
day, my mother complained that someone had stolen a pink cotton dress,
several pairs of white cotton knickers and some of my white short
school socks. She was very cross about it. "There's a pervert about,
and he's not content with grown women's stuff - he's stealing kids'
clothes!" They weren't stolen, I'd parcelled them up and given them to
Francis. I had an old pair of trainers - well, they weren't trainers
then, they weren't even tennis shoes, they were the canvas flatties we
wore for 'school exercise', and which we called 'plimsolls'. I'd grown
out of them and gave them to him to wear. I had no intention of getting
the stuff back, but still I wasn't going to let him wear the stuff
while his dirty self, so while Mum was out shopping and Dad was queuing
for his dole, I sneaked Francis in to our house, ran a shallow bath,
stripped him down and scrubbed him. I shampooed his hair, and brushed
it out against his howls of protest as the tangles came out.
Looking back now, from a position twenty-odd years later, I can still
see his soft little body. His penis and testicles were minute, and he
had the beginnings of a bust. I'd only ever seen a girl naked, and
didn't know that this was weird. Later, I discovered that he was giving
himself hormone therapy by overdosing on his mother's contraceptive
pills. He'd worked out that you needed to be a girl to be loved based
on the example he saw next door. Dressed in my panties, socks, dress
and plimsolls, with a ribbon in his hair, he could have been a girl in
my class. "You're Frances now," I said, emphasising the diction, "Fran
or Frannie?"
Together, we walked out of the house. He didn't attract the slightest
attention - we looked like two girls playing. But it couldn't last
long, and he had to change back into those awful stinking clothes of
his. It left a 'niff' in the air that Mum sensed when she came in, but
she put it down to the mould or one or other of the smells that
assailed the nose in that awful place.
After this, it was a regular thing for Francis to become Frances, along
with a wash and brush up in our flat while both Mum and Dad were out. I
look back on this of course with the benefits of hindsight, but at the
time, I was just a kid and saw no harm in dressing up. There was no way
I was even considering getting into his stinking rags, that's not what
I meant. And he did look cute when he was Frances - Frannie. So
inevitably, we decided that we'd wash his clothes. We? I mean that he
would. He had a shirt, shorts, pants and grey socks, and item by item,
I made him wash them out in a bowl full of warm water and Ariel
Biological. The filth that came out was extraordinary. Then he rinsed
them out, and together we wrung the water out. Then, we hug them out of
a window to dry.
Inevitably, of course, Mum came home from shopping while Frances and I
were sitting in the living room dressing and undressing my skinny
fashion doll. I don't think that Mum looked properly, because she
didn't recognise my new companion at first - or even for quite a long
time. She would have if Frannie was wearing my pink dress, but today
she was wearing a different one that we had really stolen. Mum decided
to engage my 'friend' in conversation, and eventually, decided that we
probably needed a drink of squash, and went off to make it. It was then
that she discovered Francis's clothes hung out to dry. She came back
with the two glasses and was about to ask what the clothes were doing
there (and whose were they?), when she caught sight of the Francis
behind Frannie. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she couldn't say a word
at first. Eventually, she found her voice: "You're Francis - from next
door!"
In time, of course, Mum came round to the idea. She checked Frances's
hair for nits - a major problem at that time and place - but nothing
was going to live in the filth of next door, not nits, not lice, not
fleas. Only humans could. From then on, Frances was a regular visitor.
Mum approved that he was getting a bath in our house, but eventually,
of course, she was going to see him unclothed, and probe until she
found out why his skinny body had a softness and curve and why his
genitals were so atrophied. That night I heard her talking to Dad.
"That kid's taking his mother's Pill to turn himself into a girl," she
said.
"Why does his mother need the Pill?" asked Dad. "Her husband buggered
off, didn't he?"
"She's on the game. Get's Benefits too. That's how she affords all the
booze and fags!" (Fags are cigarettes in British English, and 'on the
game' means prostitution).
Looking back, I could see the inevitability of it all. The mother
became pregnant from one of her 'clients', as the aspirins Frances was
substituting for her mother's Pill might be helping with her hangover,
but weren't working as contraception!
I was at home the night Frances's father came home to demand money with
menaces - and trade that for a few blows with his fists. From somewhere
he'd discovered that his wife was in receipt of Housing Benefit,
various forms of Social Security, and was making money on the side
while on her back. I heard him shouting, her screaming, the inevitable
thuds as she was knocked about, and the inevitable silence punctuated
by sobs. He'd found her small cache of money and was preparing to take
off with it.
What happened next was unexpected. Frances wandered out from his room
in girls' clothes, wearing lipstick. Barker senior took one look, and
bellowed: "Fook Me! You've turned the fookin' boy intae a pouf! You get
them clothes off now!" I heard the rips as the man tore the dress off
her back, then "What the fook 'ave you done wi' 'is fookin' cock and
balls?" followed by more sounds of violence, screams and sobbing.
In the morning, Mrs Barker was missing a tooth, and her face was black
and blue. Poor Francis - he was in boys' clothes then - still had his
teeth, but he sported a black eye. Later, he showed me the weals where
his father had whipped him with a leather belt. "Mum has them too," he
confided. There were a few across his back, but his buttocks were red
raw with them, lash after lash after lash.
I found him some more old clothes, and from then on, Francis was
Frances at every possible opportunity, and I always addressed her as a
girl.
While Frances's father was a brute, her mother was a whore, and was
supplementing her benefits with untaxed income from her whoring. The
brute had found her little stash - intended to be found easily - but
not the bigger, better-hidden, one. Once again, with the benefit of
long after hindsight, I realised what she spent it on. She spent it in
a way that pleased Frances and enabled her to act out of spite towards
her brute of a husband. Where she went, I don't know, but when she came
back a month later, Frances's operation had largely healed. He showed
me during a dressing up session. His testicles were gone, and his
scrotum had been turned into labia. His penis - incapable of erection
due to the hormones, was stitched down like a clitoris, and all but
invisible under its prepuce that looked for all the world like a
clitoral hood. Along the way, his urethra had been rerouted so he peed
like a girl. There wasn't enough skin to form a vagina, but heck, I
barely knew what that was myself, as I was a long way from puberty. I
was still completely flat chested, but Frances had more than just
budding breasts, and was now on a regular hormonal therapy.
It was three months to the day when the brute came home again looking
for money, and what he found displeased him even more than the first
time. The shouting, screaming, thumping went on as before, and then the
silence.
They found Frances naked in her bedroom sobbing, her clothes ripped to
shreds. Her mother lay in a pool of blood with her head stoved in with
a jemmy tool the brute had brought along to force the front door open.
The baby died inside her. He realised what he'd done, ran up to the
highest balcony in the apartment block and threw himself off. I joined
the bystanders, and I noticed how the impact had forced the air out of
his lungs, bringing with it a spray of black phlegm and blood. He had
been a coal miner, after all, and the black was coal dust. When the
police came and shooed away the gawpers from the corpse, I went back
upstairs. My Dad was watching football on a small television. It was 3
o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. "What's all the commotion?" he asked.
I knew he wouldn't rush out to see for himself, as he hobbled with his
missing foot that he'd lost in an industrial accident.
Frances was taken into local authority care, and went to a different
school, and I didn't see her again for years. As for me, I did well at
school, stayed on, and went to a Polytechnic where I studied
journalism. While I was there, it became a University, and after I
graduated, I went to work with a fairly left-wing newspaper as a
reporter. It was during this time that I researched the Miners'
Strikes. To my astonishment I discovered that the anti-Thatcher
mythology was simply propaganda, and I knew that wasn't publishable in
my newspaper, so I hid the results.
I was a target for predation in the offices: the sub-editor asked me
to suck him off, and the Shop Steward for the National Union of
Journalists was even more forthright: I needed to open my legs for him,
or not only was there no advancement, there wasn't a chance I'd keep my
job. My salvation came via an unlikely route. I was sent to cover the
Tory candidate despatched north to fight an unwinnable seat in a
Labour-stronghold industrial town and I fell for him and he for me. I
moved in with him, and within a year we were married with a baby on the
way. Not only did I move south, but I also got a part time job with his
Dad's free local newspaper reporting on school prizes and suchlike.
Before that, however, my last job was to go back to Sheffield to do a
story on the Park Hill Estate. The place was newsworthy on account of
the crime, but also the sheer Soviet ghastliness of the place, towering
as it did over the whole town.
I walked up our old flat, conscious of several things. Firstly, I was
overdressed for this venue. Secondly, in my purse was a new
Conservative Party membership card: probably the first one ever brought
into this place. Thirdly, my panties were soaked with a mixture of my
own secretions and my new boyfriend's semen and I was feeling
uncomfortable. I had yet to discover that I was pregnant. The flat was
no longer ours, of course. Dad's emphysema carried him off while I was
still at Uni, and Mum's life fell apart after that. She had what we now
call Alzheimer's, and she barely recognised me (and that's being
charitable) in the care home where the 'carers' starved her to death,
or maybe the last couple of weeks in a filthy National Health Service
ward did it. I knocked at the door, and it was opened by a woman of my
own age. After a moment's incomprehension and lack of recognition, I
saw it was Frances, and she recognised me. I was 24, and so it was
nearly a decade and a half since I'd last set eyes on her.
"I've read some of your articles," she said, as she ushered me in. The
flat was clean and tidy, and valiant (but unsuccessful) attempts had
been made to fight the mould. We sat and talked, and after I'd given an
account of myself (omitting the change in my political allegiance), I
discovered what had happened to her.
At the Children's Care Home, they were in a quandary. Was she a girl or
a boy? Heads were scratched, and eventually, it was decided that she
was a girl, as the operation, while reversible up to a point, would
never replace testicles and the hormone overdose had created its own
changes. She was housed, cleaned, dressed and fed. So far so good. But
what wasn't so good was the abuse. I was shocked to the core. The
wardens were up to it, most noticeably the Unison Shop Stewardess, who
was running the place as a brothel, and keeping the proceeds. The front
was that the place was endowed by the National Union of Mineworkers
(NUM), with a remit to care for orphaned miners' children, and the
Governing Body had lots of their officials on it - most of whom were
abusers too. Frances reeled off a list of men who had been at it. I
didn't recognise many of them, but I did recognise a leading figure of
the pop music world with leftish credentials, a couple of prominent
Labour politicians, and a well-known senior official of the NUM. What
shocked me even more were the number of policemen. I knew that this was
simply unpublishable, but confirmed me in my new views of life.
Frances said that the medication was never a problem, as most of the
girls were on The Pill anyway to stop unwanted pregnancies. She might
not have had a vagina, but she had a mouth and an anus, and to be
frank, the other girls envied her that she never had periods and that
she only had two and not three sites for the predations of their
abusers.
The other part was that at sixteen she was kicked out to a job in a
cheap department store that eventually went bust, paying a meagre wage
to pay for a bed in a dormitory, and which she supplemented by whoring.
Eventually, she fell in with a more senior transgirl, and together they
made the money for a visit to a Thai clinic where she was operated on
to make a functional vagina out of a section of colon. She recovered in
a village surrounded by paddy fields, and came home once the whole lot
had healed to work full-time as a prostitute. The flat was a bonus, and
she'd picked it up when the tenants who succeeded us were expelled. She
said that it held fond memories for her, so she slept in what had been
my bedroom and used the bigger bedroom as a workplace.
So, was she happy? Not happy like I was, but she seemed fulfilled.
There was no pimp, and she kept her earnings. What she dreaded was
picking up a violent client who discovered that she was a transgirl,
and didn't like it. We parted with a kiss, and I never met her again.
My report on the flats and their tenants was edited into a diatribe
about worker exploitation, and I was glad to leave that paper's staff.
It was nearly a decade later that I received the letter with the
newspaper cutting. My two daughters were both at school, and the
postman interrupted my writing in the little office we maintained in
the house. It was an unexpected letter from a solicitor. After the
preamble, addressed to me in my married name, it began:
'I am writing to you in respect of the affairs of the late Ms Frances
Barker, as I am her Executor and you are the principal beneficiary of
her will. I have obtained probate, and paid all necessary disbursements
for her funeral, closed her bank and building society accounts, and
collected her life insurance. After deduction of my fees and expenses
(as per the attached schedule), the considerable sum remaining is
herewith enclosed in the form of a cheque. All due taxes have been paid
on the Estate.
I should be grateful if you would acknowledge safe receipt of same, and
indicate that you are content with the attached accounts. I enclose a
newspaper cutting of the demise of Ms Barker, and also a letter to you
from her. She particularly requested that you not be informed until
after the funeral'.
I was staggered by the amount of the cheque. This would pay off our
mortgage, or free the girls from the costs of University education in
due course, or a bunch of other things, maybe including better
holidays, and a newer car. I was going to have an interesting and long
discussion with my husband about it when he came home from work. It
might even help him get into a safe seat somewhere to fulfil his
parliamentary ambitions.
Then, and only then, I opened the letter.
'You are the only one who showed me kindness when I was a child. You
helped me down the path I chose for myself. It was hell, but it would
have been worse for me to have followed my father down the pit, and to
have become the devil incarnate that he was.
I've enclosed a list of the names of those who abused me, when, and
where. You may find this interesting or of use for your man's political
purposes. Bless you'.
The list was witnessed and notarised. My jaw fell as I read down it,
and I guessed at the political affiliations of each based on what they
were doing for a living.
Later that evening, when my husband came home I showed it to him. We
are still deciding what to do with it. The fortunate ones are already
dead, and probably in hell themselves. The others will pay in this life
as well as in the next.
Some days later, I wondered about investments and profits. Who could
predict that the casual down-payment of two pairs of well-worn school
knickers, a dress I didn't like, a pair each of short white socks and
tatty plimsolls, plus a squeeze of shampoo, a rub of soap, a handful of
Ariel Biological washing powder, a hair ribbon and some TLC could grow,
in only two decades, into a quarter of a million pounds?
But I must have wept a tear for every penny since I got it, so don't
think that the windfall came cheap.
Grace
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