Sound: prostitution in NZ during WW2

Hear Nurse Margaret Macnab talk about visiting a prostitute in desperate conditions.

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Transcript

Clip three: visiting a prostitute in desperate conditions

Going along to see one girl on one occasion I had to go through it was a narrow sort of dark passage way to her room. I'd asked the owner where so and so was, where Violet's room was you see, she told me at the end of the corridor along to the left. And as I went along I had to almost brush soldiers with a young soldier, a young New Zealand soldier coming out of her room and an old seedy old man. And nobody spoke with me, but the girl herself was lying on bare ticking on the bed with her head on her ticking pillow - no pillowslip, nothing at all. And there were Worcester Sauce bottles and empty beer cans and things on the table, cigarette butts and so on. And she was undernourished of course, and she was actually well advanced in a state of DTs almost. While not really violent, she was quite beyond understanding what I was telling her.

Interviewer: Because she was drunk?

Yes, well she wasn't just ordinarily drunk, she was beyond that you see? But I had instructions you see that if they couldn't understand what I was telling them I was to pin the notice on them and leave it on them. And so I did that with her, but as I turned she grabbed me by the corner of my coat and said 'give me some money', and I never carried money to those places and I said, 'I haven't any money to give you' and she hung on to my coattails, but she let go, she wasn't violent.