Poet Yrsa Daley-Ward chats becoming an escort to pay the bills, hard drugs and struggles with depression

POPULAR poet Yrsa Daley-Ward always had a way with words – and she was handy with a whip, too.

As a struggling model in her twenties, she turned to sex to pay her bills, working as a high-class escort.

Regular clients included a posh Londoner who liked to dress as a schoolboy and be spanked by his “headmistress”, while another enjoyed being called Yrsa’s “pet”.

The 34-year-old said: “It’s the most common thing in the modelling industry, especially at high levels.

“I’m not talking about standing on street corners. You have a boyfriend for two months who’s a millionaire.

“In that situation you’re safe, eating caviar, drinking champagne. It’s a reality for so many women in the entertainment industry and we’re told not to talk about it. I was a very enterprising young woman, learning what to use to get by.”

Yrsa’s writing has wowed critics on both sides of the Atlantic. This week she published her acclaimed autobiography, The Terrible, in which she recalls her working-class upbringing in London and her sex-filled days as an escort.

Of her first encounter with the Hampstead intellectual who liked the “headmistress” to teach him a lesson, she writes: “What a wondrous exchange. Ever heard a cane whip through the air?”

She adds: “On first glance it is ridiculous. But we all have needs and you have a heart. Making people feel good must be taken seriously.”

Clients would sometimes host plush parties where the girls would choose a bikini from a bucket.

On one such occasion she recalls walking through a penthouse and approaching a table with white powder, foil and glass bottles all laid out.

She writes: “‘It’s crack,’ the client’s PA explained. ‘But don’t worry, it’s totally optional’.”

Yrsa describes how the girls would chat to each other breezily about “make-up, The X Factor, the news and the fact that we’d never seen anyone on crack before.”

Even if it did not pay enough, Yrsa had great success as a model.

Her 5ft 10in frame and striking, androgynous beauty saw her signed up by brands including Apple, Topshop and Estee Lauder.

She also landed bit-parts in C4’s Shameless and Drop Dead Gorgeous on BBC Three.

But Yrsa, who is of Jamaican and Nigerian heritage, did not see her future on the screen or catwalk.

From a young age her mum, Marcia, encouraged her to “escape into literature — she was a single Jamaican mother, and in our culture, education is at the top”.

But her childhood was complicated. It was an episode of Coronation Street that prompted Marcia to tell the then six-year-old that the man she believed to be her dad was not her biological father.

Yrsa said: “Linford, the person I thought was my dad, was actually just her boyfriend. I didn’t mind the new information.

“Linford was moody and ill- tempered at times, and used to bring the house down with his snoring.

“Growing up, my mum had to make lots of decisions that I didn’t understand at the time.”

Marcia and Linford split up when Yrsa was seven. The exhausted mum worked nights as a nurse and struggled to juggle her job and childcare.

She ended up packing Yrsa and little brother Roo off to their grandparents in Warrington, Cheshire.

They spent the next four years living with the devout Seventh-Day Adventists. Yrsa found the religious regime difficult.

She writes: “There are many rules. I am not allowed to venture farther than the garden gate, unless to school or on church missions.

“Sleepovers are unnecessary and the cinema is terribly sinful.”

Lots of people are afraid to tell the truth but I don’t care

Yrsa Daley-WardPoet

After the children moved back home they survived on ready-meals and party food as Marcia continued to put in long shifts at the hospital.

Their chaotic home life lasted until Yrsa was 16, when she met her first boyfriend, Peter. He was a 33-year-old music teacher and a family friend.

Mesmerised by her beauty and talent as a singer, he left his wife and the pair moved in together.

Peter promised to help the teenager realise her ambition of becoming a singer and model, and Yrsa decided to drop out of college. She describes it as “a torrid, crazy time”, as she began to question her sexuality and thought: “You’re probably a lesbian. You think about women all the time.”

Battling her own feelings and tired of Peter’s possessive behaviour, she eventually left him.

Yrsa has since been heralded as a gay activist but is reluctant to put labels on her sexuality. She said: “Let’s say I have dated women for the past ten years and not men.”

Single life took her to Manchester, where she was a “temp in an office in a glass-fronted tower” by day but spent her evenings “out, on the pills”.

She dabbled with liquid ecstasy and suffered terrifying blackouts.

Yrsa was once partying so hard that she had to carry a “drug survival kit”, containing drinks, plasters, Bonjela to treat the mouth ulcers the drugs caused and “a melted Easter egg for sugar and energy”.

She began working as a high-class escort but, keen to pursue her modelling career, moved back to London.

When her mum died in 2007 life became increasingly difficult.

Yrsa said of that time: “It was survival. It became like wading through mud. I woke up every day and I watched the sun go up and then it came down.

“It was grief, depression, the blues. It was not feeling that I had a purpose in the world. It’s intense loneliness.”

Struggling to land big gigs as a model, she continued to work in the sex industry and ended up with a job in a strip club. In her book she recalls a night where a famous cricketer attacked a fellow dancer.

The injured woman was thrown out of the club and fired.

I keep on dancing – time is money

Yrsa Daley-WardPoet

She writes: “She is holding her ribcage under her breast. There is blood in her mouth as she limps away.”

The unnamed cricketer was sent champagne on the house, and Yrsa kept dancing for him.

She continues: “I hear my heart in my ears. Of course I keep on dancing. Time is money.”

In need of a fresh start, Yrsa packed her things and spent the little money she had on a plane ticket to South Africa.
She embarked on a new life with £180 in her pocket.

She said: “The thing that attracted me to South Africa was that the models look like me and there’s so much more diversity.”

She planned to stay for only two months but ended up living there for three years.

It was in a bar in Cape Town that she rediscovered her love of poetry.

She attended a spoken-word night where anyone could perform as long as they prepared something under the set theme.

The subject for the next meeting was family discord. She remembers saying to herself: “Well, that’s going to be easy.”

Yrsa arrived the next week with her poem True Story, which received a warm response from the audience. Soon she had a full set of poems.

Her self-published first collection, Bone, was released in 2014 then picked up by Penguin — and soon by readers in their droves.

Now she spends her days in New York working as a writer.

She said: “In acting and modelling I was so busy expressing what somebody else wanted that I’d completely shut down my own voice.

“When I was 20, I was in knots. I couldn’t speak my reality to anybody. There’s no cage now.

“Lots of people are afraid to tell the truth but I don’t care.”

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