In case you’re wondering how CTM’s ‘ship woman’ story actually transpired in reality, Jenny Worth describes it like this (cut for disturbing content, though you can probably tell from the tags how this is gonna go:)
In the memoir it’s Chummy, not Trixie, who attends to the birth aboard the ship. There, Kirsten (referred to mostly as Kirsty in the book) tells Chummy that her father started prostituting her when she was fourteen, and he rapes her too. She doesn’t find anything horrifying about the situation, thinks the incest is perfectly normal, and loves her father for taking care of her even as she’s…fucking…raped by ten or twelve men a night. The baby is born and Chummy plans to go back later for the post-natal care (very important), but the harbourmaster tells the nuns the ship sailed away in the night, the captain obviously having twigged that medical professionals wouldn’t let “raped your daughter constantly since she was a teenager” go.
MIGHT have to face a prison sentence?!!?!
Anyway, out of all the horrible stories in CTM the memoir, that one sticks in my mind the most. These days surely, surely something would be done, but it wasn’t these days, so that poor woman just sailed out of history and might well have died.
