Janis Hetherington sits with her back erect on a pink chaise, in a pink room. We are in the understated grandeur of her 17th-century longhouse in a sleepy town in Oxfordshire, which she shares with her long-term partner, Barbara. Her grey hair is wound in a tight plait and pinned to her head. With wide trousers, waistcoat, jaunty cravat and a hanky in her pocket she resembles a country gent about to go hunting.
More than 40 years ago, Janis was the first lesbian in the UK to undergo artificial insemination. For anyone else that might have been a daunting decision, fraught with fear of the potential repercussions and prejudice, but for Janis it was only one of several controversial decisions that have characterised her life.
Age hasn't calmed her wild ways; at 66, she's still a massive flirt. "If I were 20 years younger!" she cackles, patting my knee, with a Cheshire cat grin and saucer-wide eyes. To say Janis has a high sex drive is an understatement. In her youth, she was, "totally addicted to, if you like, sex. It was bliss." She says it with a Miranda-style primness, all Patricia Hodge plummy tones – but there's a Carry On whimsy to her saucy life story.
As a teenager, Janis was determined to explore her sexuality and she took a 25-year-old lover when she was just 15. "A lot of people would say she should be arrested," she says. "That's absolute rubbish. I mean, I was the one seducing her!"
At 16, she travelled to France, where she was recruited into a brothel and at just 18 moved back to London to start up a sex business of her own. During that time she was raped and became pregnant, but at seven months, she miscarried. By the age of 25, Janis felt she had "done everything" and the lifestyle had begun to wear her down; "it wasn't all a bed of roses" she says despondently. She began to long for stability, a partner – and a baby.
This article continues on The Independent.
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