It’s hard to describe how warm Gatehouse is sometimes, the way that on some days it just glows.

I loved reading when I was a kid and my Mum bought me and my sister these great Brothers Grimm books that we would spend hours immersed in, drinking in the quaint 1950’s pictures, absorbing the tales and their underlying morals. My favourite was Rose Red and Snow White, a tale about two sisters who live deep in the woods with their poor, widowed mother. The sisters love each other very much. Rose Red is very outspoken and cheerful, and loves to play outside. Her sister Snow-White is quieter and shy, and prefers doing housework and reading. You can see where I was going with this in my seven-year-old mind, casting my sister and I in the roles of the girls.

One night there was a knock at their door. It was a bear wanting to warm himself by the fire in their modest but clean home. They are terrified but kindly let him in. They brush the snow from his matted fur and bring him what food they can spare. Every night of the long, cold winter the bear would come to sleep by their fire and the sisters grew to love him, despite his menacing appearance. The illustration in the book portrayed light spilling out of their tiny cottage, a beacon of warmth in the deep, dark woods.

Eventually, strengthened by the loving kindness of the sisters, the bear kills an evil dwarf who had previously deceived him and turned him from a handsome prince into a wild animal. With the death of the dwarf, the bear turns back into a prince and marries Snow White. Rose Red marries the Prince’s brother (as the brother never makes an appearance it was perfectly plausible for me to take the literary liberty of marrying my sister off and riding away on my own fairy-tale adventure).

It’s easy to draw parallels with fairytales. That’s the point. They give you a nicely packaged morality tale to apply to your own life. But on those days when an icy wind whips around Saint Kilda, hurtling leaves around exposed ankles and creeping into bones, I see Gatehouse as like that little cottage in the deep, dark woods. It too is modest but clean and most of all, it’s a home. Sometimes the people who ask to come in have a menacing appearance, but there, in that little sanctuary they come to be loved. Sometimes, the loving kindness helps women to overcome their own evil dwarf, that which has held them captive in a strange and terrible shape. Some women emerge free. The moral of the tale is best summarised by Lennon and McCartney: all you need is love.

Often what happens at the Gatehouse – what we see and the stories we hear – is dreary, depressing and disillusioning; certainly no fairytale. The majority of women who walk through the door have been beaten, raped, sexually abused and have life-altering drug addictions. They are a marginalised group who are at the mercy of the men who pay them for sex, the dealers who sell them drugs, and the arseholes who throw eggs and abuse at them as they stand on the street. In the space of five hours yesterday I heard the story of a horrific rape and abduction, of a woman whose client paid her $20 to shit in her mouth, and of a woman whose brother sexually abused her. And yesterday was a quiet day. Those stories are the ever-present undercurrents to the ebb and flow of the Gatehouse daily routine.

Later that afternoon a woman was brought in by one of the regulars. She had the kind of black eye that only comes from being purposefully, viciously, beaten. She had come straight from court where she had been trying to get a domestic violence order. She was afraid to go home to another attack from her boyfriend. Disoriented, bruised and fragile; she hadn’t slept for two days. Her friend had brought her in because she trusts Gatehouse and the people that work there. I made her a coffee while Louisa, the mother hen of the support workers, clucked over her. I tidied as I watched the other sex workers offer their support, give her a hug and help her make plans for where she was going to sleep. It seemed like the ultimate act of generosity from women who have so little, to care so much.

I helped her find some clothes from our rack of donations and gave them to her as she walked out the door. She looked at me, her poor bruised eyes engaging with my face. ‘You’re so pretty,’ she said. ‘You’re really pretty.’ She took me by surprise and I thanked her as she made her way back out into the cold night.

I’ve never felt more beautiful. And when I speak of the Gatehouse glowing, being a beacon of light and hope in the dark and cold, that’s what I mean. I mean that it’s a place that lets people shine, lets people be kind and give words where they have no possessions. It’s a place of refuge and comfort, where extraordinary things happen in the smallest, most insignificant moments. I gave that woman some second-hand jeans and a jumper in an old plastic bag, yet she left me glowing, feeling like somehow my face might be reflecting the warmth that I saw around me.

The moral of the story is not just that all you need is love; it is that kindness, given without expectation of reward, is often rewarded in the most exceptional ways.