Julie is a mum-of-three who works in telesales – and she relishes every day, because she knows her life could easily have ended so differently.

Just a few years ago she was in the grip of a £200-a-day drugs habit, paid for by nights on Bradford’s streets as a prostitute.

Back in the late 1990s, life was sweet for Julie (not her real name), her partner and their little daughter. But they had a friend who was taking heroin, and Julie’s partner decided he wanted to try it. While Julie looked after their child, she felt increasingly left out.

“I had only occasionally smoked cannabis in the past but I started using because I thought I was losing him to her. It all stemmed from there,” she says.

The couple broke up within three months, but by then, Julie was hooked to the Class A drug. Her ex-partner later died from drug-taking.

A £10 “wrap” lasted Julie seven or eight hours before her body was crying out for more. Her habit was escalating and so was the cost.

“I knew people who were into prostitution to fund their habit. With drugs, it was a small circle of – I won’t call them friends, because they’re not – but people you meet,” she says. “They suggested shoplifting, but even with a drug addiction I couldn’t bring myself to do that.”

High on drugs she stood on a lane off Thornton Road and waited for that first car. “It was one of the most scary things I’ve done,” she remembers, adding that at the time she was more concerned with the next fix. “You’re aware of the danger but you’re that numb because of the drugs, you’re not consciously aware.”

Cash earned that night resolved Julie’s immediate need, but fuelled the problem. The more money she made, the more heroin she smoked – then added crack cocaine into the mix.

Julie’s life, like that of most mums, was about routine but with some extraordinary twists. “I woke up achey and ill; sniffly with stomach cramps. I needed that fix to feel normal. Then I’d take my kids to school, do the things mums do, clean up,” she says.

“At lunch time I’d have another hit, grab an hour or two’s sleep, pick up the kids, give them their tea and get the babysitter. Once they were sorted out, I’d be off out until two or five in the morning depending on how much money I’d made.

“Then back home, with enough drugs for the day ahead, a couple of hours’ sleep and the whole cycle would start again.”

One night something happened that Julie still finds painful to talk about. “I was in Thornton Road. A car stopped, there was one guy in the car and I got in. As it pulled away, two more guys crawled out from under the parcel shelf. I was being taken to Oldham and they were threatening to rape me. I really did fear for my life,” she says. “I was sobbing my heart out in the back of the car, I was in a terrible state.

“I don’t know what turned them around. I must have been so distraught they decided against it. They took my money and ditched me outside the back of the Alhambra.

“I was very, very lucky. There are plenty of stories you hear which have worse endings. That’s how it is with drug addiction: you get out or you die.”

Keen to “live a normal life like a normal person”, Julie eventually decided to tackle her drug addiction.

“It was New Year’s Eve. The clock struck midnight and I looked down at my foil and I thought ‘No. No more’. I screwed it up and threw it in the bin,” she says. “I will be ten years clean at the end of 2014.”

She went through drugs counselling, but the habits were ingrained and even the absence of the daily trip to the chemist for methadone was unsettling.

Hope kicked in when she met life coach Nina, who works at Hidden Homeless Ltd, a social enterprise helping people break free from their past.

“Nina encouraged me to set myself achievable goals like decorating my bedroom in the next four weeks,” says Julie. “I wanted to start a college course.”

Within months, she was at college studying GCSEs enabling her to find a job in telesales, where she’s now one of the highest achieving in her team.

Julie has turned her life around, now no longer living off benefits.

“I value every day – just waking up in the morning and being me,” she says. “It’s like a whole new world. It’s always been there but I didn’t see it for a few years.”