Never a Hero to Me (8 page)
I think British kids on bases have a certain attitude to them – maybe it’s changed now, but back then they were all very blasé. They never thought of friendships as long term, so it was always about who fitted in at that time. I was withdrawn anyway, but after the abuse began I would become even more so – partly this was because Dad was isolating me, but partly it was because I didn’t have a maternal figure in my life.
Over the next three years, Mum would be in and out of hospital constantly. Her symptoms were baffling the medical experts and they couldn’t understand why she would get flare-ups of her condition to begin with. There seemed to be no common denominator so they could never predict when she would be ill. Neither could we. It was many, many years later that she finally got a diagnosis – the condition was so rare it was no wonder they had been unable to pin it down.
When Mum was in hospital, Dad never looked after me. That probably seems a ridiculous statement given that I’ve already outlined such appalling abuse but, actually, I can’t understand why his other actions were so neglectful. Given that he knew what he was doing was wrong, on every level, and given that he would have been torn limb from limb by others on the camp if they had found out that he was a paedophile, I would have thought he would have tried with all his might to deflect attention from us. One way of doing that would have been to ensure that we always fitted in, but, when Mum was away, I was uncared for. He was always telling me that I was the woman of the house, that household duties were my responsibility, but I was just a little kid. From being a child one moment, I was suddenly thrust into a situation whereby I wasn’t just being violated, I was also having to run a home.
I couldn’t do it. I actually, physically, couldn’t do it. In the 1960s, life on an Army base wasn’t one of unimaginable luxury. My dad had obviously lied to Agnes when he said he was getting someone in to help look after us while Mum was in hospital, but I wish he had – and not just for the obvious reason. Perhaps he wouldn’t have had the same opportunities to abuse me (although I think that was so ingrained in who he was that he would always have found a way), but it would also have addressed the fact that I quickly became neglected. When Mum was admitted to hospital any time, Dad didn’t look after me at all. He would never accept help from the neighbours when she was taken ill, and Agnes was not the only one to offer.
It was also Army practice to offer help in situations like ours. If Dad had been willing, there would have been a whole raft of help for us. I do remember that, on a few occasions, they sent a family liaison officer to see what they could provide, but my dad let them stay for about five minutes and said everything was fine. He lied that one of Mum’s friends was helping out as well as making a big song and dance about not wanting to put anyone to any trouble – all of it adding to the accepted view of him as a great guy. The Army would have helped with practical things like shopping and washing, but that would not have fallen in line with Dad’s plans at all. Not only was he trying to maintain the fiction of himself as a strong man coping with his family responsibilities in times of adversity, but he also needed to use these household chores to punish me.
I was very quickly pushed into housework, including such things as cooking, and got most of it wrong – I tended to burn toast, burn sausages, burn everything really. If it couldn’t be burned, I had a talent for making it under-cooked. But it was when he told me I needed to do the washing that I really got into trouble because I just couldn’t physically manage. He didn’t tell me to wash his clothes – he couldn’t run that risk. If he had gone to work in a smelly, damp uniform someone would have noticed or, at the very least, he would have been embarrassed by the smell. But that wasn’t a consideration for my things.
We had an old-fashioned twin tub and a big communal garden with washing ropes to hang the laundry on. Needless to say, Dad didn’t want me to use the garden as that would have meant me coming into contact with people and talking to them, so I had to dry everything indoors. I’d fill one barrel of the twin-tub with clothes and then have to drag them out and put them into the other side when they were sodding wet. It was physically hard, and I then had to dry them in the house. They were usually dripping wet when I hung them up on the clothes horse or on doors, and there was always a fusty, damp stink clinging to them.
When I put my school uniform on, it never smelled clean and I soon got called names by the other kids. This happened for the first time when Mum went into hospital and Dad started touching me, and even though she was only gone for a week at that point, he had asked me to wash my things. I could have got away with wearing them all week, and the smell would have been less than the stench I ended up with from the dampness. Perhaps this was a deliberate ploy of his, perhaps he was already working out ways to make sure I was an outsider and had no one to confide in. As soon as the other kids started calling me smelly, I was left to sit alone. It doesn’t take long for children to work out who is the weakest in the pack. I also had to wash my own bed sheets, although Dad took his to the laundry in the Army mess, so I was never really in anything clean and always felt like an outsider.
As time went on and Mum’s hospitalisations became more frequent, I would get more and more unkempt. My hair was long and it was rarely brushed. I couldn’t reach all of it myself, and after Dad started watching me in the bath, I never voluntarily got in there or lingered. Hair washing was one of the first things to be sacrificed as I looked for ways to keep out of situations where I felt even more vulnerable. As a result, my hair smelled even worse than my clothes. The stink of his cigarettes seemed to linger and I couldn’t get away from the constant reminder of him. I had to wash Gary’s things too, and although he smelled just as much in terms of his school uniform, he had a double-edged attack to get round it – he smothered himself in Dad’s Old Spice and also threatened to batter anyone who called him names. I wish my big brother had stuck up for me too.
I got to the stage where I couldn’t smell myself any more. When we went on the bus to Rheindalen to go swimming, it would take ages to get there and that meant I’d have to endure what seemed like hours of people sniggering, throwing things at me and making fun of Smelly Tracy. It was a lonely life. I’m not saying for one minute that I was abused every day. Sometimes now I read the stories of other people and think they couldn’t possibly have survived what they say happened to them as little children. No, it wasn’t constant, but there were precious few glimmers of light in there. Even when I wasn’t being used as my father’s plaything, it was just a miserable existence.
It sounds absolutely ghastly, but the only time I was ever given any affection was when Dad was abusing me. After he had been doing those awful things to me for about a year, maybe slightly more, he also started using endearments when he did things – I was still a dirty little bitch, but he would also call me ‘doll’ and ‘sweetheart’. Did he say these things to convince himself that it was all fine, that our perverted relationship was actually ‘normal’? I don’t know, but I do know it was the only time I ever had any nice words spoken to me.
Mum made it quite clear that I was little more than a nuisance. If I was upset about little childhood things, she would tell me to stop being such a bother. She’d make comments such as ‘I suppose I’ll have to clean that up’, if I scraped my knee. I once cut my hand quite badly and my request for a plaster was met with, ‘God, do you ever stop asking for things?’ Gary would play-act a lot; he’d trip over his own feet, fall down and scream that he’d broken his back, and Mum would come running as if her life depended on it. He never did hurt himself, but she was always there to console her boy, always there to make it better. She treated me differently for all of those years. I loved her so much when we lived in Germany and kept striving for her to love me back, but there was never anything to hold on to.
Even my dad, even the man abusing me, noticed what she was like. He would often have to be careful with how he made me accept the abuse if he had seen my mum being particularly cold with me. He stuck to saying we had to keep it a secret, that we couldn’t let anyone know because then she wouldn’t get better. Yet he was probably wondering himself just how long he could get away with getting me to accept violations for a woman who would barely give me the time of day. She didn’t hate me, she just didn’t seem to be bothered. Now that I too am a mother, I can see how odd she was; I lived in eternal hope that she would love me, or even notice me and show me a few small kindnesses.
My love for, and attachment to, her was unwavering, as is the love of many children for undeserving parents, and without it my dad would never have got away with what he did. Mum’s detachment from me meant she wasn’t even bothered about other aspects of my care. While Gary got everything new, I was given his hand-me-downs, such as school jumpers, socks and vests, or taken to the secondhand stores. Even then she was miserable in my company. My dad gave her a budget for our clothing, and she spent it all, bar a few Deutschmarks, on Gary. The other kids saw this, picked on me, and I reacted not in anger, but with emotional detachment of the sort my mother was so good at. Maybe it was genetic. You close off, close down, when you’re in the middle of a life like that, but I never really knew anything that was different. I do remember looking at other little girls one day when we were trawling round charity shops looking for shoes for me. I was being dragged along and she was telling me to ‘stop being so bloody slow’, while these other girls were having a nice time with their mummies, walking together, swinging their arms, being friends. I guess I just saw our relationship as something to be accepted. That’s the way she was. When, in my adulthood, I asked her why she was like that, she just shrugged and said it was her illness – maybe it was. I’m sure her condition was awful for her, but she managed to be different with Gary.
We stayed in Rinteln until 1970, when I was eight, and I was abused throughout those years. Actually, ‘abuse’ isn’t a word that was used in those days by many people, and at the time it wasn’t something I applied to my own situation, but, as people have become more aware of what happens to many children and as those children have spoken out, the term has become much more accepted. I use it now, because it is clearly what happened, but in those days, if it was spoken of at all in public, adults would refer to it using words such as ‘fiddling’ and ‘interfering’, terms which underestimate and minimise devastating attacks on young people which should never be hidden.
But mine was hidden, and I didn’t even have words to describe it back then – I barely knew what was happening, just that I hated and dreaded it. Of course I’ve wondered if my mum knew what was going on, but I realise that it’s hard to analyse the past. I remember on many occasions saying to Dad, ‘Mum doesn’t love me,’ and his reply was always the same. ‘She’ll love you more if you do this.’ Everything I said about her was linked to another excuse for him to do things to me; he never missed a trick. ‘If you do this, she’ll love you,’ he’d say, or, ‘If you keep doing these things, she’ll start to love you, but if you stop, she won’t.’
She never did. She never gave me a squirt of her perfume or little presents. I can actually remember the specifics of the times she was nice to me – once, she put the Avon lavender shoe soaps in my bedroom, and once she gave me a purse with 20p in it.
For Christmas and birthdays, I got mostly practical presents, clothes and educational books once I was at school. I tended to get one playful present at Christmas and the rest would be things such as a three-pack of socks, which was expected to last all year (with Gary’s being given to me when that didn’t happen) and two pairs of pants. I was once given a ready-reckoner-type machine for spelling where the words came out at the top and you had to see how quickly you could read them and spell them back again. My father kept saying to Mum, ‘She needs education, she doesn’t need toys,’ and she accepted his word unquestioningly, so they have to share the blame really.
There was a toy cupboard in our house, but it was Gary’s really as I didn’t have much to put in there. His side was crammed with cars and soldiers and boy things, but mine was sparse. I had a kaleidoscope, a golliwog that had travelled with me from when we had been based in Singapore, and a three-foot-tall walking doll. When I got the doll, the first thing I did was strip it completely, including the knickers. I was sitting in the living room doing that one Christmas when my dad came in. He went ballistic but had to keep his voice down as he didn’t want to draw attention to what I was doing. ‘What the fuck are you up to?’ he whispered in an angry voice, trying to avoid Mum or Gary hearing him from the kitchen. ‘Get the clothes back on that fucking doll, you little weirdo.’
‘I just wanted to look, Dad,’ I told him.
‘Well, don’t. It’s none of your fucking business.’
The irony wasn’t lost on me even at that age. I couldn’t look at a naked doll, but I could engage in sex acts with my own father. I had just been curious. I wanted to see what my dolly had inside her pants, I wanted to see if she was the same as me. There was a part of me which was keen to see what she had down there that was so fascinating. If my dad couldn’t keep his hands off me and was always taking my pants off, I wanted to know what there was that he was drawn to, and I naively thought I would be able to see that in a doll.
The next Christmas I was given a Barbie and I hadn’t learned my lesson. As soon as my mum and Gary left the room – I think they had gone to see Agnes to wish her a Merry Christmas – I ripped her clothes off and turned her upside down to look at what was between her legs. My dad was sitting on his chair, drinking as usual, and he was watching me quietly this time. I was amazed by bodies. Every doll I saw drew me in and I wanted to have a closer look.
‘You’ve been told about that,’ he said, eventually. ‘Stop being so fucking strange. Play with your fucking dolls, don’t poke about at them.’