by Tracy Black
Never a Hero
to Me
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © 2011 Tracy Black and Linda Watson-Brown
This book is copyright under the Berne convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Tracy Black and Linda Watson-Brown to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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ISBN: 978-0-85720-329-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-330-4
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For my partner, who is also my friend and soulmate. His belief in me has never wavered, his love for me remains strong, and his support for me in my darkest moments gave me strength.
For my children who, unknowingly, taught me that a mother’s love for her children is unconditional. Through hard times we have always been there for each other – they make me proud to be a loving mum.
And for those brave, good men and women in the armed forces, the ones who protect and serve us – there are plenty of them.
CONTENTS
Prologue: Heroes
Foreword
1 I Want My Mum
2 Fun
3 Being a Good Girl
4 A Small World
5 Everything Changes
6 Responsibilities
7 The Loving Couple
8 On the Outside
9 Saving Mum
10 Respect
11 Northern Ireland
12 Danger
13 Lucky Man
14 Normal
15 A Man with Friends
16 Still the Good Girl
17 Starting the Fire
18 Getting Out
19 Plausible
20 My New Home
21 A Sense of Normality
22 Secrets
23 Moving On
24 Standing My Ground
25 Time to Fly
Epilogue: Silent No More
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
HEROES
My story is a normal one. Horrific and normal.
I was a normal little girl in a normal little family. There was me and my big brother, Gary. There was my mum, Valerie, and there was my dad, Harry. We were a perfect nuclear family on the surface – and a completely dysfunctional, abusive one underneath. For years, no one bothered to scratch that surface, no one bothered to ask one of a thousand questions which could have blown the whole thing apart.
For years, I kept it inside. I blamed myself for what my dad did to me. I blamed myself for not being stronger or louder. I even blamed myself for not being a better little girl, because I must have been bad for him to do what he did. But the truth was, the stories he managed to weave around me, the detailed lies he managed to spin, were so believable that I actually ended up believing I ‘had’ to do the things he forced upon me.
My father was held in high esteem. But it was all a front. He was a bully. He was a child-beater. He was a paedophile. As a soldier, he was seen as a hero by many. But he was never a hero to me.
I’m a grown woman in her forties. I’m a mother and a grandmother, I have a life in the sun and a loving man by my side, but I also have many ghosts which have lingered for too many years. This is my story. I’ve needed to tell it for such a very long time – and, at last, in doing so I can claim back everything he took from me. I know I’m not the only child who suffered these horrors, but if in writing this I can reach out to even one person and tell them what I’ve learned, it will be worth it. It is never the child’s fault. There is nothing you can do that makes abuse something you deserve. What you do deserve is freedom from the torment you have carried all these years, forgiveness from yourself and a realisation that you are more than what was done to you.
There may be scars, there may be pain. There may be memories which rear their heads every day. But you got through it. Some days, it may not feel that way, but there is always hope and there is always tomorrow. Those of us who survived? We’re the invisible heroes – no one will ever give us a medal for what we endured in those dark days when we thought the hurting would never end, but we got through. We’re the heroes.
FOREWORD
Tracy Black has wanted to tell her story of horror and survival for many years. Terrified that no one would believe her, one day she made a promise to the little girl she had been – she would tell the world what that child had endured, no matter how hard it would be to revisit her past. Now in her forties, Tracy lives in Europe with her partner and is a successful businesswoman. A mother of two, she has fought through her childhood and domestic abuse, and recently graduated from university with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. She plans to undertake further study in the near future and will always fight for the victims of paedophiles. Tracy Black is a pseudonym. Names have been changed to protect anonymity.
CHAPTER 1
I WANT MY MUM
Rinteln, Germany, 1967
I looked out of the lounge window, fascinated by the torrential and persistent rain battering the glass. I was feeling pleased with myself, proud that I was tackling my homework easily and quickly despite being at my new school for only three weeks. At five years of age, in a strange country with many people speaking a language I could understand only a few words of, the Army school was a welcome haven for me. I had been in school for a little while in Singapore, but had never been such a big girl that I was given homework. It felt terribly grown-up to bring home my tiny satchel with a reading book, writing jotter and a note saying what I needed to do for the next day.
The house we lived in wasn’t particularly homely – Army accommodation never was – but in my bedroom I had my few toys, my beloved golliwog and some books. I didn’t want to be in there at that moment though. I had homework to do, and I needed an audience for that as much as anything. I wanted my family to see how grown-up I was with reading to do and numbers to learn. I had my family around me, and I was so sure that I would make friends and have a lovely time there. I had a simple, childlike belief that everything was coming together for me; little did I know how quickly it could all fall apart.
My dad had been in the Army since before I was born and I didn’t know any other life. We were in Germany, but the camp was like a little Britain, isolated from local culture and local life, a version of home even though it was hundreds of miles away. I was born on a different Army base in 1962, and we stayed there for a couple of years before going to Germany. After that, we went to Singapore, but I remember very little of my first four or five years; nothing more than snippets really. We were never settled, it could change at any point, but that was just life. As a child, you absorb so much of what has gone on in the past, of what your parents’ lives have been like, of what their expectations are, without ever being explicitly told. I assumed my dad had an important job, which meant we often had to move about. I knew this had ‘always’ been the case (in my mind, ‘always’ wasn’t a concept that made much sense – at five years old the time between one birthday and the next seemed to take forever) and it was just the way things were. All around me, other children were living the same lives in anonymous houses with a determination not to put
down roots, but school was making everything seem much more settled, much more permanent.
I had spent so much time looking forward to attending classes. All summer I had been counting down the days, asking my mum how many sleeps it would be until I was there. She was exasperated (or perhaps just bored) with my constant enthusiasm, but I was thrilled that every day was a step closer. I would look at my school bag every night before I went to bed, line my shoes up neatly for the hundredth time, and dream about the wonderful time I would have.
For the first two days of my life as a schoolgirl, Mum had taken me and my big brother Gary to class in the morning. The school I was now at, my very first big-girl school, was near to the living quarters and, after those first mornings, she decided it was safe enough for us to go alone. She wasn’t wrong in that sense – for children, Army bases are probably one of the most secure environments they could ever be in. I didn’t have the slightest inkling at that stage of where danger would really lie, or of how close to home it would be. I would have liked Mum to have kept taking me to school for a little longer, but she told me that I was a big girl now – which I always liked to hear – and I didn’t need her. That didn’t feel quite right, I did need her, but she wasn’t the sort of warm, cuddly mummy I saw with other kids at the school gate, so I wasn’t too surprised when she stopped taking me there so quickly.
She passed the responsibility over to Gary, who was a few years older than me. He wasn’t exactly delighted to be in charge of his little sister, but he had no choice in the matter and, for the next few days, took me on his own. I didn’t like that, for he used our time together to nip my arms, pull my hair and push me into puddles. I soon realised he was only doing this to show off in front of the boys he hoped would be his friends, but I hated it and needed it to stop. I had made friends quickly and knew some of the other girls walked to school on their own. After my first week, I collared Mum in the kitchen one night to test the waters.
‘Mum?’ I began.
‘What now?’ she sighed, continuing to peel potatoes for dinner.
‘I’m a big girl now, aren’t I?’
‘Why? What do you want?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes at me as she turned round.
‘Well, Sophie and Debbie in my class don’t have big brothers . . . and they get to walk to school on their own.’
‘So?’ she queried, concentrating on the potatoes again now that she knew I wasn’t after anything that would cost money or time.
‘So, can I walk to school on my own? I’d be good. I’d be careful. I promise. Please, Mum? Please?’ I begged.
I was putting in more effort than required.
‘Do what you like,’ she muttered.
I was delighted that I had managed to get Mum to agree that I could go with the others, as it served the dual purpose of getting Gary away from me and making me feel even more grown up. I wasn’t too bothered by the fact that she didn’t seem particularly interested in what I did because, just as I accepted we might move at any time, I also accepted that my mum wasn’t the most loving person in the world. Of course, I would have preferred things to be different, but I was well aware that she had other things on her mind. The thing was, Mum wasn’t very well. I had no idea what was actually wrong with her, but I wasn’t the only one – I knew from listening to snippets of her conversations with Dad when she came back from the medical centre that the doctors were clueless too. She was often sick and I would hear her vomiting at all times of the day and night. Sometimes the sound would wake me up as it was so loud and she would moan in pain when it happened.
I had also seen these weird lumpy things on her body, like boils, and knew her skin hurt a lot of the time. She would rub horrible smelly stuff into it that she told me was paraffin oil, and the stench of it filled our house. When she was unwell, she would tell me she couldn’t be bothered with me, and Dad would say that I had to leave her alone, so I knew she might be in pain or feeling unwell when I asked her about walking to school on my own. Maybe that was why she had seemed so disinterested.
Whatever the reason, by the time I was sitting at the table, with my books and jotter in front of me, I was glad I had been allowed to walk to school with Debbie and the others, because it was all part of becoming grown up. Gary wasn’t able to get at me when I was with other people and, to be honest, he wasn’t that bothered anyway, as he could go off with his friends now he no longer had to take care of me.
I was concentrating so hard on my work that my tongue was poking out between my lips and my eyes were screwed up – I couldn’t really read yet and numbers were still a bit tricky, but I was determined to try really hard. I got distracted by the weather and, as I watched the rain pour down the window, all these changes were floating around in my head, making me feel so happy – until I heard Gary guffawing over my shoulder. Quickly, my thoughts were dragged from how proud I would be to hand in my work to a sense that my brother knew something I didn’t.
‘What is it, Gary?’ I asked. ‘Why are you laughing at me?’
He snatched my homework book from my lap and sniggered. ‘You’re stupid! Anybody would laugh when they saw how stupid you were.’ He waved the notebook around in front of me, dangling it in front of my face as he ridiculed me. ‘You don’t know how to use capital letters or anything – the only thing you’ve got right is your name. And that’s stupid, just like you.’ I looked over to Dad, sitting in front of the telly, oblivious to everything that was going on. I knew he wouldn’t intervene, but I didn’t want him to anyway; he wasn’t the parent I needed. With tears welling in my eyes, I snatched my book back from Gary and rushed to find Mum.
I’d tell on him. I’d tell her how awful he was to me, and she’d sort him out. I knew she was in her bedroom, so I rushed there from the lounge, full of hot tears at how Gary had spoken to me, with an urgent need for Mum to make it all right. I barged in, the words all ready to tumble out – and froze. My mother was bent in half over a basin, vomiting violently. Her body was convulsing in pain and the sickness was coming fast. As always, I had no idea what was wrong with her, but knew she was so ill she was in no state to deal with my childish disputes. She looked up weakly, but had neither the strength nor the ability to even talk to me, promptly bending over the basin again and retching once more.
I backed out of the room, full of concern for her, but also worried. This had happened so many times before, but there seemed to be a violence to the sickness now that I hadn’t been aware of previously. Mum had been taken ill the week before and, as young as I was, even I couldn’t help but notice that she seemed to be getting worse as time went on. Ordinarily, she was pretty and well groomed, a tall woman with long, blonde hair and a radiant glow to her skin. But on this evening, her locks were lank, her skin pallid and she was terribly thin. My mum was only twenty-eight, but tonight she looked more than twice her age.
I returned to the lounge, where Gary was perched at the window, smirking at me and seemingly unconcerned at my mother’s illness. Dad was still sitting where I had left him, Senior Service cigarette in one hand and a can of beer in the other. When he finished, the cigarette butt would join the many others which lay in a full ashtray and the tin would be thrown into an old cardboard box which rattled with empties. The beer cans were always there, a constant reminder of the fact that Dad drank all the time, yet he never seemed to be drunk. I couldn’t understand this. When I watched television, men would drink beer and then reel around in drunkenness, often falling over, or singing, and having a great time. That wasn’t my dad. That wasn’t how drink affected him. I had concluded that my dad must not drink as much as those men, because, apart from sometimes falling asleep in his chair, I’d never seen him fall prey to the funny antics of the drunk men on telly.
In fact, my dad wasn’t a funny man at all.
Tonight, as I came back from seeing Mum looking like death, from watching her retch her very insides out, I would realise just how bad his temper could be. His anger seemed to ooze out of him as he tu
rned to me and barked, ‘For fuck’s sake, stop harassing your mother.’ I was shocked – I couldn’t remember Dad ever swearing at me before, even though he had never been particularly loving or warm. He was a man who believed in standards, he was Army through and through, but now he seemed to have forgotten that he was talking to a little girl.
I stood there staring at him, stunned by the bad words which had come out of his mouth.
‘What are you fucking gawping at?’ he snapped. ‘You know she isn’t well, you know she’s ill, and Christ knows when she’ll get any better.’
I’m not sure that I did know that. I did have an awareness that my mum was often sick, and that she was being sick more often these days, but at five years old I never thought about the future and I didn’t put two and two together. Sometimes I felt sick if I ate too many sweeties, and I knew my friends did too. I certainly hadn’t faced up to the possibility that there was something seriously wrong with Mum that might not get fixed.
My dad’s words snapped me out of my reverie. ‘Keep the fuck away from her,’ he told me. ‘In fact, clear up your rubbish instead of standing there being useless. It’s your bedtime, so hurry up for Christ’s sake. Get all of your shite out of the way – move it!’
The unfairness of it swamped me. ‘It’s not rubbish, it’s my homework!’ I said, desperately wanting to cry. My mum was ill, my dad was swearing at me, my brother was calling me names, and my world seemed overwhelmingly horrible. I grabbed my homework jotter and books from where Gary was sitting, ignoring the fact that he was sniggering at Dad’s treatment of me, and ran down the hallway to my bedroom.
I threw it all down onto my dressing table and flung myself on the bed. Just as I did so, I heard a horrendous crack and saw flashes of light. This was a ghastly night and it was getting worse. I hated thunderstorms and felt a knot in my stomach as the night got threateningly dark. I could hardly see anything. Despite an ominous feeling, I knew I had no alternative but to go back through to the lounge. ‘Dad! Dad!’ I screamed. ‘I’m so scared. What’s happening? When will it stop, Dad?’