Never a Hero To Me

by Tracy Black

  On the occasions when he touched himself to the point of orgasm beside me, I would feel sick at the smell. I had no idea what it was, but I finally realised that he must want that vile sticky stuff to come out of his private parts because he seemed to calm down afterwards. While it was going on, his face was terribly contorted and I would wonder if he was unwell – as he did it more and more, I eventually realised this was just part of it. He had to make these funny faces and funny noises for the sticky stuff to come out. He would touch me with one hand while he did that, and touch himself with the other. If I screwed my face up or gagged, or gave any indication that I didn’t want to be there, he would release one hand to slap me or punch me in the kidneys, before going back to what he was doing.

  These were ghastly ‘activities’ and I hated them with all my heart, but the worst was when he made me touch him. Since the first time he had forced that on me, it had haunted me and I dreaded it beyond everything else. As time went on, he would find even more horrors to inflict on me and I took it all, all to save my mum.

  CHAPTER 10

  RESPECT

  He had a face for everyone. I don’t have to say again what he was to me, but I’m sure the neighbours and everyone on the base thought he was a martyr for looking after us whenever Mum was unwell. Men always get more credit for that than women do, and in those days it was even more unusual for a dad to take care of his kids, even though the reality was that I really wasn’t being looked after at all. By the time I was eight, and the abuse had been going on for three years, he was explicit about my role in his life.

  He had started coming into my room to abuse me the year before. Now that my own personal space had been violated as much as my body, I had no safe area in which to disappear. He could get me anywhere – I was fair game in any room of the house. I could barely remember a time when this hadn’t been happening. In fact, I had always had a strange feeling that something wasn’t quite right in my life and remember how I used to hide in the cellar when we lived on another base. I recalled that one of the caretakers on the base found me one time and I was sobbing when he took me back home, but I wasn’t quite sure why.

  In all truth, I have no idea whether I was abused before we moved to Germany. My dad’s character had seemingly changed so quickly and so markedly on that first night when my mum was taken into hospital, but I wonder sometimes whether that had actually been the starting point or whether there was more that even I couldn’t bring to the front of my mind.

  Nothing seemed to inspire my dad. Apart from reading his spy books and cowboy stories, he did little else. He was drinking a lot through these years. That didn’t excuse what he did, but it must have had an effect on his mood, and perhaps he used it to make it easier in some ways for him to do what he did. I almost hope so – I hope he needed some anaesthetic for what he did to me. I wish I’d had something. He would meet other soldiers in the halfway house, the pub they all frequented nearby. The pub had a German name but everyone called it the halfway house as it was halfway between the camp and the town. He was definitely different with them and they all would say what a great guy he was; it was just another aspect of his split personality.

  Sometimes Gary and I were allowed to meet him in the taproom when it was time for him to walk home. Gary had been allowed to do this much more than I had, as I guess Dad would have worried about me even coming to somewhere of his choosing as there were too many chances for me to meet someone along the way and get chatting. By the time I was allowed, I was in such fear of him and so worried about my disobedience putting Mum back in hospital if I ever said ‘no’ that he felt safe enough letting me out. The first time I walked into the taproom, it seemed overpowering. It was loud and smelled of beer – a stench I hated as I associated it with my dad hurting me. There was a lot of laughter and people seemed to be happy, but that was alien to me.

  Dad was sitting near the door with friends and I saw him as soon as I went in. He waved me over, unsmiling, and I stood next to him at the end of the table. Back then, when I noticed how these other men were with him, I didn’t know the appropriate word to use to describe the relationship they seemed to have and their attitude towards him. It came to me some years later – respectful. They were extremely respectful towards Dad. In fact, they were like that with each other too, but even more so with him. Around them were just the normal sounds of groups of blokes winding down after a difficult day at work. They’d be laughing and joking, sometimes singing, but always good-natured. It was different at my dad’s table that night, and every other night I went for him.

  ‘Stand there,’ he said when I walked up to the table. ‘This is my daughter, Tracy,’ he told the others. I thought that was quite strange – they obviously knew him, and they must have all known who lived where and what sort of families they had, but he was being very formal. None of the other men even said hello. I could hear all the noise from the rest of the pub, but it was as if everything was silent at that table. After what seemed like ages, he took his coat from the back of the chair and said, ‘Right, let’s go.’

  All of the men got up and put their jackets on too. They shook hands with each other, and no one was missed out. There were no slaps on the back, no camaraderie. Dad pushed me back towards the door and we walked home in silence. It was very peculiar. When I told a friend about this as an adult, she asked whether my dad had been in the Masons. I have considered that, but, if he was, he never mentioned it, nor did he ever seem to go to meetings, wear Masonic regalia, or even have anything good going on in his life which might have suggested he knew people in the right places.

  No, the real reason was, I believe, much more sinister.

  He was showing me to other men who had the same depraved needs as he did.

  I’m not imagining that, and what happened on other occasions adds more evidence to my understanding of the situation. Every time I saw Dad with these friends, every time I went to the taproom for him, they were the same people. They sat away from everyone else; no other soldiers approached their table. There were no laughs; there was no sense of fun. They kept their voices down and they always had that formal approach to each member of their group.

  The weekend after I met him in the halfway house for the first time, he had to work on the Saturday morning. This often happened. On this occasion, he woke me up early. ‘Get up and get dressed,’ he snapped. ‘You’re coming to work with me.’ I did as I was told. As we walked to his office, the only conversation we had was when he told me how to behave.

  ‘If anyone comes in, keep quiet. Speak if you’re spoken to, but keep it short and sweet,’ he instructed.

  There was a steady stream of other personnel coming in, and I didn’t have any concerns about any of them. They were friendly to me and most of them would say, ‘Who’s this you’ve got in with you today then?’ Dad wouldn’t elaborate at all. He’d simply say, ‘My daughter, Tracy,’ and answer their question or give them what they needed. I’d smile shyly, but say nothing, wary of how he had told me to behave. Quite often, other clerks would come in, and they were all nice to me. There was, again, a lot of respect shown to him. No one was there for small chat exactly, but he would just coldly give them what they needed and hurry them out.

  Until one man came in. I thought I recognised him from the halfway house, but I couldn’t be sure, given that no one really engaged with me there either. He didn’t ask who I was, but my dad said to him immediately, ‘This is Tracy.’

  The man nodded.

  All I remember is that they said a few inconsequential things to each other, along the lines of ‘everything all right?’ and comments like that.

  Nothing else happened that day, and I went with my dad for a few weekends after that and the same things happened. He stopped working on Saturdays and Sundays after a while, and started to go on exercise instead. Exercises were compulsory and happened at least twice a year. The men would go away from their families. All or most of the camp would go, usually for a week or two, and
at least once a year they had a long one which lasted between four and six weeks. Dad was exempt from most of these because of Mum’s illness but at times he seemed to opt back in – I think he didn’t like them because of his laziness more than anything, and I suspect he was shown up by the real soldiers when he went on them. I was surprised when he started going on them. After a few weeks, he told me that help was needed in the kitchen and that he’d volunteered me. I was still too young for that sort of thing really, but as I’d been doing so much around the house for so many years now, it didn’t surprise me.

  When we got there, he didn’t go off with the others; he took me into the kitchen. We were the only ones there early on and he started explaining things to me. There was an old toasting machine, the sort where you place the split rolls on a tray and they roll through, getting toasted on the way before they drop off the end. I was told to do hamburgers that way too, four at a time. It was quite a small place, maybe about eight feet long and just wide enough for someone to stand at the toasting machine with no one behind them. The mess itself had a huge kitchen, but this area was really just for making snacks. Given the way it was laid out, I was squashed almost in a corner making the rolls as other people came in, some to get the hot drinks ready, others to grab something to eat. People said ‘hello’ or mentioned how nice it was for me to help out, but Dad had already given me his usual speech about not engaging with others, so I didn’t chat.

  He was standing on the other side of the partition where we handed food through when I heard someone say, ‘Where’s Tracy?’ I didn’t know anyone, so couldn’t imagine why there would be a man asking for me by name. I didn’t hear my father replying to him, but seconds later a burly chap came in and headed straight for me. I was still standing over the toasting machine and he walked over behind me, squeezing past everyone else.

  ‘Hello there, young Tracy,’ he said, smiling.

  I said ‘hello’ back to him, and kept my head down as I made the burgers. I suspected Dad was somewhere nearby and I didn’t want to get into trouble for talking – not that I particularly wanted to talk to this man anyway.

  ‘Busy?’ he asked as he moved closer. I looked behind me at him and said nothing. He was very close to me. There wasn’t much space where I was working anyway, but he had chosen to put himself there. As I moved the burgers and bread rolls through the machine, he pushed the front of his body into the back of mine. It was like the situation when Dad made me change the duvet cover all over again. I had no idea what to do – if I drew attention to what was happening I feared I would get into trouble. All the things Dad regularly called me, all the blame he laid on me for what happened, went through my mind. The kitchen was busy and no one was paying attention to what was going on. This man was pressing hard into me and I knew what I could feel; I had felt Dad’s often enough. He was getting harder and harder and he had a horrible grin on his face.

  All of a sudden, I heard Dad call ‘Graham!’ from the door of the kitchen.

  The man moved away from me, slapped me on the backside, and waved. ‘Harry!’ he called, walking towards him. ‘Something wrong?’

  My Dad didn’t answer immediately. When he did, he just said, ‘No, nothing’s wrong – a word, if you don’t mind?’ Graham left the room with him and I continued making the food. I knew I couldn’t get upset and I knew I had to keep going through the motions or there would be a few hard punches and slaps waiting for me when we got home.

  Nothing was said by my father about what had happened, but I thought I knew. It came to me in a flash of realisation that they had been talking, he had been one of the men I had seen in the halfway house, and he had known my name. Dad had shown me to him, and he had thought he had the right to do what he did. What did that mean? Had Dad told other men what he was doing to me? If that was the case, did that mean they thought it was fine? If he had told them of the abuse and they hadn’t told him he was a bad man, then all the things he had been indoctrinating me with were true – this was OK, this was what made me a good girl.

  My head was spinning. If he was telling other people, did that mean men like Graham could do these things to me as well? Was that what he was trying? Was he paving the way?

  What a horrible situation for a young child. Not only was I being violated by the person who should care for me, who should be my hero, but I was also now living in fear that it was going to be done by other men too. My horror that Dad was bragging about what he did and presenting me as an option to other men was compounded the next time we were at the mess and I was sent into the tiny kitchen again. I had told my dad that morning I didn’t want to go, but he’d just laughed at me and told me to go and put my coat on.

  I could hear him outside the kitchen talking to people, then I heard a man’s voice say, quite loudly, ‘Where’s Tracy?’ Just then a stranger walked towards me, leering, and made for the tiny space behind me just as Graham had done. As he walked over, I could see that he was already excited and I couldn’t help myself shout out, ‘Dad!’ My father came into the kitchen and looked at this man, who, still smiling, shook his head and left. I was torn. What a position to be in – I’d had to ask for help from the man who abused me to stop another man from touching me, when I was pretty sure that he was the one telling them about me.

  This was the pattern of my life – he was still doing what he did, and now I had to worry about others joining in. I think that, when I was very little, when it all started, I almost accepted it – it was my normality. However, as I got older, I began to wonder. I was meant to be Mum’s saviour, but she was still getting ill. Why was that? Why was I putting up with what he did to me if it wasn’t changing anything? He said she would get even worse if I wasn’t a good girl, but I couldn’t see how it could be worse. Mum didn’t love me, she didn’t even seem to like me, which sometimes made me think that we should tell her all I was doing to try and make her better, for maybe then she would care for me a little. Now, I was finding Dad’s ‘outside’ behaviour odd too – and these men who he seemed to be showing me to, parading me in front of, gave me an uneasy feeling that I couldn’t quite explain.

  It was getting worse – but we were going to be on the move soon, and I could only hope that would mean a change in my life too.

  CHAPTER 11

  NORTHERN IRELAND

  When it was announced we were moving, I was delighted. It wasn’t presented as an option to Gary and me, it was a fait accompli. That we were going to Northern Ireland was even better in my mind – although I’d been born abroad, and although I’d lived most of my life on foreign bases, I still thought of myself as British. My parents both had strong Scottish accents, which I had picked up, so I was glad to be going somewhere I thought would feel more like home.

  Dad was in a bad mood about it but it was what was called a ‘natural’ posting, just one of the moves all personnel had to deal with. As there was so much going on in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, pretty much every soldier had to do a tour of duty there – things were getting bad, with constant bombings and threats. Mum had been quite well for a while, but she was upset about the fact that Dad clearly didn’t want to go. She asked if he could request somewhere else, but he said everyone had to do at least one tour there. I think there were three reasons for his reluctance – he didn’t want to leave his buddies behind and he didn’t want to break the hold he had over me by going somewhere new. However, above all of that, I think the main problem was that he was a coward. So many brave men and women lost their lives, or had their lives wrecked, during the Troubles but my father simply wasn’t that sort of man. He was terrified at the very thought of being in such a dangerous environment. A lot of the kids had been there and come back to Germany again, so I knew how perilous it was. Children on Army bases talk about things like that all the time, it’s their way of coping. The older ones said you could hear bombs and it was exciting, but, again, that was largely bravado. We had a sense of what it might be like but nothing could prepare us for how bad Northern
Ireland in 1970 would be.

  The set-up was the same wherever you went in those days – there were sometimes different colours, but the furniture was all the same. Everything was always dated. School was only a hundred metres down the road from where we lived, but there were lots of restrictions and barricades – and, of course, there were the same restrictions and barricades on my life at home. I don’t think I really expected the abuse to stop; it was only the scenery which was changing. Dad was angry the whole time we were there. As soon as the others left the house, the swearing would start and the fury within him would lead to more sexual and physical attacks on me.

  Outside, things were bad too. The political situation in Northern Ireland was something which obviously affected us all enormously, and yet, at the same time, we were protected to a large degree. Life inside the Army camp continued as it had in every other Army camp for years, but we knew there were events going on outside which restricted our movements and coloured our experiences.

  Obviously, any child living in that sort of environment in any country feels its impact in some way, but we were the living embodiment of a government and political system hated by so many of those around us. When we went to school, we learned Irish history. When we passed by boarded-up shops and drove through barricades, we knew it was something to do with our country and we knew our dads were there to help people, but we were just kids – I can’t remember any of us having political opinions and I can’t remember my dad actually talking about the rights and wrongs of what was going on there. To this day, when I hear or read something about the Troubles, I find it hard to process that I was part of that time. I don’t think that’s simply because I had such awful things going on in my own life, I think it’s because we were almost completely cocooned.