Never a Hero To Me

by Tracy Black

  One Saturday, I made the most of my mum being at home again and went into town with Holly and Glenda. I’d never been in a ‘gang’ before and was really excited – however, I had no idea until we went into the German hypermarket that the other girls were planning to shoplift. They hadn’t discussed it on the way there, but it seemed so natural to them I could only assume they did this regularly. It turned out I was a natural too. I loved make-up but wasn’t allowed it – without a hint of irony, my dad said it would make me look like a tart and that boys would be sniffing around. When Holly and Glenda started nicking sweets, I headed for the cosmetics counter and filled my pockets with lipsticks and eye shadows. It was all the German equivalent of Miners or Rimmel. Holly and Glenda gave me some of what they had stolen too, sweetie bracelets and dark chocolate, which was much more expensive in those days.

  I felt quite pleased with myself as we made our way home. It had been a real bonding experience and I had shown the other girls that, despite being younger, I could do what I needed to do to be part of their gang. They were pleased with me, and with the make-up loot I shared with them, and I was on a high. I wasn’t really too bothered about getting caught as I thought that getting out of the shop without someone noticing would be the main thing, but once Holly and Glenda had gone home, I did start to think about where I could hide my stash. I didn’t have much money to spend, so I knew Mum or Dad would be suspicious if they found anything. Just outside my bedroom window was a huge tree; when I got back, I put all the make-up and sweets in a plastic bag, tied the handles and hung it on a branch. I clearly wasn’t destined to become a criminal mastermind because Mum saw it waving about out there the moment she came into my room. ‘Tracy? There’s something in that bag hanging on the tree out there,’ she commented.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I tried to say calmly. ‘Bags are always getting caught in the wind.’

  ‘No – there’s something in there. It looks heavy,’ she said.

  She opened the window and reached out – it wasn’t hard to grab the bag, after all, a ten-year-old had put it there. Mum stood, holding on to it after she’d looked inside, with her face all twisted up in that special ‘mum’ look that mixes disappointment with anger.

  ‘Where is this all from?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Where were you today?’

  ‘Town.’

  ‘Who were you with?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  It was the sort of conversation children have been having with parents for years – a list of questions from her, followed by me giving out as little information as possible. She held the trump card though.

  ‘Tracy, do you remember what I’ve said to you and Gary about stealing?’

  ‘I didn’t steal anything!’ I lied.

  ‘Well, that’s fine then – you won’t be bothered about me calling the police and asking them to get to the bottom of it.’

  With that, she flounced out of the room with the bag in her hand and a commitment to her version of tough love. Mum kept to her word and the police arrived that evening. I denied it all for a little while and then Dad came in. He asked the policemen if they would mind him having a quick chat with me in private. He took me out of the living room, and asked if I had taken it. I admitted I had, hoping he would say he would sort it all out – surely he owed me something? – but he seemed completely nonplussed by having police in the house, and went straight through to tell them he had got to the bottom of it.

  I was told I had to take the stuff back to the shop and one of the police officers said they would be putting this on record and watching for me. I had no idea if that was true, but as soon as they left my mum started ranting and raving.

  ‘You’d better get her sorted out!’ she screamed at Dad. ‘I’m sick of her bad behaviour.’

  The thing was, I had never stolen before and the only ‘evidence’ she had of my so-called bad behaviour was all the lies Dad told her.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘What have I ever done wrong?’

  ‘Your father’s told me all about it.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing, I’m a good girl,’ I protested.

  ‘Good girls don’t lie and steal,’ she retorted, then sighed. ‘Oh, I’m too ill to put up with this. You deal with her, Harry. I’m so cross with that girl, I need to get out of here.’

  Off she went to the bingo while my father smirked on the sofa.

  As soon as she was out of the door, I knew what would happen. And it did. He was so angry at me, which made him even rougher than usual. Afterwards, he said, ‘You were told, Tracy – you know the rules. When you play up, your mother gets ill, and now the fucking police are involved. How much worse do you think that makes her? You need to fucking behave.’

  I didn’t know what else to do. I let him hurt me. I let him rape me. What else did he want? I didn’t know at that stage it was all about power and controlling me. There wasn’t anything I could do apart from let him rule my life. ‘You told Mum I was doing bad things but I’m a good girl, aren’t I?’

  He thought about it for a moment. ‘You’re my good girl, but you’re her bad girl. Do you want her to love you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

  ‘Then you do what I tell you. You do everything I tell you. I’ll show you how to make her love you.’ Even as I lay there, bleeding and in agony, that’s all I could think of.

  Throughout the following week, Mum was really unwell. Dad said it was because she was terribly upset about the shame I had brought on her, which was worsened when he took me back to the supermarket to return the stolen goods. The manager was actually really good about it and said I had done well by being honest, but Dad made a big fuss when we got back and said to Mum that I had shown us all up. A few days later, her legs needed to be strapped up with the pain and she had bleeding, blistering mouth ulcers, which meant she could barely eat. I thought it was my fault – and Dad made the most of it. She wasn’t going out, so he had to abuse me in my own bed, usually in the middle of the night. I never knew when he would be there; I could never settle or relax. These restrictions also meant he couldn’t engage in the washing ritual as Mum would notice a bath being run in the middle of the night, so he was angry all the time.

  She was taken into hospital one weekend for a few days and he abused me solidly throughout that period. Gary was at football practice, at friends, playing outside and my dad kept me away from my friends, using the excuse to Gary that they were a bad influence and that he had to keep an eye on me. By the time Mum got back, I felt physically, emotionally and mentally drained – perhaps he felt a little bit guilty, if he was capable of that, because I think he must have had a word with her. Something certainly happened, because the Saturday after she got home, she suggested we went on a day out.

  I couldn’t believe it. We started off by going to the cinema then went to the shops. She bought me a lovely pink jumpsuit (it seemed lovely in 1973!), denim culottes, Wrangler jeans and Doc Marten boots, so many of the things I’d dreamed of. I had decided how I wanted to look, and – apart from the pink jumpsuit – it was a very boyish, hard look, which would be in line with my behaviour. It was our first and last girly day out. My birthday was only a few weeks away and I asked whether all of these things were my presents, but she said they were extra. We were laden with shopping, we went for a cream bun in a café – we appeared to all the world like a normal mum and daughter. At one point, I reached for her hand, but that was a step too far for her and she snatched it away. She still held Gary’s hand when they were out, and he was a teenager. My father had played it very well. He must have told her I was going off the rails, so she should take me out and see if it made a difference. I didn’t think that at the time though; I just believed that being a good girl for him had finally paid off.

  I was disproportionately grateful to her for doing what so many mums did as a matter of course. That gratitude extended to my dad as well, for I had no doubt he had made this happen. I revelle
d in the normality of it – and it lasted for a while.

  For a couple of weeks, Mum was much better with me. She wasn’t loving but she would do things she’d never done before, such as sit beside me on the sofa while I did my reading – I would deliberately get things wrong so she would help. Usually she only sat there with Gary, hugging him, while I was told to go and do my homework at the table. When it stopped and she reverted back to type, I did the only thing I could think of – I tried to get attention.

  In Germany, the camp was more laid-back than it had been in Northern Ireland, and more than it had been when we were there before. It was a fifteen-minute walk from town and more like a housing scheme for Englishers, as we were known (despite being Scottish!). There was a building site nearby where they were just putting windows into new houses and that’s where I headed, feeling very hard in my DMs and Wranglers. The police drove by regularly and I made sure I was throwing rocks at the glass just as they went by on one of their circuits. There was no point doing it if I didn’t get caught. It was a conscious decision when I went out that day to do something that would get me attention. I was taken back home in the car to Mum. When Dad came home, her only words were, ‘She’s been at it again.’

  As usual, Mum left the house as soon as she had handed over responsibility to him and, as usual, I was punished by him forcing himself upon me. He was in a set pattern. He’d always wash me. It didn’t hurt or bruise so much by then, so maybe I was getting used to it. It certainly felt as if he was pushing deeper each time. I was eleven years old by this time and it’s probably only now, as a mother and grandmother, that I see the true horror of what was going on – what does it take for an eleven-year-old child to be glad that her body is getting more used to her father raping her because it doesn’t hurt quite so much any more? I can see there were many times when he wasn’t angry, when he actually treated me like a lover, caressing me, stroking my hair. He had crossed another line and seemed to see me as a substitute wife. My father now thought this was all perfectly normal, I think. He would ask if I was enjoying myself, if it had been good for me, if I liked the way he touched me. He obviously wanted me to say ‘yes’ because that would normalise it even more for him. I’d ask, ‘Why? Why do you want me to say “yes”? You know I don’t want this, Dad.’ He told me it should make me feel happy inside. That was the last thing it did, but by now he had broken me.

  This was my life, this was my normality.

  CHAPTER 15

  A MAN WITH FRIENDS

  Billy Stoppard was one of my dad’s drinking buddies. I don’t know how much deeper that link went – but I was about to find out part of it. He was a big man, physically imposing and in a different regiment to my father, although he was a proper soldier not an impostor like Dad.

  One day I came back from school and my parents were sitting in the living room chatting to another couple. It was Billy and his wife, Chrissie. Mum knew Chrissie from bingo and that’s what they were chatting about. I heard Billy say, ‘Fancy going out tonight?’ and Chrissie replied by asking him where he was taking her. He laughed and said, ‘No, I’m working – why don’t you have a night out with Valerie at the bingo?’

  Chrissie said she had no one to look after their three kids, who were only little and not at school yet. Billy looked at my dad and smirked. ‘That’s a shame, love – isn’t it, Harry?’ He paused. ‘Here, Harry – don’t suppose you’ve got any ideas, have you?’

  My dad smiled too. ‘Well, Tracy’s a big girl now, isn’t she? Would you like her?’

  ‘I think that would be absolutely perfect,’ retorted Billy. ‘What do you think, Chrissie?’

  I was quiet and tall for my age. I looked like the sort of kid who could take on responsibility, so Chrissie had no reason to worry. ‘It’s only for a couple of hours I suppose,’ she said. ‘Is that all right with you, Valerie? The kids will be sleeping anyway.’ My mum shrugged, probably wondering why anybody would want to spend time with me if they didn’t have to, and Dad sealed the deal. ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said to Billy. ‘She could do with a bit of pocket money, so make sure you pay her.’

  ‘For her services!’ Billy laughed.

  I wasn’t sure about it but I was keen to make some money and Dad said I would get ten Deutschmarks for my trouble. There was a school skiing trip coming up which I really wanted to go on and Dad had said if I could save the money up by myself, I could go. This had seemed like quite a concession from him. It had only been a couple of days before, and I now see he was softening me up for Billy’s approach. By planting the seed in my mind that if I could get the money I could go on the trip, he knew I would see the babysitting as a means to an end.

  Later that night, he said he would walk me round to Billy and Chrissie’s while Mum got ready for bingo. ‘Now, you must be a good girl for him, OK?’ he warned me as we approached their house. ‘You be really, really good.’

  I didn’t pay attention to Dad; I was just glad to get the night away from him. Chrissie put the kids in bed before she left and said she’d give me my money when she came back from bingo (‘and a wee bit extra if I’m lucky tonight!’), then left. After about an hour, the door opened and Billy came in.

  ‘I thought you were working tonight, Mr Stoppard,’ I said.

  ‘Did you now?’ he replied. ‘Well, you’re in luck because I managed to get back to you so much quicker than we expected.’ He was really sleazy and I just wanted to get out. Their house had a different layout from ours so I would have had to follow him through to the kitchen from the sitting room to get my money. Something told me I shouldn’t do this, so I grabbed my coat and headed for the door. He shouted through, ‘Where are you off to? I haven’t given you your money yet!’ I told him not to bother, that he could pass it on to my dad next time he saw him, but he followed me through and said, ‘I insist.’

  He pinned me against the front door and started rubbing my shoulders, as if giving me a massage. I said, ‘I have to go straight home, I have to go straight home,’ but it made no difference.

  ‘You need paying, don’t you? That’s what your dad said – he told me you like to get paid.’

  He kept rubbing my shoulders but his hands were moving further and further down my body. He stopped for a moment and held ten Deutschmarks out in front of me. ‘There you go – you’ll have to give me a cuddle for it though.’

  I looked at the floor and muttered that I wanted to leave.

  ‘Didn’t your dad tell you to be good for me?’ he said. ‘He told me you were such a good girl.’

  The penny dropped.

  The phrase was the one my dad always used – and I suddenly remembered what he had said when he left me at Billy and Chrissie’s front door. Be good for him. Billy wasn’t meant to be there that night, so why had Dad said that? The only explanation was that he knew Billy would be there. This was all a set-up. My dad had sent me there to be abused.

  Billy Stoppard put his arms around me and gave me a cuddle. He slipped the ten Deutschmarks into my pocket, taking too long to do it, then slapped my backside and told me he looked forward to seeing me again.

  I ran home as fast as my legs could carry me, not recognising the irony that I was hurrying from one abuser to another. As soon as I went in, Dad said, ‘What did you get?’ I showed him the ten Deutschmarks. ‘So, you were good for him?’ he asked. I nodded and put the money in my piggy bank.

  The following week, he asked me in front of Mum if I wanted to babysit for Billy and Chrissie’s kids again. My mum interrupted before I had a chance to answer. ‘Of course she does – gets her out of the house and she’ll get paid.’ That was it; that was it all settled. Again, he wasn’t there when I got to their house but Chrissie said he might be home before her. It was only about ten minutes after she left that he appeared, stinking of booze. I tried to get past him but he stood in front of me. ‘You can’t go yet – what about your money?’

  ‘I’ve only been here a little while, I don’t mind,’ I told him.
r />   He pulled me towards him and started to run his hands all over me as I told him to stop. I pushed him away as much as I could and said ‘no’ over and over again. ‘I’ll tell your dad you weren’t a good girl,’ he said. ‘He’ll have to punish you, he’ll have to make you understand who your friends are.’

  ‘Let me go!’ I screamed, managing to get the door open.

  ‘You little bitch!’ he said. As I ran out the door he threw a packet of dates at me – ‘Take these! You’re getting nothing else!’

  I cried all the way home. When I got in, Dad asked me how much I’d earned. When I showed him the dates and said there was no money, he asked me whether Chrissie had come home early. It was clear he knew exactly what was going on as he could only think that the reason I hadn’t been paid by Billy was that he hadn’t got what he wanted because his wife had appeared. Dad slapped me across the face and punched me in the kidneys. ‘I told you to be fucking good, didn’t I?’ he said, leaving me crying as he stormed off.

  When Mum came home, my face was still red. She saw it when I got up for a glass of water and asked me what had happened. Dad told her I’d fallen, and she tutted as usual, as if I was a terrible burden to her, then asked how much babysitting money I’d earned. I said I’d got nothing but Dad butted in again to say that he’d get the cash from Billy in the halfway house next time he saw him. The signal was obvious to me – if I was good I got the money, if I wasn’t, I didn’t.

  I realised I was trapped – there was no way out of this.

  The next time I went to Billy’s house, it was obvious he and Dad had been talking. I didn’t know how much he was aware of what happened between me and Dad; was my own father telling other men about the secret? The night before I went to babysit, Dad had sat me down ‘to have a word’.