Auntie Dee had four kids and she loved them all. It was a revelation for me. All my cousins had loads of friends and I was just accepted as one of them. We went to the local youth club, played pool, attempted tennis, listened to music, danced – nothing unusual for most kids, but another world for me. I was even noticing that some boys were nice. I had always been told to keep away from boys, by both Mum and Dad, but he in particular had said they were bad and dirty and only after one thing.
They’ll never love you properly
, he told me,
not like I do
.
I was so distanced from my horrible real life while I was there that I realised the truth of my relationship with my mum too. Now I was away and could see things more clearly, I really didn’t give a damn about her. When I was little, my concern was for having my mum there all the time, but she’d been so horrible to me and I’d suffered such things for her, I didn’t really care any more. I gave up on her – but she had given up on me long before that.
Seeing how my Auntie Dee was with her kids opened my eyes – she was loving and caring, and always had time for each one. She would play with them, come out and muck about in the garden, have a game of football, cuddle them all constantly, do the garden so she always had rhubarb to make crumble; everything was connected to them. She was always teaching them and thinking of them. My Uncle Freddie was great too. He would sit and explain homework to the kids when they went back to school, why they had to do it and how it would help them. I got to see a lovely alternative while I was there. Dad left me with Auntie Dee so long that her kids went back to school after the six-week break and I got to be with her on my own. I’ll always treasure that time.
It ended all too soon. I got word that my mum was being sent back to Germany to convalesce and my summer was over. I had never really given her another thought until that moment and then the dread began. When I thought about the abuse starting all over, I had panic attacks. Auntie Dee would sit with me while I breathed into a brown paper bag. ‘What’s the matter, hen?’ she’d ask. ‘What’s getting you so worked up?’ I did think of telling her, but I just couldn’t. She was a lovely woman, but the thought of informing her that her own brother was a paedophile who regularly raped his own daughter was something I couldn’t force myself to say.
It was time to find my voice – when I got home.
Mum had been moved to a German hospital and Gary and I went back to school. To begin with, when I returned, my resolve faltered. As soon as I got home, Dad said to me: ‘Have you any idea how ill your mum is? It’s been touch and go.’ He was sending me a clear message and the abuse began all over again. However, this time I had decided that, even if I couldn’t stop him, I was determined not to make it easy. Every time he touched me, I told him the same things. I didn’t want this. I hated it. He was doing it against my will. The biggest change of all though was the final threat I lobbed at him – I was going to tell Mum.
‘Do you want to kill her? Do you want that on your fucking conscience?’ he asked, shocked, but this wasn’t affecting me in the same way any more. By the time I was twelve, I had something else to throw at him. Every time he raped me, I got the most awful pains in my stomach, which I decided to use to my tiny advantage too. ‘I think I’m starting my period,’ I told him.
‘You better fucking not, I won’t have it,’ he told me, as if either of us could stop it. I could see he was rattled. He didn’t want me to grow up, I knew that. As I got taller, older, he would say to me that I was changing, that I wasn’t his little girl any more, and I could see this was a bad thing for him. He didn’t want me to talk back or fight back, and he didn’t want me turning into a woman. It was a child he wanted to terrorise.
I wasn’t given to any other men when I got back from Scotland but there was another threat which I hadn’t even anticipated. Gary had been nasty to me for years, for as long as I could remember really. He bullied me a lot, pulled my hair, kicked me whenever he got the chance – in some ways, this wasn’t surprising. He had seen casual violence being dished out to me since I was so little, and he had also seen there were never any consequences for the perpetrator of that violence. On top of that, he had been going to karate classes for years as it was another way for Dad to get him out of the house, so he was much stronger than me and was always trying out his stupid moves when I was least prepared.
One day, after Dad had stormed out of the house, I was in my bedroom tidying up. Almost before I knew what was happening, Gary came up behind me, grabbed my neck and did something. I don’t know what he did, but it was so powerful it knocked me out. When I came to, he was standing over me with a stupid grin on his face.
‘What on earth did you do?’ I asked.
He just laughed at me and walked out.
This happened again about a week later, but then a few days after that he came into my room while Dad was out and sat on my bed.
‘I know what you’ve been doing,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.
‘Think about it – you’ve been doing something you shouldn’t have been doing, and I know all about it.’
My heart sank. Did he know? Did he really know what Dad had been doing to me for years? Just as these thoughts were going through my head, he grabbed me and pulled me into the bed. He punched me in the stomach and twisted my hair and then tried to climb on top of me. I could feel his body react to mine in the same way my father’s did. The panting started, the heavy breathing, and I knew he was getting excited. I fought against him and got strength from somewhere – I couldn’t let this happen again in my own home, with my own brother. I scratched and kicked and bit him, and he finally jumped off. Did he come to his senses or did he realise I wasn’t going to give in easily? I have no idea.
This all really shook me – and it provided the catalyst I needed to try and get someone to notice what was going on. My behaviour became much worse and I was attention-seeking constantly. I was also often at the doctors with cystitis, despite being so young. (I was just given sachets of some medicine to take without so much as an examination.) I was excluded from lots of normal things; I chose to be naughty whenever I could, but still no one was picking up on any of it.
I had started smoking years earlier, as part of my plan to be accepted by older kids. I was getting a reputation for being tough, not a particularly accurate one as it was only based on me wearing boyish clothes, DMs, and always having a packet of fags in my pocket.
The windows had all been put in the new houses on the estate I had previously been to, and I had a plan. One Saturday afternoon, I arranged to go there with a boy called Liam, who was the year ahead of me at school. There was nothing between us other than friendship as I couldn’t bear to think of boys that way. As I was a smoker, I always had matches with me, so I suggested to Liam that we build a fire. He wasn’t too sure and didn’t know why I would want to do that, but I persuaded him that if we started it in a bath it would be safe – and if anyone saw us, I’d take all the blame. I don’t think he believed I would, but what he didn’t know was that I didn’t want to share or deflect the blame – it was all about getting attention for me and hoping someone would notice why I needed it in the first place.
I set the fire, with Liam just watching. There was a lot of rubbish lying around the site so there was no shortage of material. While it was taking hold, I started to do some graffiti, drawing Union Jacks on the wall with the ashes. Liam went outside to have a cigarette and I was distracted by my ‘art’. When he came back he shouted, ‘Tracy! It’s getting out of control!’ I looked round, and he was right – the fire was blazing. I told him to get help but he was too worried, so I reiterated that I would take the blame. While he went off to find a call box – there were no mobile phones back then – I tried to dampen it down with water but it wasn’t helping.
I waited for help, not even thinking of leaving as that would defeat my plan, and eventually the police came. At first they started quizzing me in German, but soon switched to English once I started talking. I admitted it all to them, and they said someone else must have been there because of all the cigarette butts lying around; however, I kept to my word and didn’t mention Liam.
I was taken home by the police, which was the third time they had been involved. They didn’t prosecute for all the damage I’d caused as Dad offered to pay for it – again, that was him trying to prevent our family being looked at too closely. Also, he wouldn’t only be putting himself in the firing line if someone investigated our family, he would also be threatening to reveal the sickening secrets of others.
The German police officers accepted that Dad would pay and no charges brought, but as they now knew I had been in trouble a few times they said something had to be done or they would be forced to report me to the British military police; as things were, they were going to have to send a report to the Army anyway. They said a social worker would have to be called, which Dad reacted against immediately. However, he hadn’t accounted for my mum, who was all for it. He had to agree. Before I met the social worker for the first time, he made sure I knew the rules.
‘You say nothing,’ he told me. ‘You don’t tell her how you manage to keep your mum out of hospital because she won’t understand. Lots of little girls have these secrets with their daddies, but people like the social worker wouldn’t know what to make of it and they would just think you were bad. She’ll make it all worse if you tell her and your mum will die.’ He urged me to say I had got in with a bad crowd and they had encouraged me to do all the things the police were aware of. I know he was worried the social worker would sense something and start picking at the dysfunctional threads of our family life, but he needn’t have lost any sleep over it; she was a silly cow who was only in the job for the money as far as I could see.
Her name was Mrs Walker. She was very short and fat, with a strong Liverpudlian accent. She often wore her hair stretched as tightly back as possible and dressed in plain clothes in dull colours. I once saw her files, which had the letters SSAF and BFSWS on them – the first stood for Social Services Army Forces (it’s an acronym used for a charitable group now) and the second was British Forces Social Work Services.
On the first scheduled visit, she came to our house. Within minutes, my mum stood up to leave the room, muttering one of her favourite excuses – ‘I can’t handle this’. She left Dad to deal with it all, as he must have wanted to do anyway, and he suggested Mrs Walker and I have our meetings elsewhere in future to avoid distressing my ‘very ill’ mother. They decided she would pick me up from school when she needed to have an appointment with me, and take me to a café then bring me back home. I’d had so much hope for this woman and felt that, if she was the right person, I could and would confide in her, but throughout that first meeting, she didn’t even talk to me.
Dad had prepared me with a script really – I was to say the things about bullies at school getting me into bad ways, that I was upset about Mum being in hospital a lot, that Gary kept hitting me. The latter was actually true – he had seen Dad doing it for years and had started lashing out at me since we got back to Germany as well as those occasions when he had tried to force himself on me. My Dad just had a lucky guess with that one, but I could say it happened to Mrs Walker in all honesty. We spent two hours together for each of the twelve weeks allocated and during that time she gave me no reason to think she was remotely interested in the truth.
She asked me the same things every time about how my day had gone at school. I had been given conduct cards for teachers to fill in and she collected these from me, discussing what was on them. I behaved at school though. I liked it and didn’t skip off. When we only had a few weeks left she asked her first perceptive question.
‘Do you know what I’m going to ask you every week, Tracy?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘you always ask me the same things.’
‘Don’t be so cheeky,’ she snapped. ‘I mean . . . well, you always seem to have your answers almost prepared.’
I waited for her to say more. It wouldn’t have taken someone with enormous brainpower to work out why that was the case. I was tempted to tell her she was an idiot even at that young age.
‘You need to be good. Do you think you can be a good girl?’ she asked, obviously bored.
Of course I could. I’d been doing it for years, but when I was getting into trouble, I was choosing to get into trouble and no one was asking why.
I knew time was running out so at our next meeting, when we were driving to a café and she asked me if I could be good, I gave Mrs Walker an answer she hadn’t been expecting.
‘I know why I’ve been naughty,’ I told her.
‘Really?’ she answered, looking interested for the first time.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes as the words finally came out.
‘It’s my dad. My dad’s been touching me. He touches me and hurts me and does bad things to me and I want it to stop.’
She nearly crashed the car as she stared at me. ‘Don’t say such terrible things, Tracy! What an awful excuse to give for your appalling behaviour.’
‘But Mrs Walker,’ I insisted, ‘it’s true, he does do things to me.’
‘It’s utterly ridiculous to even think of such a thing. Your father is right – you’re a very bad girl indeed.’ She regained her composure and started driving again as if nothing had happened.
Was that it? I had waited for years to say something and, now that I had, the person who was meant to help me, whose
job
it was to help me, was just going to brush it aside?
We carried on to the café where Mrs Walker filled in that week’s forms. She said nothing to me and I know she didn’t write it in her report as they were given to my parents and the shit never did hit the fan. When she dropped me off at home that day, she informed me there was no point in continuing with the sessions as I was clearly intent on being naughty.