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.
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.
What I had learned in class was that the whole of Northern Ireland was unstable – there were some people who hated being called British, and there were some people who would fight until their dying breath for the privilege of being called the same thing. It all seemed very complicated. There was no talk in Army camps of peace campaigners and civil rights leaders – everything was black and white. Sinn Fein, the IRA, the RUC and internment were all words and phrases I heard, but they didn’t mean much. In retrospect, I think that was partly because Dad wasn’t on the front line. He wasn’t a hero, he wasn’t involved in peacekeeping or ensuring the safety of Irish people from either side – he was just a little man sitting in an office pretending he was one of the big boys. If he’d been out on the streets with his life in danger every day, maybe I’d have known more, but, as it was, the most information I got was from the TV, when I was allowed to watch it, and from school history lessons.
By the time we went to Northern Ireland, the violence was at fever pitch. The IRA had become much more powerful, and bombings were a way of life. People were being arrested and imprisoned without trial under internment, and a British accent was enough to put your life in danger if you walked the streets – which I was never allowed to do. No one could be trusted. I do remember Mum talking to another woman about the young girls who hung about the soldiers whenever they left the camp – I wondered whether they were as young as me and whether they were trying to help their mummies too. She made it clear that she blamed them for trying to ‘trap’ the soldiers, and when I heard her talking about ‘prostitutes’ I was very confused. Were these girls like me? I wondered about the word because that’s what my dad now called me and the word itself wasn’t one I knew the real meaning of. His use of that had only started in Northern Ireland. One night, when my mum was at bingo as usual, he had been touching me in bed. As he forced me to masturbate him, a sly smile crossed his face and stopped his frantic breathing for a moment. ‘Do you know what you are?’ he’d said, not waiting for my response. ‘You’re a right little prostitute. Aren’t you? You love all of this, don’t you? You’re a little prostitute. You’re my little prostitute.’
I was ten years old.
When my mum referred to these women and used the same word, I tried to work out what she meant. What was there that made us the same, I wondered?
One day, in class, we were being taught Irish history. The teacher asked us if we knew anything about Catholics and Protestants. Desperate to do well, I put my hand up.
‘Tracy,’ she said, smiling. ‘What do you know?’
‘I’m one,’ I said, happily. ‘I’m a prostitute.’
She frowned at me. ‘A Protestant. That’s what you mean.’
‘No, I’m a prostitute. That’s what my dad calls me.’
It was the first time I had said anything in public which could have raised suspicions, but I had thought it was fine to bring it up, reasoning that if the teacher had said the word, it must be OK. She shook her head, presumably dismissing it as something I’d misheard, and went back to the lesson. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad.
Now we had moved from Germany, I did hope that perhaps I might be given a bit more freedom – I thought I had shown Dad he could trust me as I hadn’t told anyone about our ‘secret’. While I had been given plenty of new warnings about the threats in Northern Ireland, my concerns were closer to home. I didn’t want to go wandering around the whole country, I just wanted to get out of the house, play, and maybe make some friends. I noticed very soon after we arrived that there was another girl who used to sit outside her house playing on her own. Her family lived directly opposite and I could see her from my bedroom window. She looked about ten or eleven, and I really hoped we could be friends. I saw something sad in her, her whole demeanour seemed shy and I wondered whether I might finally have someone I could talk to.
It didn’t take long for things at home to fall into the same routine as in Germany. Mum was ill sometimes, but didn’t have to go into hospital, and there was still a lot of shouting in the house, most of it directed at me. It seemed as if Dad was getting more and more openly angry at me, and I can only think, in retrospect, that was part of his plan to try and make me seem like a terrible child. If he did this, Mum would presumably have no time for any ‘stories’ I then chose to tell her, and everyone would just think I was spouting lies as part of my ‘badness’.
Dad seemed unhappy in Northern Ireland. I don’t see how it could have been as a result of his job, because he wasn’t in any danger. While there were many brave soldiers walking the streets and risking life and limb every day, he was in an office doing very little. He never left the base for work, so wasn’t risking anything happening to him as part of the Troubles. What had changed in his life were two things – he had to re-establish the controls over me which he had in place while we were in Germany, part of which depended on my mum making new friends, and he was away from the group of men he was so close to back in the other camp. His personality seemed to change wherever he was posted, and he was very morose this time, with a lack of confidence. The only thing which remained the same and which gave his ego a boost was that he could still abuse a child. That was his rock.
He needn’t have worried about Mum. As an Army wife of many years, she always had new friends, and there was always bingo for her to go to. Whenever anything went wrong, or seemed likely to, Mum went out. We were very rarely together, all four of us, as a family. It was as if she would rather be out than in – I knew the feeling, but I didn’t have the option. If my dad was there, she would either be at one of her little part-time jobs (cleaning usually), or at a friend’s house for a Tupperware party – or at the bingo. It was her favourite get-out option, her way of burying her head in the sand, and it played right into my dad’s hands. There was nothing he wanted more than to have an empty house. With no one there to be suspicious at all, he could do whatever he wanted. By this time, I was starting to resent Mum in many ways. Of course, it was only natural that I still craved her attention and affection, but it is also only natural that a dog can only be kicked so many times before it stays down. My love for her was still there, but only in the way that the bonds between mother and child can never be truly broken. She never really acted like a mother, even though I tried my very hardest to be a good daughter. I tried harder than any child should ever have to try, because during all of those years, through all that horrendous abuse, I was doing it for my mum. Every time my father touched me, every time he invaded me, I was doing it not to avoid being hit, not to avoid being called more names – no, I was doing it all for a woman who could barely even look me in the eye.
I wouldn’t be human if I hadn’t spent a long time – perhaps too long – wondering how much she knew about what was going on. I wondered whether she suspected something about what Dad was doing to me and that was why she pulled herself away, but it didn’t make any sense. Why would any mother do that? If she thought her husband was abusing her daughter, why would she not stay and fight? Why would she not accuse him of his terrible crimes? If she felt incapable of doing that, of being assertive and acting in the best interests of her child, she could have protected me in other ways. If she couldn’t face up to throwing him out and reporting him to the police, or his employers, why could she just not stay with me? Make sure I was never alone with him, make sure he never had the opportunity to do such awful things to me? None of it made sense – but the overriding thing I hated to remember was that she had never been warm to me. Even before the abuse started, I have no memories of hugs and kisses from her, no memories of cuddling up together reading stories or playing with dollies together. No real love at all.