Everything was falling into place. If I wanted Mum home, I had to do those things, I had to let him do those things. I had done them and she had come home; when I didn’t do them, when he didn’t try to make me do them, she had got ill again.
As he told me all of this, the tears rolled down my cheeks. I felt his hands all over me, his fingers in places they shouldn’t have been, as he said over and over again,
good girl, dirty little bitch, good girl, dirty little bitch . . .
All I could think was,
I’m doing it for Mum, this will make her better, I’m doing it for her.
Dad was his usual self outside of the family home – a great guy, admired by all – while at home, every time Mum was in hospital, he was abusing me. Over the next six months, she was hospitalised a lot, but the nature of her illness, which was still undiagnosed, meant she was also perfectly well at times. On those occasions, she seemed to like to spend as little time as possible at home. She loved bingo, and went there as often as she could, and she loved spending time with friends and neighbours. They weren’t a loving couple and didn’t seem to need to spend time together. In the past, Dad had made comments about her going out, especially about her ‘wasting’ money at the bingo, but now he seemed to positively encourage it. It doesn’t take a lot to work out why – an empty house was all he needed.
When people ask me what my dad looked like, I find it hard to describe him in some ways – there was nothing remarkable about him at all. People tend not to have ‘evil’ tattooed on their foreheads. I feel that what he did to me should have made him noticeable in some ways. People didn’t seem to see anything was the matter with me, no matter how I tried to make them as the years went on; but surely, I often thought, surely others would sense a monster in their midst. They didn’t.
The truth is, Dad was amazingly unremarkable. He was quite short, and had a medium build which would turn towards fat later on in his life. Despite the fact that he loved to brag about being in the Army, he was only a clerk. He got the uniform, he got the kudos, but he wasn’t off saving lives or risking his own. He spent all day every day sitting on his backside, so, unless he was away on a six-week exercise, he would have no activity at all – unless constantly lifting cans of beer to his mouth counted. I never saw him do an assault course, I never saw him run, but he wasn’t a clerk because he had injuries or a disability, he had simply chosen that role. He always said he chose it so he could have a trade, but he didn’t actually have one of those either as far as I could see.
As I got older, I realised he was the living embodiment of someone who had his cake and ate it – he was in the Army, but not in the Army. He had the respect and glory, but he did bugger all to acquire it. I’ve known brave men, I’ve listened as their deaths have been reported, and I can assure you my dad did not possess one ounce of courage in his character. It used to hurt me so much when he told people he was in the armed forces, that he had been based in Northern Ireland during the Troubles for a while, and they would respond with respect. Without going into detail, he never had to say how little he did, he just had to say the magic word ‘Army’ and people thought he was a hero. He was a disgrace to all those brave men and women who do justice to their position.
My dad was in it for the role he played. He loved his uniform. He loved how people looked at him when he walked by in it, and he took enormous pride in that symbol of his status. He adored being on parade and he needed everything to be immaculate. But, of course, I did the bulk of the work to make things that way. I was the woman of the house, after all. I made everything shine, I made everything glisten, and he just stood there – a big man in a safe job.
That was definitely his persona and, while there are many good, decent men in the Army, there are also far too many like him, cheery with everyone else, but staunch disciplinarians within the home, making their wives’ and kids’ lives a misery. They love having a sense of authority and yet they’re often not the ones actually doing anything in the front line. That was him. He had a light moustache, jetblack hair, dark eyes, a real Mediterranean look. He always had his hair short and Brylcreemed. He smelled of Old Spice aftershave and stale cigarettes, and I still feel sick when I get a whiff of him from another man.
My mum was almost the same height as him, maybe an inch shorter, and she had a very distinctive mole on her cheek. She was slim and good-looking, with long, thick white-blonde hair which she wore in a beehive. That beehive was her pride and joy, and she must have kept the hairspray industry in business for years! I remember one night when we had only just arrived in Rinteln, I woke up in the early hours to the sound of her screaming. I rushed through to their bedroom, which held no horrors for me at that time, to find my dad swatting at her head as she continued to shriek the place down. We’d spent the whole day unpacking MFO boxes until late, and she’d fallen asleep with her clothes still on only to be woken by dozens of cockroaches crawling all over her. They’d come from the boxes and seemed to have set up camp in her beehive! It was one of the few funny moments I can remember in my childhood, although any humour was soon dismissed the next day when she had to go and get it all hacked off.
It soon grew back and returned to being her crowning glory. Mum was a handsome woman with very high cheekbones which she never complemented with make-up. Her face was always scrubbed clean and her clothes in particular. It was the 1960s and most women were wearing short skirts – my mum was no exception and she had a preference for tight-waisted dresses which were halfway up her thighs. She never wore trousers and always took good care of herself when she could.
While my dad liked to smell of Old Spice, Mum’s perfume of choice was Tweed. She liked to be surrounded by smelly stuff and always bought Avon products. Wherever we lived, there was an Avon rep on camp, and Valerie was a good customer. She especially liked their soaps, which came wrapped in tissue paper inside pretty little boxes, often with a drawer you would slide out. I remember soaps in the shape of bells, umbrellas, and flowers aplenty. We had pelmets and mantelpieces covered in them and Mum placed them all around the house.
The women on camp would hold Avon or Tupperware parties where they all congregated in a house. They’d take turns every six weeks or so, and there would be about eight of them at each one. Mum tended to go with Agnes to these and they’d all take turns at providing sandwiches, tea and cake if they were the host. The parties would be held in the early evening and kids would play outside together until they were finished two hours later. They gave the women an opportunity to catch up on any news and gossip. Mum tried to host one once but Dad was horrified when he came home early and caught her; she was told never to hold one again. After this, she went to the other women’s houses, refusing to take me and Gary. Her excuse was that the women wouldn’t want us two eating their sandwiches when they couldn’t bring their kids to our house. I remember feeling it was another form of alienating me from ‘normal’ life. I had to stay home when she went to one, whereas Gary would do his own thing and wait for Mum outside the house and come home with her later.
She enjoyed being with friends, who she would pick up quite easily wherever we moved – they were never hugely close, but Army wives have to learn to be quick at making new female friendships, and they can’t get too tied to each other either.
When I list the things my mum liked, to me, it seems quite a lot. Perfume and Avon, soaps and bingo, friends and fashion.
But she never liked me.
I know that lots of children, at whatever stage of their life, may make that claim. Their mum doesn’t understand them, or she’s too strict, or she’s too bossy, or a million other things. However, I can categorically say, with hand on heart, that my mother simply didn’t like me.
I only have one photograph of us together. We’re on holiday in Clacton and she has her bouffant hair standing firm against the sea air. I’m grinning like a Cheshire cat and she’s completely blank-faced. There isn’t a glimmer of emotion and, to be honest, the camera isn’t lying. That’s how I remember her – she was never warm towards me, never tactile, never loving. I felt as if I was a nuisance, as if I was just someone who got in between her and Gary because, my God, she was the opposite with him. She loved her boy. When she came back from hospital, he was the one she looked for. She would hug him and say how glad she was to be home, and all the time she would be looking at Gary and blanking me.
As a grown woman, I tried to work out what the relationship between my mum and dad truly was in the hope that it could throw some light on what my life was like, but the pieces I do have don’t make enough sense. I never saw him hit her, although he was handy enough with me, but she did once tell me that when she was pregnant with me, they had a huge argument about something. Dad grabbed her on the arm and left a thumbprint which lasted for the rest of her pregnancy. The odd thing is that I have a birthmark on my arm in exactly the same place – in the shape of a thumbprint. Perhaps he was even making his mark on me in the womb.
Theirs was not a passionate relationship. They didn’t even seem to be good friends. They were very distant with each other and had quite a traditional relationship – Mum’s role was to stay at home, cook, clean, and look after the children. These were pretty much the same responsibilities Dad handed over to me when she was in hospital – plus the ones in the bedroom. I never saw him buy her flowers, or kiss her, or hold her hand. When he visited her in hospital, he never took anything as a gift or gesture. He would sit on the end of the bed as if he couldn’t wait to get away and there was no feeling to any of their interaction together. He was completely cold-hearted, with never a lingering look behind him as he left, or a sign that he was worried about the mother of his children.
As a wife and mum myself, I know children do not always see the reality of their parents’ relationship. In a bad marriage, adults can hide things from their kids to spare them hurt, but in a good one, children often just don’t pick up on little in-jokes, or warmth which has come from a life’s journey together. I couldn’t see a single thing which kept Mum and Dad together in all the years they were married. I never caught them having a sneaky cuddle or kiss, he never playfully pinched her or tickled her when he thought we weren’t looking. I never caught them laughing about something we weren’t privy to. We all know that passion can die with any couple, but there is usually something left – I saw nothing with them. Even when Mum was at death’s door, when you would expect a husband to show some kindness, be at a loss, it just gave him an excuse to be with me.
Of course, I don’t know the whole story. I do know she wasn’t close to her family back home either, so perhaps there was just something in her nature that made her unable to form relationships (although that wouldn’t explain why Dad was the same, or why she was loving to Gary). In fact, back where they came from in Scotland, no one seemed to have any time for her. One time, when she was in hospital, Dad took us to Scotland as he said my granny would need to look after us as he was busy (I don’t know what he was doing, as he usually took every opportunity to be alone with me). When we turned up at her house, I realised it was completely unannounced and my gran – a complete stranger to me – had no idea we’d planned to arrive. She opened the door, took one look at us standing there with our bags and said, ‘They’re not coming here – they belong to that bitch.’ My dad said nothing, just dragged us back to the bus stop and took us to his sister. I never saw my granny again and never did get any explanation, but something major must have happened for a woman to treat her own daughter’s children in such a callous, unequivocal way.
Years later, I asked my other granny whether she knew anything about this. She never named my mum;
her
was the best she could do. I didn’t get much information, just a pursing of the lips, as she muttered, ‘I blame
her
for everything.’
I didn’t. I knew who was to blame for a whole lot more.
On another occasion at my granny’s, my dad’s sister Karen came in.
‘I didn’t know Valerie’s bairns were here.’
‘You won’t raise
her
name in my house,’ Granny retorted. ‘She’s a cow that one, always has been, always will be.’
‘Call her by her name, for God’s sake,’ said Auntie Karen. ‘It won’t kill you. She’s Harry’s wife after all, wee Tracy and Gary are their kids.’
‘Aye, Tracy, fair enough,’ Granny replied. ‘But Gary? I doubt it.’
My granny always said that my dad wasn’t Gary’s dad. They certainly looked nothing like each other, but that didn’t make sense to me then, and it still doesn’t. If Gary wasn’t my dad’s biological child and I was, then why was I the one he hated? Surely he must have hated me to do those things to me? Maybe Mum would feel more protective of the child who was a bastard – she had definitely been pregnant when they got married as I found out from birth and marriage certificates – and perhaps she even felt grateful to the man who had taken on another man’s child, but why did she feel no love for me?
This then, this lack of love and surfeit of bitterness, was the background to my childhood; a dad who abused me and a mum who seemed incapable of showing me any affection whatsoever.
I had no one.
I was completely and utterly alone.
I’ve never made that many friends – partly because of what was done to me, which made me withdrawn and wary, but also partly because of the life we led. In fact, I’ve probably only had about six really good friends over the course of my whole life. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have liked things to be different, but when your childhood is characterised by abuse, it turns everything on its head. I didn’t know what normal was.