Never a Hero to Me
to Me
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © 2011 Tracy Black and Linda Watson-Brown
This book is copyright under the Berne convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Tracy Black and Linda Watson-Brown to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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ISBN: 978-0-85720-329-8
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For my partner, who is also my friend and soulmate. His belief in me has never wavered, his love for me remains strong, and his support for me in my darkest moments gave me strength.
For my children who, unknowingly, taught me that a mother’s love for her children is unconditional. Through hard times we have always been there for each other – they make me proud to be a loving mum.
And for those brave, good men and women in the armed forces, the ones who protect and serve us – there are plenty of them.
My story is a normal one. Horrific and normal.
I was a normal little girl in a normal little family. There was me and my big brother, Gary. There was my mum, Valerie, and there was my dad, Harry. We were a perfect nuclear family on the surface – and a completely dysfunctional, abusive one underneath. For years, no one bothered to scratch that surface, no one bothered to ask one of a thousand questions which could have blown the whole thing apart.
For years, I kept it inside. I blamed myself for what my dad did to me. I blamed myself for not being stronger or louder. I even blamed myself for not being a better little girl, because I must have been bad for him to do what he did. But the truth was, the stories he managed to weave around me, the detailed lies he managed to spin, were so believable that I actually ended up believing I ‘had’ to do the things he forced upon me.
My father was held in high esteem. But it was all a front. He was a bully. He was a child-beater. He was a paedophile. As a soldier, he was seen as a hero by many. But he was never a hero to me.
I’m a grown woman in her forties. I’m a mother and a grandmother, I have a life in the sun and a loving man by my side, but I also have many ghosts which have lingered for too many years. This is my story. I’ve needed to tell it for such a very long time – and, at last, in doing so I can claim back everything he took from me. I know I’m not the only child who suffered these horrors, but if in writing this I can reach out to even one person and tell them what I’ve learned, it will be worth it. It is
never
the child’s fault. There is nothing you can do that makes abuse something you deserve. What you do deserve is freedom from the torment you have carried all these years, forgiveness from yourself and a realisation that you are more than what was done to you.
There may be scars, there may be pain. There may be memories which rear their heads every day. But you got through it. Some days, it may not feel that way, but there is always hope and there is always tomorrow. Those of us who survived? We’re the invisible heroes – no one will ever give us a medal for what we endured in those dark days when we thought the hurting would never end, but we got through. We’re the heroes.
Tracy Black has wanted to tell her story of horror and survival for many years. Terrified that no one would believe her, one day she made a promise to the little girl she had been – she would tell the world what that child had endured, no matter how hard it would be to revisit her past. Now in her forties, Tracy lives in Europe with her partner and is a successful businesswoman. A mother of two, she has fought through her childhood and domestic abuse, and recently graduated from university with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. She plans to undertake further study in the near future and will always fight for the victims of paedophiles. Tracy Black is a pseudonym. Names have been changed to protect anonymity.
Rinteln, Germany, 1967
I looked out of the lounge window, fascinated by the torrential and persistent rain battering the glass. I was feeling pleased with myself, proud that I was tackling my homework easily and quickly despite being at my new school for only three weeks. At five years of age, in a strange country with many people speaking a language I could understand only a few words of, the Army school was a welcome haven for me. I had been in school for a little while in Singapore, but had never been such a big girl that I was given homework. It felt terribly grown-up to bring home my tiny satchel with a reading book, writing jotter and a note saying what I needed to do for the next day.
The house we lived in wasn’t particularly homely – Army accommodation never was – but in my bedroom I had my few toys, my beloved golliwog and some books. I didn’t want to be in there at that moment though. I had homework to do, and I needed an audience for that as much as anything. I wanted my family to see how grown-up I was with reading to do and numbers to learn. I had my family around me, and I was so sure that I would make friends and have a lovely time there. I had a simple, childlike belief that everything was coming together for me; little did I know how quickly it could all fall apart.
My dad had been in the Army since before I was born and I didn’t know any other life. We were in Germany, but the camp was like a little Britain, isolated from local culture and local life, a version of home even though it was hundreds of miles away. I was born on a different Army base in 1962, and we stayed there for a couple of years before going to Germany. After that, we went to Singapore, but I remember very little of my first four or five years; nothing more than snippets really. We were never settled, it could change at any point, but that was just life. As a child, you absorb so much of what has gone on in the past, of what your parents’ lives have been like, of what their expectations are, without ever being explicitly told. I assumed my dad had an important job, which meant we often had to move about. I knew this had ‘always’ been the case (in my mind, ‘always’ wasn’t a concept that made much sense – at five years old the time between one birthday and the next seemed to take forever) and it was just the way things were. All around me, other children were living the same lives in anonymous houses with a determination not to put down roots, but school was making everything seem much more settled, much more permanent.
I had spent so much time looking forward to attending classes. All summer I had been counting down the days, asking my mum how many sleeps it would be until I was there. She was exasperated (or perhaps just bored) with my constant enthusiasm, but I was thrilled that every day was a step closer. I would look at my school bag every night before I went to bed, line my shoes up neatly for the hundredth time, and dream about the wonderful time I would have.
For the first two days of my life as a schoolgirl, Mum had taken me and my big brother Gary to class in the morning. The school I was now at, my very first big-girl school, was near to the living quarters and, after those first mornings, she decided it was safe enough for us to go alone. She wasn’t wrong in that sense – for children, Army bases are probably one of the most secure environments they could ever be in. I didn’t have the slightest inkling at that stage of where danger would really lie, or of how close to home it would be. I would have liked Mum to have kept taking me to school for a little longer, but she told me that I was a big girl now – which I always liked to hear – and I didn’t need her. That didn’t feel quite right, I did need her, but she wasn’t the sort of warm, cuddly mummy I saw with other kids at the school gate, so I wasn’t too surprised when she stopped taking me there so quickly.
She passed the responsibility over to Gary, who was a few years older than me. He wasn’t exactly delighted to be in charge of his little sister, but he had no choice in the matter and, for the next few days, took me on his own. I didn’t like that, for he used our time together to nip my arms, pull my hair and push me into puddles. I soon realised he was only doing this to show off in front of the boys he hoped would be his friends, but I hated it and needed it to stop. I had made friends quickly and knew some of the other girls walked to school on their own. After my first week, I collared Mum in the kitchen one night to test the waters.