He took off everything I was wearing and removed all of his clothes, which worried me as I had hoped that the rough touching would have finished things quickly. If he was removing his things, it meant he was planning to be here for a while. He lay on his side and I lay on my back. The stench of him was horrible. I didn’t smell any drink on him, but he had been given Brut aftershave for Christmas by my mum and it wasn’t enough to keep the smell of sweat away, so there was a stink of body odour mingled in with it which made me want to gag.
As he lay there beside me, he stroked my hair and said that I was his ‘little whore’. I tried to imagine I was somewhere else and this wasn’t happening, but the smell and his words kept pulling me back. I told him I didn’t want to do this but he kept saying Mum would get ill and it would be my fault. She had been saying she was feeling bad that week and that she didn’t want it all to start again, so when he told me to lie there and she would get better, I was torn.
He stopped touching me for a few minutes while he kept up his chant of sexual insults, and continued to stroke me and say that I loved all of this – and then he began to shove his fingers inside me again. As soon as he started again, I knew this would be worse than any other time. It was intrusive. It was hideous. I started gagging again but he ignored me and climbed on top. ‘You’re Daddy’s girl,’ he said, ‘you’re my little darling.’ I could feel that he was hard and I could feel that he was pushing his penis into me, but this was going beyond anything he’d done in the past.
Then he entered me.
I thought the pain was going to split me into little pieces.
I didn’t think I could cope with that, didn’t think I could survive it. I know now that you can survive almost anything. All of the time he was thrusting at me, he was saying that I was a whore, a bitch, his whore, his bitch.
It seemed to take forever.
When he finished and got off me, I think I was in shock. I couldn’t move, not just because of the pain, but because I knew that this was the worst thing of all – and that if he had done it once, he’d do it again. He never went back, he always upped things a level. I shouldn’t have worried about moving because he told me to stay still anyway and then pulled his clothes on before leaving the room.
I was shaking but not crying until he returned with a bottle-green plastic basin filled with hot water, a bar of soap and a washing flannel.
He washed me this time – the ritual had changed. As he rubbed the soap over me and rinsed it off with the flannel, he kept calling me his favourite names.
Little prostitute, little prostitute, my little prostitute
, he muttered constantly as he washed between my legs. I was feeling sick and I was hurting. I could feel where bruises would appear over the next few hours.
Dad told me that everything would be all right – but I couldn’t see how. Then I realised he wasn’t referring to me or how I was feeling, he wasn’t actually concerned about the child he had just raped. He meant that his lies and illusions about my mum would be realised. ‘You’ll see,’ he promised, ‘Mum will be fine now.’ He was taking a huge risk with that as this was the first time he had really abused me
before
she was obviously ill.
After he had completed the ritual, his tone changed again. ‘You’re filthy,’ he said. ‘Get out of that fucking bed and have a bath.’ Still in shock, I staggered to the bathroom while he remained in the bedroom. He was changing the bed linen – I never saw the sheets as he removed them, but there must have been blood, which was why he washed me to begin with that night. Once I had run the bath and got in, he came into the bathroom and sat on the seat as he usually did. He stared at me for twenty minutes and I was in such a state that I didn’t even move, nor did I ask if I could get out until he finally left the room and I came to my senses.
I went back to my bedroom and put on baggy pyjamas. I could hear him doing some washing in the kitchen and vaguely wondered what lie he would tell my mum to cover his tracks about why there was wet bedding and clothing lying around. I didn’t even bother to think about whether she would question him – I knew she accepted every word which came out of his mouth.
I climbed into my bed and lay in the darkness with my eyes wide open for hours. I heard the other sounds of the house go on as normal as Gary and my mum came back, and I existed in my own little world. Alone as always. Not the lucky one.
I continued to fear every glance my father threw in my direction as the outside world around me was becoming more and more dangerous. As hundreds of people were imprisoned without trial, protests increased in number and ferocity. The one which took place in Derry on 30 January 1972 would change everything and become known the world over as Bloody Sunday.
The march had been organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association to protest against internment and, although it had been banned by the province’s Stormont government, later news footage would show there was a happy, upbeat atmosphere, with lots of families among the thousands who had attended. There was singing, and a real sense of camaraderie. There were plans for the ten thousand or so to walk from the Creggan Estate to Guildhall Square in the centre of the city, where a rally would be held. Members of the Paratroop Regiment had sealed off the Square to prevent this, so a different route was decided at the last minute, but some protestors stayed behind to confront the soldiers – they responded with rubber bullets, CS gas and a water cannon. The gas forced many into an area called Bogside and it was there that the soldiers opened fire, killing thirteen people in a space of twenty-five minutes.
For all of us in British Army accommodation, it meant that a match had finally been thrown into the tinderbox in which we lived. Within a couple of months, Stormont would be suspended, and the number of deaths would increase almost tenfold. A quick decision was made – all families were to be moved out as quickly as possible.
The day after Bloody Sunday, Mum was waiting for me after school. ‘Get your stuff sorted,’ she snapped. ‘We’re moving and there’s no time to waste.’ I didn’t have much to organise or pack, but I still needed to know why it all had to be done in such a rush. ‘Don’t ask so many questions,’ she answered. ‘We’ve got a week to get out of this hellhole – if we’re lucky enough to make it in one piece.’ I heard from people at school the next day that they’d all been given the same message. We had to get out, and we had to get out quickly. My only concern was Betty and whether we could take her with us. My Dad said ‘not bloody likely’, but luckily someone who worked in one of the local shops had always had a soft spot for her and was happy to give her a home. I’d miss her terribly but at least I knew she was safe and away from the kicks my dad sent her way all too regularly.
No one knew exactly what would happen as a result of the Bloody Sunday murders, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that there would be repercussions, with everyone associated with the British Army in the firing line.
While Mum seemed harassed – probably because she carried the burden of getting accommodation moves organised, and I guess there was always the chance the extra stress could bring on her illness again – Dad was delighted. He was a different character in Northern Ireland and I sensed that a move elsewhere would allow him to reinvent himself yet again.
Throughout that week, the pressure to move quickly intensified; all the families on the first evacuation out to other bases were anxious, and the aftermath of Bloody Sunday meant we were just waiting to see what atrocity would happen next. As I’ve been writing this book, so many decades after the events, the Inquiry into that day has finally concluded. The very fact that it has been in the news yet again has taken me back to those days. In the midst of such a terrible mark on British history, I’ve had to face up to what was happening to one little girl. While the world looked on in horror at the atrocities in Northern Ireland, I was living out my own nightmare – and, sadly, I wouldn’t be the only child doing so.
We got back to Germany quickly, where I kept myself to myself for a while, not speaking to people apart from when I needed to at school, and not really developing any proper friendships. This was quite odd for an Army kid. Mum always managed to establish good, if superficial, friendships within a few weeks of moving to a new posting. She never complained about moving to other postings or about leaving friends behind. Women knew what they needed to do if they were Army wives. There wasn’t time to waste as you never knew when you might be moving on, and they also never knew when they might need someone, so they all built up support networks pretty quickly. Throughout the whole Army experience, she could pick up friends quickly and then drop them when she moved on. There were no tears on leaving, no promises to write or stay in touch, and the days of Facebook and email were decades away, so when families moved on, that was it. My brother was similar to her. He got a new gang very quickly each time we moved somewhere else. I don’t think I was an unfriendly child, but I still bore the psychological scars of when I had been called names. I was no longer smelly and unkempt, but I was still an outsider. What had been done to me made sure of that. How could I trust anyone? How could I believe anyone’s story? I of all people knew just how many lies were perpetuated by families, and just how different private lives could be to the ones presented for public consumption.
Throughout my time in Singapore and Germany, then on to Northern Ireland, I had largely kept a distance from everyone. However, when we returned to Rinteln, I found there were girls around who I had known the first time, so I didn’t have to start from scratch. It was easier for me to develop the slim threads of friendship from my younger days and try to make them stronger. I hadn’t managed to acquire my mum’s and Gary’s ability to make friends quickly and not bother about the prospect of never seeing them again, but I was more willing to take a chance this time. As an Army child, you do learn to avoid getting too emotionally attached and to hold a part of yourself back. As an abused child, I was actually quite good at this. I could be whatever I needed to be for the company I was in as I was used to living a lie anyway.
When we’d first left Rinteln for Northern Ireland, we didn’t know we would be back one day – in fact, Hong Kong had been on the cards, so we had broken all ties. With Singapore and Northern Ireland, we had been given six months’ notice in advance, but it was much quicker after Bloody Sunday. Some families spoke of sometimes having no warning at all, and of having to drag out their MFO boxes for a move the next day, so there was a sense of never really settling into anything, to school, friendships, or even pets. If you accumulated personal belongings, you often had to leave them behind. Emotional ties fitted into that category as well.
It wasn’t a traumatic way of living if you didn’t know any different. In some ways, that was what I felt about the abuse for a while too. My dad had been so clever about how he had manipulated me that I had accepted this was just what some daddies did with their daughters. In fact, as far as I knew, maybe
all
daddies did this with all little girls. Certainly, if their mums were ill, this was a way for good girls to help make them better, and who wouldn’t see that as a price worth paying? Although I hated the abuse, and although I was beginning to realise it was wrong, my father was trying very hard to normalise it over all those years, so it was a way of living that was normal for me.
Just as I spent my days waiting for signs of whether my dad was getting ready to rape me again, I watched for symptoms of Mum’s illness. I remember how she used paraffin cream to cover the ulcers which would develop. When I saw her rubbing paraffin in or having a paraffin bath, I started to worry. Dad’s luck held for a while after raping me for the first time and she stayed out of hospital until about six months after we moved back to Germany.
The abuse and rape continued and, unsurprisingly, there were physical consequences. It was more surprising there hadn’t been anything requiring medical attention earlier. One morning, quite soon after we returned to Rinteln, I woke up feeling awful. It was hard to put my finger on anything specific and I actually suspect my body was just crying out against all that was being inflicted upon it.
Mum had to get the doctor in not long after we returned to Germany. I was aching all over and had really bad stomach cramps. I was having breathing problems and panic attacks. My body was just screaming that something was wrong and someone needed to listen. My parents stood just inside the bedroom door when the doctor arrived and stayed there throughout the visit. He examined my stomach, throat and ears in quite a cursory way and decided it was a tummy bug. All through the examination, Dad had been chatting away, telling the man about Mum’s illness and how she had been recently – trying to distract him, I guess. He had been doing this since the doctor arrived as I had heard them discussing the big, black rubber bullet displayed on our wall – every soldier had been given one of these macabre mementoes when they left Northern Ireland after their tour. Would I have said anything to the doctor if I had been left alone with him? I don’t know. Maybe not, but I didn’t have the opportunity. Would he have had a more thorough look at me and asked more about my symptoms? He wouldn’t have had to look far, and if he had bothered to look underneath my pyjamas he would have seen the enormous damage which had been inflicted on my body.
As the doctor got up to leave, I made one attempt at making him see there was something terribly wrong. ‘I’m smelly, I smell, I smell all over, I smell.’
It was as if I could see the colour drain from my dad’s face. My Mum said, ‘What’s she saying, Harry? What’s she saying?’
I tried again. ‘I smell. I smell so bad.’
‘What do you mean?’ the doctor asked. He looked totally bemused but my dad regained his composure very quickly. He walked over to the bed and took my hand. ‘I know exactly what she means,’ he said. He squeezed my hand tighter and dug his nails into me. ‘It’s all that Avon stuff Valerie puts in here.’ He waved his free hand around my room at the various soaps and pomanders Mum had filled the room with. They were lined up along the pelmet and window ledges. They were the only personal things she ever gave me. ‘That’s what she means by smelly – she’s feeling ill with this tummy bug and all she can sniff is this lavender muck. I’ll get it all dumped, leave it to me.’