Read Online Never a Hero to Me by Tracy Black - Free Book Online

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