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

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.

CHAPTER 8
     
ON THE OUTSIDE
     
    I’ve never made that many friends – partly because of what was done to me, which made me withdrawn and wary, but also partly because of the life we led.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.
    I think British kids on bases have a certain attitude to them – maybe it’s changed now, but back then they were all very blasé. They never thought of friendships as long term, so it was always about who fitted in at that time. I was withdrawn anyway, but after the abuse began I would become even more so – partly this was because Dad was isolating me, but partly it was because I didn’t have a maternal figure in my life.
    Over the next three years, Mum would be in and out of hospital constantly. Her symptoms were baffling the medical experts and they couldn’t understand why she would get flare-ups of her condition to begin with. There seemed to be no common denominator so they could never predict when she would be ill. Neither could we. It was many, many years later that she finally got a diagnosis – the condition was so rare it was no wonder they had been unable to pin it down.
    When Mum was in hospital, Dad never looked after me. That probably seems a ridiculous statement given that I’ve already outlined such appalling abuse but, actually, I can’t understand why his other actions were so neglectful. Given that he knew what he was doing was wrong, on every level, and given that he would have been torn limb from limb by others on the camp if they had found out that he was a paedophile, I would have thought he would have tried with all his might to deflect attention from us. One way of doing that would have been to ensure that we always fitted in, but, when Mum was away, I was uncared for. He was always telling me that I was the woman of the house, that household duties were my responsibility, but I was just a little kid. From being a child one moment, I was suddenly thrust into a situation whereby I wasn’t just being violated, I was also having to run a home.
    I couldn’t do it. I actually, physically, couldn’t do it. In the 1960s, life on an Army base wasn’t one of unimaginable luxury. My dad had obviously lied to Agnes when he said he was getting someone in to help look after us while Mum