Never a Hero to Me by Tracy Black Page B

me, who should be my hero, but I was also now living in fear that it was going to be done by other men too. My horror that Dad was bragging about what he did and presenting me as an option to other men was compounded the next time we were at the mess and I was sent into the tiny kitchen again. I had told my dad that morning I didn’t want to go, but he’d just laughed at me and told me to go and put my coat on.
    I could hear him outside the kitchen talking to people, then I heard a man’s voice say, quite loudly, ‘Where’s Tracy?’ Just then a stranger walked towards me, leering, and made for the tiny space behind me just as Graham had done. As he walked over, I could see that he was already excited and I couldn’t help myself shout out, ‘Dad!’ My father came into the kitchen and looked at this man, who, still smiling, shook his head and left. I was torn. What a position to be in – I’d had to ask for help from the man who abused me to stop another man from touching me, when I was pretty sure that he was the one telling them about me.
    This was the pattern of my life – he was still doing what he did, and now I had to worry about others joining in. I think that, when I was very little, when it all started, I almost accepted it – it was my normality. However, as I got older, I began to wonder. I was meant to be Mum’s saviour, but she was still getting ill. Why was that? Why was I putting up with what he did to me if it wasn’t changing anything? He said she would get even worse if I wasn’t a good girl, but I couldn’t see how it could be worse. Mum didn’t love me, she didn’t even seem to like me, which sometimes made me think that we should tell her all I was doing to try and make her better, for maybe then she would care for me a little. Now, I was finding Dad’s ‘outside’ behaviour odd too – and these men who he seemed to be showing me to, parading me in front of, gave me an uneasy feeling that I couldn’t quite explain.
    It was getting worse – but we were going to be on the move soon, and I could only hope that would mean a change in my life too.

CHAPTER 11
     
NORTHERN IRELAND
     
    When it was announced we were moving, I was delighted. It wasn’t presented as an option to Gary and me, it was a fait accompli . That we were going to Northern Ireland was even better in my mind – although I’d been born abroad, and although I’d lived most of my life on foreign bases, I still thought of myself as British. My parents both had strong Scottish accents, which I had picked up, so I was glad to be going somewhere I thought would feel more like home.
    Dad was in a bad mood about it but it was what was called a ‘natural’ posting, just one of the moves all personnel had to deal with. As there was so much going on in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, pretty much every soldier had to do a tour of duty there – things were getting bad, with constant bombings and threats. Mum had been quite well for a while, but she was upset about the fact that Dad clearly didn’t want to go. She asked if he could request somewhere else, but he said everyone had to do at least one tour there. I think there were three reasons for his reluctance – he didn’t want to leave his buddies behind and he didn’t want to break the hold he had over me by going somewhere new. However, above all of that, I think the main problem was that he was a coward. So many brave men and women lost their lives, or had their lives wrecked, during the Troubles but my father simply wasn’t that sort of man. He was terrified at the very thought of being in such a dangerous environment. A lot of the kids had been there and come back to Germany again, so I knew how perilous it was. Children on Army bases talk about things like that all the time, it’s their way of coping. The older ones said you could hear bombs and it was exciting, but, again, that was largely bravado. We had a sense of what it might be like but nothing could prepare