Never a Hero to Me (16 page)

This was my life, this was my normality.

Billy Stoppard was one of my dad’s drinking buddies. I don’t know how much deeper that link went – but I was about to find out part of it. He was a big man, physically imposing and in a different regiment to my father, although he was a proper soldier not an impostor like Dad.

One day I came back from school and my parents were sitting in the living room chatting to another couple. It was Billy and his wife, Chrissie. Mum knew Chrissie from bingo and that’s what they were chatting about. I heard Billy say, ‘Fancy going out tonight?’ and Chrissie replied by asking him where he was taking her. He laughed and said, ‘No, I’m working – why don’t you have a night out with Valerie at the bingo?’

Chrissie said she had no one to look after their three kids, who were only little and not at school yet. Billy looked at my dad and smirked. ‘That’s a shame, love – isn’t it, Harry?’ He paused. ‘Here, Harry – don’t suppose you’ve got any ideas, have you?’

My dad smiled too. ‘Well, Tracy’s a big girl now, isn’t she? Would you like her?’

‘I think that would be absolutely perfect,’ retorted Billy. ‘What do you think, Chrissie?’

I was quiet and tall for my age. I looked like the sort of kid who could take on responsibility, so Chrissie had no reason to worry. ‘It’s only for a couple of hours I suppose,’ she said. ‘Is that all right with you, Valerie? The kids will be sleeping anyway.’ My mum shrugged, probably wondering why anybody would want to spend time with me if they didn’t have to, and Dad sealed the deal. ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said to Billy. ‘She could do with a bit of pocket money, so make sure you pay her.’

‘For her services!’ Billy laughed.

I wasn’t sure about it but I was keen to make some money and Dad said I would get ten Deutschmarks for my trouble. There was a school skiing trip coming up which I really wanted to go on and Dad had said if I could save the money up by myself, I could go. This had seemed like quite a concession from him. It had only been a couple of days before, and I now see he was softening me up for Billy’s approach. By planting the seed in my mind that if I could get the money I could go on the trip, he knew I would see the babysitting as a means to an end.

Later that night, he said he would walk me round to Billy and Chrissie’s while Mum got ready for bingo. ‘Now, you must be a good girl for him, OK?’ he warned me as we approached their house. ‘You be really, really good.’

I didn’t pay attention to Dad; I was just glad to get the night away from him. Chrissie put the kids in bed before she left and said she’d give me my money when she came back from bingo (‘and a wee bit extra if I’m lucky tonight!’), then left. After about an hour, the door opened and Billy came in.

‘I thought you were working tonight, Mr Stoppard,’ I said.

‘Did you now?’ he replied. ‘Well, you’re in luck because I managed to get back to you so much quicker than we expected.’ He was really sleazy and I just wanted to get out. Their house had a different layout from ours so I would have had to follow him through to the kitchen from the sitting room to get my money. Something told me I shouldn’t do this, so I grabbed my coat and headed for the door. He shouted through, ‘Where are you off to? I haven’t given you your money yet!’ I told him not to bother, that he could pass it on to my dad next time he saw him, but he followed me through and said, ‘I insist.’

He pinned me against the front door and started rubbing my shoulders, as if giving me a massage. I said, ‘I have to go straight home, I have to go straight home,’ but it made no difference.

‘You need paying, don’t you? That’s what your dad said – he told me you like to get paid.’

He kept rubbing my shoulders but his hands were moving further and further down my body. He stopped for a moment and held ten Deutschmarks out in front of me. ‘There you go – you’ll have to give me a cuddle for it though.’

I looked at the floor and muttered that I wanted to leave.

‘Didn’t your dad tell you to be good for me?’ he said. ‘He told me you were such a good girl.’

The penny dropped.

The phrase was the one my dad always used – and I suddenly remembered what he had said when he left me at Billy and Chrissie’s front door.
Be good for him
. Billy wasn’t meant to be there that night, so why had Dad said that? The only explanation was that he knew Billy would be there. This was all a set-up. My dad had sent me there to be abused.

Billy Stoppard put his arms around me and gave me a cuddle. He slipped the ten Deutschmarks into my pocket, taking too long to do it, then slapped my backside and told me he looked forward to seeing me again.

I ran home as fast as my legs could carry me, not recognising the irony that I was hurrying from one abuser to another. As soon as I went in, Dad said, ‘What did you get?’ I showed him the ten Deutschmarks. ‘So, you were good for him?’ he asked. I nodded and put the money in my piggy bank.

The following week, he asked me in front of Mum if I wanted to babysit for Billy and Chrissie’s kids again. My mum interrupted before I had a chance to answer. ‘Of course she does – gets her out of the house and she’ll get paid.’ That was it; that was it all settled. Again, he wasn’t there when I got to their house but Chrissie said he might be home before her. It was only about ten minutes after she left that he appeared, stinking of booze. I tried to get past him but he stood in front of me. ‘You can’t go yet – what about your money?’

‘I’ve only been here a little while, I don’t mind,’ I told him.

He pulled me towards him and started to run his hands all over me as I told him to stop. I pushed him away as much as I could and said ‘no’ over and over again. ‘I’ll tell your dad you weren’t a good girl,’ he said. ‘He’ll have to punish you, he’ll have to make you understand who your friends are.’

‘Let me go!’ I screamed, managing to get the door open.

‘You little bitch!’ he said. As I ran out the door he threw a packet of dates at me – ‘Take these! You’re getting nothing else!’

I cried all the way home. When I got in, Dad asked me how much I’d earned. When I showed him the dates and said there was no money, he asked me whether Chrissie had come home early. It was clear he knew exactly what was going on as he could only think that the reason I hadn’t been paid by Billy was that he hadn’t got what he wanted because his wife had appeared. Dad slapped me across the face and punched me in the kidneys. ‘I told you to be fucking good, didn’t I?’ he said, leaving me crying as he stormed off.

When Mum came home, my face was still red. She saw it when I got up for a glass of water and asked me what had happened. Dad told her I’d fallen, and she tutted as usual, as if I was a terrible burden to her, then asked how much babysitting money I’d earned. I said I’d got nothing but Dad butted in again to say that he’d get the cash from Billy in the halfway house next time he saw him. The signal was obvious to me – if I was good I got the money, if I wasn’t, I didn’t.

I realised I was trapped – there was no way out of this.

The next time I went to Billy’s house, it was obvious he and Dad had been talking. I didn’t know how much he was aware of what happened between me and Dad; was my own father telling other men about the secret? The night before I went to babysit, Dad had sat me down ‘to have a word’.

‘Billy is my friend,’ he said, ‘and, more importantly, he’s a good man, a good soldier. Don’t you dare embarrass me ever again. If he wants you to help him out, then that’s exactly what you’ll do.’

So my continued abuse by another ‘good man’ was to be acceptable because it would save my dad from embarrassment and help Billy Stoppard out? As I lay there that night, with my own father raping me yet again, I wondered what the future would be for Billy’s three little girls, the ones I supposedly babysat. Would they be sold on to my dad when they got older? One of them was only a year younger than I had been when he had started on me – were they facing the same destiny?

Dad frequently had a lot of porn around the house and I always felt he probably traded it with his friends as I would see packages being passed between them. I think that was one of the reasons he kept us out of the cellar and wouldn’t let us use it as a den the way other kids did. I believe it was his storeroom for lots of things. The first time I knew of him having magazines like that was when I came home one day and Gary was acting strangely. Mum was out cleaning and Dad was still at work, and my brother had been raking around in their bedroom looking for Christmas presents. He’d been shuffling through things in their wardrobe when a stash of porn fell out. Although he thought of himself as tough, Gary had quite a sheltered life really. He was never hit and Mum treated him as if he was five years old. If he had seen porn before (and I guess there would be mags being passed around between teenage boys at that time as they didn’t have the internet), it was probably pretty tame stuff – but this wasn’t. It was hard core, and it had obviously shocked Gary a bit. When I asked what was wrong, he avoided telling me for a while, then said, ‘Come and see what I’ve found.’ He wasn’t full of bravado or showing off, he seemed genuinely puzzled and shaken.

In some ways the pictures didn’t have the same effect on me because an awful lot of those things had been done to me since I was a little girl. However, I had never seen them so explicitly. It was like looking at a catalogue of my own abuse. I completely related it to what was done to me, and I assumed these women were all in the same position as me. Maybe they were, I have no idea if it was consensual or not. Whatever the legality of it all, I was amazed there were images like that. As Gary flicked through, I saw one photograph of a woman kneeling down masturbating a man – I was drawn to it because I had never really envisaged what the reality of that act was when I was being forced into it. I didn’t even know that grown-ups did those things – I thought they were part of the special secret between daddies and little girls to keep mummies out of hospital.

From that moment on, the knowledge that my dad had those magazines haunted me. Although he never showed them to me or left them lying around openly, I could always find them easily and the fact that they existed confused me. Why were other people doing these things? The women in the pictures were grown-ups – I couldn’t understand if the men in the pictures were their daddies or, if not, what their dads would think about them doing such things. Wouldn’t they get into terrible trouble? Every time I saw Dad passing magazines or books to other men in the pub, I would wonder whether they were full of pictures like the ones Gary had found.

Once I started ‘babysitting’, I was even more terrified of going to the halfway house to collect Dad than I had been in the past. Too many times, Billy Stoppard was there and I saw him leering at me whenever I came in. He was often passing magazines to the others. I once asked Dad what they were and he just said ‘car mags’, but I didn’t know if that was the truth and I had less reason to believe it once Billy Stoppard decided to show me some of his collection.

One night when I was at his house, instead of trying to get me in the kitchen or at the door, he told me to wait a minute before I left. One of his kids had fallen asleep on the sofa, so I didn’t want to leave until I was sure he was looking after them properly.

He went into another room and came back with a magazine. He sat down beside me on the sofa – far too close – and said he wanted to show me something nice. That worried me – men who said that to me had very different ideas about what was ‘nice’. He brought out a magazine and opened it to a photograph of two naked women touching each other in their private places. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘isn’t that nice?’ I tried to get off the sofa, but he pulled me back down. ‘I need to go,’ I said, ‘my dad will be wondering about where I am.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t you worry about that – I think your dad doesn’t mind at all that you’re here with me, Tracy.’

That was exactly what worried me.

‘Look,’ he kept saying, ‘they’re having a good time, aren’t they?’

I turned my head away; I didn’t want to see or to have him watching me while I did.

I heard him flicking the pages. ‘Oh, here’s a lovely one,’ he said. ‘I like this. Do you like it?’

Again, I refused to turn my head. He grabbed my arm at the top and nipped me. I didn’t move. His hand moved to my leg and started rubbing it. ‘Tracy? Look. I want you to look. I really do think you should look.’

There was a threat in his voice – and I’d rather look at his filthy magazines than have him touch me. I looked. It was what seemed to be a Polaroid picture in the mag, an actual photograph of what I thought of as ‘real’ people. A woman was kneeling down in front of a man and they both had their eyes blackened out. She had his penis in her mouth. ‘Just think, Tracy,’ Billy said, ‘that could be you.’

I jumped up off the sofa and ran to the door – I had no idea how long I could keep fighting him off.

The answer was, not long.

The next time I went to Billy and Chrissie’s, she wasn’t there and he was. It looked as if even the usual pretence of him working was to be discarded. The kids were already in bed and I walked through to the kitchen as soon as he opened the door to me.

I went to go and check on his children, but he stopped me. ‘No need – they’re asleep. I think it’s time you and I had a little chat, Tracy, don’t you?’

He held me by the elbow and guided me to the kitchen table. ‘If you don’t need me here tonight, Mr Stoppard, I’ll just head back home,’ I said.

‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘I’m a bit confused, Tracy. You see, I thought you were a good girl. Your dad tells me you’re a good girl. In fact, in the pub, your dad tells all of his friends that you’re a good girl.’ My heart sank. I had suspected this but I hadn’t wanted to have it confirmed. ‘So, Tracy, I think it’s time for you to prove he is right – it’s time for you to be a good girl.’