Free Never a Hero to Me by Tracy Black

was in hospital, but I wish he had – and not just for the obvious reason. Perhaps he wouldn’t have had the same opportunities to abuse me (although I think that was so ingrained in who he was that he would always have found a way), but it would also have addressed the fact that I quickly became neglected. When Mum was admitted to hospital any time, Dad didn’t look after me at all. He would never accept help from the neighbours when she was taken ill, and Agnes was not the only one to offer.
    It was also Army practice to offer help in situations like ours. If Dad had been willing, there would have been a whole raft of help for us. I do remember that, on a few occasions, they sent a family liaison officer to see what they could provide, but my dad let them stay for about five minutes and said everything was fine. He lied that one of Mum’s friends was helping out as well as making a big song and dance about not wanting to put anyone to any trouble – all of it adding to the accepted view of him as a great guy. The Army would have helped with practical things like shopping and washing, but that would not have fallen in line with Dad’s plans at all. Not only was he trying to maintain the fiction of himself as a strong man coping with his family responsibilities in times of adversity, but he also needed to use these household chores to punish me.
    I was very quickly pushed into housework, including such things as cooking, and got most of it wrong – I tended to burn toast, burn sausages, burn everything really. If it couldn’t be burned, I had a talent for making it under-cooked. But it was when he told me I needed to do the washing that I really got into trouble because I just couldn’t physically manage. He didn’t tell me to wash his clothes – he couldn’t run that risk. If he had gone to work in a smelly, damp uniform someone would have noticed or, at the very least, he would have been embarrassed by the smell. But that wasn’t a consideration for my things.
    We had an old-fashioned twin tub and a big communal garden with washing ropes to hang the laundry on. Needless to say, Dad didn’t want me to use the garden as that would have meant me coming into contact with people and talking to them, so I had to dry everything indoors. I’d fill one barrel of the twin-tub with clothes and then have to drag them out and put them into the other side when they were sodding wet. It was physically hard, and I then had to dry them in the house. They were usually dripping wet when I hung them up on the clothes horse or on doors, and there was always a fusty, damp stink clinging to them.
    When I put my school uniform on, it never smelled clean and I soon got called names by the other kids. This happened for the first time when Mum went into hospital and Dad started touching me, and even though she was only gone for a week at that point, he had asked me to wash my things. I could have got away with wearing them all week, and the smell would have been less than the stench I ended up with from the dampness. Perhaps this was a deliberate ploy of his, perhaps he was already working out ways to make sure I was an outsider and had no one to confide in. As soon as the other kids started calling me smelly, I was left to sit alone. It doesn’t take long for children to work out who is the weakest in the pack. I also had to wash my own bed sheets, although Dad took his to the laundry in the Army mess, so I was never really in anything clean and always felt like an outsider.
    As time went on and Mum’s hospitalisations became more frequent, I would get more and more unkempt. My hair was long and it was rarely brushed. I couldn’t reach all of it myself, and after Dad started watching me in the bath, I never voluntarily got in there or lingered. Hair washing was one of the first things to be sacrificed as I looked for ways to keep out of situations where I felt even more vulnerable. As a result, my hair smelled even worse than my