Tracy Bevan has opened up about escaping from her abusive father.
Talking to The Weekly’s editor-in-chief, Helen McCabe, for the ‘relationships’ edition of Let’s Talk, Bevan, whose husband is legendary cricketer Michael Bevan, recounted the day when she and her mother made the decision to run away from their abusive home.
“I would wait, as a little girl,” she says, “To listen to the way he opened the gate, and I knew, from the way he opened the gate whether my mum was going to get hit that night.”
“I remember the night [when we left],” she says, recalling the chilling moment when she knew that she and her mother would need to flee, “It was the same thing. Heard the gate. Heard a ‘bang’. And I knew… he came in and he said to me, ‘go to bed’.”
“My mother told him ‘she’s got a sore eye, she’s got a sore eye’ and took me into the kitchen,” she continues, “And she just said, ‘we’ve got to go’, and we ran.”
She goes on to relive the days she spent living at the Battered Women’s Shelters in England with her mother and sister, and the safety she found there.
“I was in this run down house, with all of these women going through the same thing, and I was sitting there in that horrible room,” she says, “but that night I slept like a baby.”
Tracy Bevan relives an unforgettable night.
Zoe Arnold, wife of troubled politician Craig Thompson, also spoke about her experience with abuse, which came at the hands of her psychologically abusive father, whom she says she hasn’t spoken to in “over half [her] life”.
“I never grew up with someone who I loved or admired,” Zoe reveals, “Even as a child, our relationship was more, like, what I could do right by him, and sometimes that was approved and sometimes the things I said really upset him.”
But her relationship with her father is, thankfully, not the only fatherly relationship experience she’d had.
“I didn’t know what a good father was until I had children with my husband,” she says, “And I was like ‘Oh! This is kind of nice’.”
Helen McCabe with Tracy Bevan and Zoe Arnold
On the topic of marriage, however, both women admit they have had their ups and downs.
Bevan, who has been married to Michael 17 years, says she initially struggled with both marriage and post-natal depression.
“My mother said to me ‘you have to work at marriage everyday’,” she explains, “It’s harder than you think.”
Elaborating, she says suffered from post-natal depression after the birth of her second child, “I remember being in a park one day, in the UK, and letting my girls run around in the rain and thinking ‘if I kill myself tonight, [they’ll] get over it’.”
It was that moment that opened her eyes, however, and she attributes it to the pressure of her public life.
A pressure that Zoe has also experienced.
“People don’t check in with you [when you’re a mother],” she says, “It’s like, you’re the mother, you’re the wife, but you’re not Zoe the person.”
But despite both their struggles both personally, and in the public eye, they both credit their emotional success to their husbands.
When asked what they believed the secret to a happy marriage was, Bevan replied definitively with, “Keep that piece of individuality, that piece of yourself. Keep that if you can.”
Zoe thought about hers for a little while, before replying, “Be patient and be kind to each other.”
