14

Never Trust a Journalist

It was a wet Sunday afternoon in mid-November and the wind rampaged around the common like a mad woman. Our tarpaulin, set up in a gazebo-style arrangement to protect the main fire, had repeatedly collapsed, and finally ripped, leaving us nowhere to shelter, so in the end we’d retreated. I was in Rori’s bender, listening to the weather as it warred with Barbel’s experimental recorder-playing from next door. Barbel could play the guitar like a professional, but she’d never been forced to learn the recorder at primary school like the rest of us and now she’d decided to teach herself from a book.

‘At least she’s happy,’ I said, as she started another round of ‘London’s Burning’.

‘Yes, she has a gift for happiness,’ said Rori, shifting to get more comfortable. We were propped on our elbows, a candle glowing inside a jam jar, bronze light pooling between us. ‘She’s one of life’s free spirits.’

It was true, I’d never seen Barbel downhearted – even when the rain had seeped into our dry food supplies, ruining the flour and biscuits and turning the bread to wet sponge, she’d refused to complain.

‘Do you think she’ll stay long?’ I asked.

‘Difficult to tell. They’re planning a peace camp in New York State, she wants to go and help.’

‘The weather’s got to be better at least.’ The sheeting cracked hard in the wind and Rori sat up to re-tie a loose piece of plastic flapping near her head.

‘Such a sloppy housewife,’ she said, ‘haven’t dusted for weeks.’

‘Well, I didn’t like to mention it, but I noticed your antimacassars need a wash.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘What’s an antimacassar?’

‘You put them on the back of your three-piece suite.’

‘Three-piece suite! You’re hilarious,’ she said, and flopped down again.

I didn’t know what was so funny about a three-piece suite, but it was good to see her laughing. I’d noticed the melancholy she occasionally slipped into. Two days before, we’d been sitting by the fire, eyes fixed on the flames, and she’d told me about a time she’d walked into the sea. ‘But it’s harder to drown yourself than you’d think,’ she said. Appalled by this, I’d put my arm around her and she’d smiled, not stoical but sad, and laid her head on my shoulder.

Rori’s bender was more comfortable than my tent and more spacious too. She slept on foam spread over duckboard. The knobbles on the branches, which had been bent over to create the shelter’s structure, acted as handy clothes hooks, while straw insulation kept in the heat. When the weather improved she’d promised to help me build a bender of my own.

The rain picked up speed and she sighed.

‘Some days I’m convinced I’ve had enough, and other days this seems the only place to be.’

I knew what she meant. After a run of clear, cold nights I’d begun to enjoy being outside in a way I’d never have imagined when centrally heated in Stevenage. I liked the practical business of making do, the way women wrapped hot stones from the fire in cloth and put them in their sleeping bags. I liked listening to their stories as we cooked. I liked the sky, an ever-changing wallpaper. But in the rain it was a different matter.

‘You know, being here is a little like playing tennis,’ Rori said. I pictured hordes of women jumping over a net in their filthy whites. ‘So much is about the inner game, the struggle with one’s self.’ She was inserting long fingers into her curls. Even if she hadn’t washed or brushed them, the curls stayed springy.

‘Still, this is far more enlightening than anything I’ve done before,’ she said firmly.

‘Even university?’

‘Much.’ The idea astonished me. ‘I went to university and met exactly the same sorts I’d been at school with. All good fun of course, but hardly a challenge.’

I thought about that, and of the things I’d learned since being at the camp: that the suffragette colours were green, white and violet; nettles contain vitamin C and taste like a worse version of spinach; scattering catnip keeps away rats, and keening is symbolic of mourning. I’d also learned there are special ponds in London where women go swimming together, that a war was going on in Nicaragua, and that wooden pallets catch brilliantly on an open fire.

‘What does your mum think of you being here?’ I asked, chipping a cold drip of wax with my thumbnail.

‘Jocasta? Oh she loves it. Loves it. She stayed for a night during the summer – those glorious warm evenings we had – though when it came to actually sleeping without a mattress, she was quite disabled by it all. Not that she’d ever admit it of course.’

‘At least she sees why you’re here.’

‘Doesn’t yours?’

I thought of Mum triple cleaning the worktops. ‘She’s not that interested in politics.’

A recent fragment of dream returned to me: Mum standing with her potato peeler removing Dad’s post-explosion skin in long bubbly strips while he watched Match of the Day on a smoking television set. Since arriving at the camp my dreams had taken new and frightening turns.

Rori said her parents took opposing sides about disarmament. She was fond of her father, Corbert, but teased him for being right wing.

‘They’re poles apart on almost everything. Should have divorced years ago.’

‘Why did they get married?’

‘In their youth they were both exceptionally beautiful. It all comes down to sex in the end. But she married far too young, barely twenty. Actually, my being here has been very good for Jocasta. When there was that nonsense about me in the paper, the Lady Muck stuff, she was absolutely brimming, showed the page to all her friends. Greenham has boosted her no end. She can be quite…’ she thought for the word, rolling a soft drip of candle wax into a bead ‘…unstable I suppose you’d call it. She’s put her heart into fundraising.’

I’d got the impression from a couple of other things Rori had said, that unstable was a euphemism.

Outside the rain stormed on, but at least the wind had stopped hurling itself so violently against the bender.

‘Do you think they have Sunday lunch inside the base?’ said Rori, for whom thoughts of food were never far away. To pass time, we began planning a fantasy meal, working our way from starter to desert.

‘You know what I’d die for? A poached pear with chocolate sauce,’ she declared. ‘Jocasta does them with a slug of cognac. Sprinkles them with crushed pistachios.’ I’d been thinking about butterscotch Angel Delight. ‘My elder brother, Ivo, did I tell you about him?’

‘The one in the city?’

‘He’s incredibly impressed by these tiny meals on enormous white plates. Nouvelle cuisine. Absurd. Last year he took us to a smart restaurant for his birthday, and my main course was nothing but a spec of cod with a dribble of nothingy sauce. Gone in two bites. And God knows what he paid for it. I blame that appalling fiancée – he hardly ever comes home since they met, and if he does it’s only to show off to my father.’

That didn’t make sense. ‘Doesn’t your dad have a title?’

‘Oh yes, he has a title, but he doesn’t have any actual money. Our house is practically bare floorboards upstairs. All the Nouveauxs have got the cash, haven’t you noticed? Poor Dad, he’d love me to zip into a nice Laura Ashley and bag myself an aristo with a decent estate.’

We were on the cheese course, Rori scooping out the creamy insides of a Stilton, me cutting a generous wedge of Cheddar, when a head appeared. It wasn’t like the heads of any of the women we knew; it was a head wearing a fawn Burberry rain hat.

‘May I come in?’

The woman didn’t wait for an answer, she was already crawling inside. ‘Sorry to disturb,’ she said, dragging after her a golfing umbrella and a leather bag like a beast on a leash. ‘I’m April.’

‘Here for a visit?’ said Rori, as the woman rearranged the plastic sheeting to keep the weather out.

‘In a way. I’m doing a piece about the camp.’ She glanced around while simultaneously trying to settle herself on her knees.

‘You’re a journalist?’ I asked.

‘That’s right. Freelance. Smaller papers mostly. Community news. Isn’t it cosy in here,’ she said, as if assessing the interior of Mrs Tiggywinkle’s parlour. She wore a tweedy skirt with a pair of Wellington boots and the rain hadn’t dampened the scent of her flowery perfume. I sensed Rori stiffen beside me and remembered her suspicion of journalists. But hadn’t this one declared herself? April smiled.

‘Would it be all right if I asked you a few questions?’ she said, opting finally for an awkward half-squat half-kneel. ‘I’ve been talking to some of the women at the Main gate, but I wanted to get an idea of what’s happening at the smaller ones too.’

I glanced at Rori and whispered ‘OK?’ She shrugged as if she didn’t mind either way. I’d never met a real journalist, and soon we were chatting away easily while I gave her the lowdown on our lives and tried to raise her consciousness. I was just in the middle of telling her about our water-carrying arrangements when Jean poked her head into the bender.

‘Are you a journalist?’ she asked. ‘Because we don’t permit the press into our living quarters.’

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said April, looking to us.

There was no room for Jean to squeeze inside, so she remained suspended at the entrance, a disembodied head.

‘Well then…’ April made as if to go, but I interjected. ‘It’s pelting, Jean.’

Jean considered. ‘I suppose we could use my tepee. But this isn’t the way it’s normally done.’ There was a hint of schoolmistress in her voice I’d never heard before.

‘That’s very kind,’ said April. ‘Happy to come?’ I was but Rori looked doubtful. ‘I’ve brought coffee and chocolate digestives,’ she added lightly.

There wasn’t much Rori wouldn’t do for a chocolate biscuit. Besides, April’s presence was at least a spark of interest in an otherwise eventless wet Sunday so we crossed the puddled mud towards Jean’s tepee.

The only figure visible in the thrashing rain was Di, un-pegging the WOMEN AGAINST CRUISE banner to keep it from being shredded by the wind. I called to her over the elements and she followed us.

You could get six women in Jean’s tepee, which had a bristly doormat at the entrance to wipe the worst clods of wet mud from your boots. April collapsed her golf umbrella. Jean fetched mugs and spare cushions. Despite the faded mud splatters, the one she gave me was still pretty, fashioned from dark orange cloth, embroidered with an Indian elephant and dusted with pink sequins. Once upon a time it must have occupied a chair in Jean’s home, a place I imagined to be walled with books.

April produced the flask of coffee. ‘It has sugar, is that all right?’

‘Brilliant,’ I said. Sugar. I’d not had sugar in anything since I arrived. We didn’t bother with it because it got damp quickly and crystallised into blocks.

April removed her hat, releasing a swirl of mostly dry strawberry blonde hair and smiled at us inclusively. Di smiled back, kneeling on her short legs, the rescued banner bundled beside her. I’d got used to Di’s unspeaking presence; she always operated in silence, sometimes knitting silence, sometimes sitting with a placard silence, sometimes bending with a bin liner silence. That first time I’d met her by the side of the road was the longest conversation we’d had.

‘Shall I be mother?’ asked April, as the mugs made their way towards her.

‘We don’t have a matriarch,’ I said. I felt we’d got quite friendly after our exchange earlier. ‘We’re not attempting to emulate patriarchal power structures.’

I thought that was quite good, but no one apart from April laughed. Concentrate, I told myself. Don’t muck about. My mug said Great Ashfield Flower Festival 1975. There was milk in the coffee too. Milk and sugar. April produced the promised chocolate digestives.

The rain made a muted percussive sound against the thick canvas of the tepee and April’s eyes moved again towards Rori, who she’d been glancing at with interest. ‘I don’t think I caught your name?’

‘Bernadette,’ said Rori. That was weird. April’s pen hovered before she committed the name to the pad. ‘Bernadette,’ she repeated. ‘Like the saint?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Can I ask how your family feel about you being here, Bernadette?’

‘I’m not sure that’s relevant,’ said Jean.

‘No, I’m not sure it is,’ said Rori/Bernadette.

April nodded, not in the least offended. ‘And how long have you been living at the camp, Tessa?’

I thought for a second. The days merged. Today was Sunday, but it could just as well be Wednesday. ‘Two weeks.’

‘Not long then.’

‘It feels like longer… a lot longer…’

April smiled and wrote something down.

‘I didn’t mean, I mean, you know, it feels like home.’ That wasn’t quite true either, but it was better.

‘So you like it here?’

I thought of everything at once. Weeing in a ditch. Conversations about politics. Learning songs. The vegetables. Laughing. Being friends with Rori.

‘It’s very educating.’

April seemed wary of Jean, and slightly unsure of Rori/Bernadette, so I found myself doing most of the talking, which was fine, she was very interested. Now and again she glanced over at Di, as if she might have something to contribute, but Di continued to sit quietly and listen. After we’d chatted for a while, April said, ‘I suppose for the women to be here, children and husbands might have to take a backseat. What do you feel about that?’

‘Many of us are here precisely because of our children,’ said Jean. ‘There are children living with their mothers at the other gates, as you know. And men are equally able to give childcare.’

‘Some people think the women are supported by the Communists, what do you say to that? ’

‘By some people, you mean the right-wing press,’ said Rori with challenge in her voice.

Jean laughed. The chocolate digestives had cheered her up a bit. She said the British didn’t need help to protest and she talked about the Aldermaston marches she’d been on in the 1950s.

April nodded, as if she were thinking about it.

Rori said the country was in a deep recession and we were wasting millions trying to keep up with the arms race.

‘But some people might say…’

‘What might you say?’ Rori asked, fixing the journalist with her green eyes.

April smiled. ‘I’m simply playing devil’s advocate. How would you answer the criticism that the Greenham women are well intentioned but misguided?’

Jean sighed. ‘Misguided is spending vast sums of money on weaponry which can never conceivably be used.’

She and Rori talked more about the reasons for the original march from Wales. They were both clear and articulate, but they’d had practice with public speaking, and that’s what it came down to in the end, you couldn’t get better if you didn’t practise. I took a deep breath. This was an opportunity.

‘The thing is, April,’ I said, ‘the thing is… every cruise missile can do the damage of…’

A voice came from outside the tepee. ‘Jean? Have you seen Rori?’ It was unmistakably Angela. ‘Oh,’ she said, surveying the scene.

‘You’re very welcome to join us,’ said April, turning around.

Angela took in the belted mackintosh and freshly washed hair, and though her face said You’ve got a nerve, she merely nodded and came inside.

Jean passed Angela a cushion of mustard corduroy and Angela sat down cross-legged beside Rori. When she pulled back the hood of her parka her fringe lay plastered in slicks against her forehead.

‘So,’ said April, glancing down at her pad. ‘You were telling me about nuclear capability, Tessa?’

Angela’s eyes settled on my face.

‘Yes. You see, the thing is a cruise missile can do the damage of twenty-nine Hiroshimas, which is massive.’

‘It is. Gosh. Twenty-nine.’ April went to write it down.

‘I think it’s more like nine,’ said Angela quietly, wiping her glasses dry.

‘Is it? Oh. That’s still a lot. Nine. Perhaps it depends which paper you read,’ I laughed inappropriately.

April liked that, she made another note. I wanted to get her pen and cross it out again, but I couldn’t. Everyone in the circle, particularly Angela, with her freshly cleaned glasses, was staring at me.

‘Anyway, we’re getting them because that’s the policy they agreed to, the MAD one, Mutually Agreed Disaster.’

Hang on, that didn’t sound right. April looked up with the slightest of frowns. ‘Mutually Assured Destruction, do you mean?’

‘Yes, sorry.’ I knew that, I knew that, I’d got a bit muddled that’s all. Angela was still scrutinising me. I had to prove myself. I opened my mouth to speak again. ‘So on the subject of the um, NATO thingy… the thing is… other countries are supposed to get involved. So the Germans are having the SS-20s…’

‘I thought the SS-20 was Russian,’ said April.

‘Oh yes, of course.’ In my head a woman was ransacking the filing cabinets for information, but the files had got mixed up.

‘I mean the Polaris in Germany.’

Angela broke in to make a correction.

‘They have Pershing. NATO is countering Russian SS-20 with Cruise and Pershing based in Europe. The balance of terror.’

My face was going thermo nuclear. I remembered something Rori had said about Simone de Beauvoir and the existentialists.

‘You see, women can help rebalance the power. Women are eminent and men are transcendent but here women are able to reach transcendence too.’ I paused. ‘Greenham is a subliminal place. I mean liminal…’ That was one of the new words I’d noted in my exercise book. ‘It’s a liminal place, and…’

Could it be that Di’s usually calm face had taken on a troubled aspect? Angela blinked through her glasses. April’s pen wasn’t moving anymore. Outside the rain slowed to a stop.

‘What I mean is.’ But I didn’t know what I meant. The woman upstairs had run out of drawers to try and was lying exhausted on a chair, sweating.

April smiled kindly. ‘You’ve been very generous with your time. I should probably make a move while the rain’s eased off.’ She replaced the flask in her bag.

Di coughed. April gave a little start, as if she’d forgotten Di were there, which is what happened to the rest of us much of the time. Then she turned her reaction into a question, ‘Would you like to make any comment?’

Di nodded, ‘The weapons are an abomination,’ she said, in her soft Welsh accent. ‘I’m here for my grandchildren.’ There was something to be said for brevity.

Once April had ventured into the mud, Jean turned to her sewing box from which she produced a square of embroidery. ‘Never trust a journalist,’ she declared, squinting to thread a needle.

April had seemed nice.‘But some of them want to know the facts, don’t they?’ The mention of facts made me cringe.

‘What that woman was interested in was the usual: how we cook, where we defecate, how we keep clean, who’s looking after our children, are we lesbians. I hate to sound cynical, Tessa, but I’ve been here long enough to learn that. Even the sympathetic ones need a story.’

‘But if we’re nice to them they could tell other people.’

‘Nice? We’re not here to ingratiate ourselves,’ said Angela, directing her irritation at me.

‘I know but, if they knew we were just normal women.’ I didn’t like the edge to her voice, the way she could jump on things.

‘As opposed to what? What’s normal?’

She got up then and went outside with Rori to discuss a speech they were giving at a women’s group in Oxford, leaving me with Jean and my own feelings of inadequacy. Di continued to sit with us companionably, a Buddha in a woolly hat.

If Angela hadn’t arrived I wouldn’t have felt so nervous and made such a fool of myself. I dug my fingernails into my palm, recalling the awful rambling.

Jean lifted the calico. ‘How’s it looking?’ she asked, spreading out the fabric to reveal a bluebird and an emerald green butterfly. ‘I’m stealing part of the design from William Morris.’

‘It’s beautiful.’ I took off a glove and traced my forefinger over a silky primrose.

‘It’s for the group at home, they’ll frame it and sell it to raise funds. Can you sew, Tessa?’

‘Me? No.’

‘Ever wanted to learn?’

‘Isn’t it a stereotype…?’

Jean turned the fabric to begin a new section and glanced at me over her half-moon specs. ‘Have you been speaking to Sam?’ Sam got annoyed about what she called mother-earth syndrome because it made women passive and she said women weren’t all about feelings and caring and birth bliss. ‘Sewing’s a skill,’ said Jean, ‘if anything it binds women together, gives us solidarity.’

Jean was failing to thread her needle in the poor light, so I threaded it for her, glad to be doing something useful. Being useful felt important, and I welcomed any chance to contribute to the camp. I could peel vegetables and collect water, even if the public speaking needed work.

‘What do you want to do with your life then, Tessa?’

Nobody had ever asked me that before. ‘The careers teacher at school said I should think about town planning. But I ended up at secretarial college.’

‘Did you want to be a town planner?’

‘No, but I was good at Geography. Anyway, I failed my A levels.’ Too many nights thinking about Tony and not enough revision, ‘So Mum and Dad said I’d be better off learning a skill.’

Jean nipped at the calico with her needle, building dot-sized stitches into a pink bud. ‘And what did you think?’

April had left us her chocolate digestives, I nibbled on one and shrugged.

The secretarial college was grey and concrete and filled with rooms which were filled with typewriters. We approached them every morning, removed their covers, rolled in our carbons and awaited instructions from Mrs Manningtree who’d worked at ICI for twenty-five years and could reach 95 words per minute without corrections. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party she sang, as we stumbled about on our keyboards like people in a dark room groping for the lights. Upstairs in a high-ceilinged classroom with flaky green walls, Mrs Plume taught us Pitman shorthand. She also instructed us about filing systems, appointment scheduling, telephone manner and good business dress: if you are tall, don’t wear a box-style jacket; always attend an interview in a skirt, even if you prefer to wear trousers. A court shoe with a medium heel is best.

‘You’ve got brains in your head,’ said Jean. I felt doubtful. She gave another glance over the specs. ‘At my school we taught our girls to think, not type. No girl of mine ever learned to type unless she was going to write books for a living.’

Well I wasn’t going to write books. I thought of Peggy at Hirschman & Luck – was Jean saying her working life was invalid?

‘There’s nothing wrong with being a secretary,’ I said.

‘Of course there isn’t. As long as it’s what you really want to do. Too many bright girls are farmed out for office fodder.’

Jean finished another stitch and bit the thread.

‘Do you want to have a go?’ she asked as I rethreaded the needle with green silk.

‘Me? I’ll spoil it.’

‘No you won’t. We’ll practise on scrap.’

She demonstrated how to mount the linen on a hoop so it was pulled taut, and then showed me a chain stitch.

‘You can retake A levels,’ she said, supervising over my shoulder.

We sat like that for two hours or more, Di with her eyes closed, meditating perhaps, me and Jean sewing, the rain clouds racing overhead and darkening the tepee. And as we talked I forgot that my sleeping bag would probably be damp when I got back to my tent, that I’d have no dry clothes to change into and that even when I tried my best to prevent it, everything I owned would become slaked with watery mud.