20
Embracing the Base
A little girl sat on her mother’s shoulders waving a paper dove on a stick and below her a woman played a clarinet while her friend blew a stream of bubbles through a soapy wand, sending them high into the winter afternoon. I’d never seen so many women: women laughing, women singing, women chatting, women standing staring or pinning mementos to the fence. Some of them belonged to tribes, you could tell by their clothes or banners, but others looked like the women you’d see in Stevenage on a Saturday, middle-aged women shopping with their friends and daughters. And this was only the small section of fence we could see from our crest of slope. No one knew how many had come, but rumours passed along the human chain like a current, creating new charges of excitement: fifteen thousand said someone, twenty thousand said someone else.
Maggie stood beside me eating a Marmite sandwich. I’d already finished mine. The sandwiches had been handed out, much to her delight, by two men carrying cardboard trays around their necks like ice-cream girls. I told her the men had come from the crèche tent where they’d been stationed. Along with making rounds of sandwiches and cups of tea, they were tasked with looking after the kids and assembling wax lanterns.
We had our backs to the fence. The ground was still soft. In between us and the trees was a mud path along which a constant flow of women was passing. ‘I thought there’d be more police around,’ I said, trying to see if there were any beyond the curve of bodies snaking around the corner of the fence and out of sight. It was difficult to get a clear view. The path was puddled from the sleet which had fallen overnight and during the early morning, but now the misty rain had stopped and the sky had turned its usual mid-winter, mid-afternoon grey.
‘You warm enough, Mags?’
‘Fine,’ she said, popping the last wholemeal crust into her mouth.
She was wearing tight jeans, pixie boots and a long coat with a fur hood left over from her brother’s Mod phase.
‘So what are we supposed to be doing?’ she asked, stamping her feet for warmth and speckling the burgundy suede of her boots with mud.
‘This,’ I said. ‘I think. I’m not sure. There isn’t a plan exactly.’
We shuffled up to let someone pin a child’s party dress to the wire. It fluttered, yellow as the skirts of a primrose. Everyone had been asked to bring something to attach, and the fence had been transformed into a chaotic exhibition of baby booties, photographs, poems, messages and art work. Without warning, someone nearby dipped her hand into a polythene bag and thrust her arm to scatter the contents over the fence and into the base.
‘Seeds?’ she said, offering us the bag as if it contained crisps.
‘Don’t you need to plant them?’ asked Maggie.
‘Life has a way of seeing to itself,’ replied the woman, chucking another handful. Maggie turned her back in a way that wasn’t entirely sisterly and raised her eyebrow at me, then she plunged into the bag and flung a handful of seeds high into the air with a whoop. Most of them fell back down at her feet. She did a couple of star jumps for warmth.
‘Your jeans are too tight, that’s the problem,’ I told her. ‘Loose clothes trap the warm air.’ I’d learned to dress in layers: a coat over a cardi over a jumper over two t-shirts over a vest. Some women didn’t bother with coats because they didn’t dry out if they got wet. It hadn’t taken me long to start wearing the thermals Mum made me pack.
Maggie was only half listening, she nodded in the direction of a figure weaving a woollen spider’s web into the fence. ‘What’s she doing?’
‘It’s a symbol.’ Webs, witches, Greenham was full of symbols. ‘The strength of the web, connected threads, like a network of women. They like that stuff here,’ I added, to show I hadn’t changed. Even if I had, a bit.
Maggie was still trying to keep warm.
‘Do you want to wear my hat?’ I passed her my beanie and she inspected the inside.
‘When did you last wash your hair?’ she said, raising her voice over the clarinet player, who was now wandering like a minstrel behind a troop of older ladies carrying banners for the Ecology party.
‘Very recently,’ I said, but she’d already pulled it on with a grin.
More seeds showered our heads. The clarinet player began ‘You Can’t Kill the Spirit’. By now the songs had become as familiar as any chart hit I might have hummed in the bath, so I joined in with the seed flinger whose voice rose in a church choir soprano. Maggie liked singing and joined in too.
I asked her again about home, and she gave me another run-down of work, who’d been going out with who, her new shift patterns at the pub. There was only one Stevenage-related subject I was truly curious about, but I didn’t have time to steer the conversation because a familiar voice came sailing towards us.
‘Skittle!’ Rori weaved through the bodies, an older woman at her side. ‘Skittle!’
‘She’s coming this way,’ said Maggie in warning.
‘That’s my friend.’
‘Who’s Skittle?’
‘It’s my nickname.’
‘Since when?’
Rori launched herself at me, slinging an arm around my neck. We always hugged, even if we’d only been apart for a few hours. We were as close as ever, and though the memory of the woods had been bothering me, pinching like a blister, I knew today definitely wasn’t the day for that conversation. I’d have to wait and in the meantime live as Barbel did, happy in the moment.
‘This is my friend Maggie, from home,’ I said. ‘This is Rori.’
‘All right,’ said Maggie.
‘Isn’t this fantastic!’ said Rori. Her face was shining and I heard her voice new, the way it must have sounded to Maggie, polished like silver. Dressed in an astrakhan coat with a paisley shawl draped over her shoulders, and a camera hanging from a strap around her neck, the other woman seemed oddly familiar. She smiled the same smile as Rori. Of course.
‘You must be Rori’s mum.’
‘Jocasta,’ said the woman, offering a leather-gloved hand.
It was like seeing Rori in thirty years’ time, the same green eyes, the same wide mouth that curled up at the edges as if she were contemplating something interesting. Jocasta was what my Mum would have called an Oil of Ulay mum.
‘Wonderful to meet you, Tessa,’ her tone was warm and husky and she stressed her words, so that wonderful became wuuunderful. ‘Auri’s told me all about you.’
Had she? The thought made me stupidly glad and the scene in the woods receded.
‘We’ve been walking around for ages, trying to take it all in,’ said Rori. ‘Incredible isn’t it?’ Her eyes flicked between us. ‘Oh, you’ll never guess who I saw,’ she said, addressing us both. We couldn’t.
‘Vi.’ she said. I drew a blank. ‘You know, from the public loos.’
‘Oh, Vi. Really?’
‘Public loos?’ said Maggie.
‘It’s a long story,’ I said.
‘All this creativity,’ Jocasta remarked deeply, stooping to get a shot of the yellow party dress on the fence.
‘You don’t have to photograph everything,’ said Rori laying a hand on her mother’s arm.
‘This is documentary evidence, darling.’ Jocasta straightened up. ‘This is history.’
‘Apparently there are twenty-five thousand women,’ I said. ‘Maybe more.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Jocasta. ‘It makes me so proud. How could you not be moved by all this, all this life?’ Her eyes darted around and settled on Maggie as if she were expecting an answer. Maggie turned, surveying the heads of the women who poured below us into a dip in the path and out of sight. Open displays of emotion made us nervous in Stevenage.
‘Let’s have one of you girls,’ said Jocasta, shuffling us together.
‘You two be in it,’ said Maggie.
‘No, come on,’ Jocasta directed the three of us into position. I stood in the middle and we held our smiles for the flash.
‘Now one of the Greenham girls,’ she called. Rori’s grip was tight around my shoulder. This time there was a problem. ‘Hang on,’ said Jocasta, and slipped off a glove, ‘it won’t wind on.’ Me and Rori clamped together, swaying each other from side to side until the camera flashed.
‘Perfect!’ Jocasta surveyed the scene around us again. ‘I haven’t found the right spot for my memento yet.’
‘What did you bring?’ I asked.
‘Ahh,’ she said, and removed from her pocket a photograph of three suntanned children, two boys and between them a little girl of about seven, all sitting on a white boat made whiter by the blue sky and surrounding water. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked. The girl in the sunflower-splashed costume held a fishing rod over the side of the boat, her curls tumbling around her head, a gap in her front teeth as she grinned.
‘Aren’t you sweet,’ I said to Rori, holding the photograph to show Maggie.
Rori laughed at herself. ‘Where was that one taken?’
‘Quinley, that summer in ’68.’ Quinley was their home in Cornwall.
‘What did you two bring?’ Jocasta asked.
‘Tessa and Barbel made the most amazing peace symbols,’ said Rori.
‘We pinned them up near Amber,’ I said. Barbel and I had fashioned our contributions earlier in the week by reshaping wire coat hangers into peace symbols and decorating them with beads and ribbon. Jocasta turned encouragingly to Maggie.
‘I didn’t have much time,’ she said.
‘Oh, I know, take one of these,’ said Rori pulling a packet of luggage labels from her pocket along with a felt-tip pen.
‘To write a message on,’ I explained.
Maggie made the face of a non-smoker presented with cigarettes. ‘You’re all right.’
‘Go on,’ said Jocasta. ‘That’s why we’re here.’
‘Okay,’ said Maggie, stuffing the luggage label into her coat pocket, ‘I might need to, you know, give it some thought.’ She eyed me sideways but I pretended not to notice.
While we’d been talking there’d been movement. Five women in matching rugby shirts, each with an individual letter stitched on the front, organised themselves to spell out PEACE. Other women were joining hands.
‘Quick sweetheart, they’re linking up,’ said Jocasta, her camera flashing as the late afternoon sky darkened. Jean had suggested we all bring scarves so that if too few women turned up we’d link together by holding onto their ends, but there was no need. There were women everywhere, moving along the cramped line to let others squeeze in. Jocasta held Maggie’s hand, Maggie held Rori’s, Rori held my mine, and I held the hand of a woman in a red coat. The chain fizzed with excited energy. ‘This is it,’ said Rori, ‘it’s happening.’ We squeezed hands.
It was all strangely quiet, and then a distant cry went up and rippled along the human chain until it reached us. ‘Freedom!’
‘Freedom!’ we repeated, raising our joined hands in the air, moving the cry along the line of bodies. The shout carried to the women around the corner out of sight, distantly echoing back to us, ‘Freedom!’ Spontaneous laughter and cheering. My throat tightened. The women who hadn’t got a place in the chain assembled in a ragged line, mirroring us. The cry moved over us a second time, we caught it and sent it on – it carried towards us again and with a whoop we raised our hands in a mass expression of exhilaration. We were here. It was happening.
A helicopter’s blade thrummed across the darkening sky.
‘It’s probably the television,’ said Rori, looking up.
Maggie broke out of the chain and waved her arms above her head with sudden energy. ‘They might see us on telly at The Volunteer, Tess!’
Rori smiled with non-understanding, the way one might at a foreigner.
I had the sensation of seeing myself as if from above, through the eyes of the helicopter: Maggie knew me and Rori knew me, but at that moment, I didn’t know myself.
Dusk came swiftly. By four o’clock the fence was one long jumble of women, half-lit figures in hats and scarves, their gloved hands clasping fire torches and candles. Groups were silent or talking or still singing ‘You Can’t Kill the Spirit’ into the oncoming evening. Moths flittered around the bushes at the fence, attracted to the lights that crowded like a mass of votive candles beside photographs and poems and haphazard flowers, a collective shrine for the deaths that hadn’t yet happened, but could if nobody took stock. Maggie said she was glad she’d come, which I took as a personal victory, but now the temperature had dropped and we needed a fire. Rori and Jocasta had arranged to stay with family friends in Oxford, so it was only Maggie and me returning to camp.
Amber gate had swollen with all the visitors, and by the time we arrived half a dozen different fires were burning, creating an extra cheer. Around these fires guitars were being strummed and tents erected.
‘So this is it then, this is where you live?’ Maggie’s boots squelched as she made a semi circle, taking in the scene.
‘This is it.’
She fell silent, recalculating some list of information in her head. Was it more or less awful than she’d expected?
‘Bloody hell.’
More. I dug a shallow pit using the trowel we kept in the kitchen, filling the space with kindling and crowning the arrangement with a Sainsbury’s firelighter from the store box the visitors didn’t know about. Not that they’d go near our stuff, most visitors behaved around the camp with a good deal of trepidation, though today was different, I could see that from looking around. Embracing the base had united everyone and put us on a high.
‘Didn’t know you were such a girl scout,’ said Maggie, watching me work.
‘I’ve been learning.’
‘Suppose you’ve got to.’ She lit up a B&H and offered me one, but I was used to smoking rollies. ‘Why aren’t there any blokes anyway?’
‘They wouldn’t do the washing-up,’ I said, fanning the baby flames. ‘Anyway, the women wanted to live on their own terms, because the camp is about creating a female space, somewhere away from the male gaze where women can be themselves.’
Maggie was eyeing me curiously as she dragged on her cigarette.
I found us a straw bale. There was a basket of treated timber nearby, a gift from some visitors no doubt, so I arranged some on the fire. The cold fingered our necks, but soon the flames were leaping and gasping into life.
‘All I need now is a cup of tea,’ said Maggie.
‘I can put the kettle on.’
‘No, I’ll have one in a bit otherwise I’ll need to visit that ditch again. I don’t know how you stand it, Tessa.’
‘You get used to it. Life is so sanitised outside, you forget what it’s like to live simply.’ I was about to venture a speech about the benefits of returning to nature when she interrupted.
‘Talking of basic needs, I nearly forgot.’ She unzipped her overnight bag and removed a tin. ‘Present from my mum,’ she said revealing a round cake iced with a CND symbol in white piping.
‘Great, we’ll have a piece before I put it in the store.’
She frowned. ‘What store?’
‘It’ll have to go in the supply box. That’s how it works.’
‘Don’t be soft. Anyway, you don’t even know this lot.’
‘But that’s not the point.’
‘What is the point?’
‘This is a community and it works on shared resources and trust. All property is shared. No profit or ownership.’
‘It’s a cake, Tessa, it’s a bloody fruit cake. My mum didn’t spend all afternoon making a cake for some Doris she doesn’t even know.’
The cake sat on Maggie’s lap like an undetonated bomb. Her brow had grown a vertical crease. If I said the wrong thing now, if I pushed the principles of communality, the fruitcake could go off in my face.
‘The thing is…’
She looked at me determinedly. ‘If we don’t eat it, I’m dropping it in the fire.’
‘Maggie…’
‘Watch me.’ She stood up with the tin and held it over the flames. I sighed and gave in.
‘Thank God for that,’ she said, easing the lid free. ‘Thought that was going to be another Tara Mason.’
I laughed. When Tara Mason picked on me at primary school, Maggie had promptly waded in and sat on her.
‘So when are you coming home?’ she asked. I shrugged, cutting two jagged lumps of cake with my penknife. The cake tasted wonderful, soft and rich with brown sugar and rum. ‘Not exactly fun times here, is it. Seems like the locals hate you, and that girl Angela sounds like a pain in the arse.’
It had been a relief to talk about the Angela episode. Since our run-in I’d been doing my best to avoid her though it was difficult living cheek by jowl.
‘I’ve got other friends. Proper friends.’
‘What, the posh girl with the hair?’ said Maggie, picking out a glacé cherry and passing it to me. My mind flashed to the scene in the woods; that was something I hadn’t mentioned to Maggie.
‘You shouldn’t judge someone by the way they speak.’
‘Not just the way they speak,’ said Maggie, taking a bite of cake. ‘You can’t stay here, Tessa. Imagine what they’ll do to your hair next time.’
We laughed. The fire snapped and we sat watching it, picking at lumps of cake.
‘Your job, is it better than The Old Volunteer then?’ I asked.
‘You know what pubs are like,’ she shrugged, checking for more glacé cherries.
‘Ever see anyone we know?’
If she understood where I was going she was choosing not to. All right, if she was going to make me say it. ‘Does Tony ever come in?’
‘Tony Mercer?’
What other Tony was there? She shook her head.
‘Aren’t you too busy with your sisterhood to be bothered about men?’
‘I’m not bothered about men and I’m certainly not bothered about him. It’s nice to be living among women where the conversation doesn’t revolve around them.’
The cold was at our backs but our knees and faces were warm.
‘Hey, what are they up to?’ said Maggie and I followed her gaze to the borders of the trees where a group of orange women were moving their arms in a sideways figure of eight. I recognised the blonde fuzz of Deeksha’s hair.
‘Rajneeshees. They visit sometimes.’
‘Looks like fun,’ said Maggie. ‘Come on.’
I didn’t want Deeksha to think we were laughing at them, but Maggie had already got to her feet and was pulling me up. ‘This is my night off,’ she said, ‘if there are no blokes around we can at least have a dance.’
We’d been to all the worst clubs in Stevenage and if we got to dance we considered it a good night out. We picked our way across the mud, trying to walk without bumping into guy ropes. A woman and her friend were juggling. Two others canoodled beside their tent.
‘Bloody hell, Tess, there’s a lot of lezzers about.’
‘Shh.’
Deeksha greeted us, still swaying her arms above her head, her hair wobbling like a cloud of blonde candy floss. Balanced on a folding garden chair, a tape recorder played a dreamy mix of pipes and chime bells.
‘This is my friend Maggie,’ I said. Deeksha smiled and kept dancing, making a space for us on the bracken-strewn ground. Music filled our heads. We joined in the dance, turning around and around, the camp behind us, the fire where we’d been sitting and where a new group had now gathered, huddling together for warmth. I felt a deep sense of the shared nature of life.
By midnight we’d snaffled down a third of the CND cake – I could tell it was a third because we’d followed the white wings of the piped symbol – and were both feeling the effects of the Bacardi circulating at one of the fires. A gang of women with dreadlocked hair and multiple piercings had taught an enthusiastic Maggie one of their satirical songs.
Working for the KGB
Dirty women squatting in the mud…
At one o’clock we turned in.
I lit the fat candle I kept in a jar. The ground was sodden outside but I’d lain down hay and plastic sheeting the way Rori had instructed, so inside the bender it was relatively dry and warm.
‘Where’s the baby Jesus?’ whispered Maggie, swirling her torch. ‘You are properly mad, Tessa.’ She flopped down, laughing, and picked up a large stone with a flower painted on it.
‘That’s from Vicky. She’s a sort of witch. It’s called a home stone,’ I said, wobbly with Bacardi. ‘She blessed it.’
‘She did what?’
‘She has this ritual, we had to sit around it and she called in our foremothers and instructed them to look after me. And then… and then…’ I was laughing now, ‘I had to put my hands on it and pray to the goddess. She said it’ll soak up all the bad energy and protect me during the night.’
‘What, this?’ said Maggie, lifting the stone from her lap.
‘You haven’t seen the other side yet.’
Maggie turned the stone over and stared at it. ‘What’s that?’
The sides of my eyes were wet, the sentence came out in a convulsion.
‘It’s a peace snail.’
There was the happy face of the painted snail, his shell off balance, smiling his innocent smile. Maggie looked at me in disbelief. ‘A peace snail?’ she repeated. We collapsed on top of each other, the way we’d done when we were kids, the home stone between us, its painted yellow petals on one side, and on the other the snail with his amiable smile, turning it over and over, not knowing which side was funnier.