25
Three Little Maids
‘Shouldn’t complain, I know,’ said Rori, reaching out to investigate a soft thistle, ‘but the camp doesn’t feel like ours anymore. Does that sound silly?’
I agreed, my arm linked through hers. Since Embrace the Base, numbers at Main gate had increased and with the smaller camps catching the overspill, Amber gate had also swollen: benders sprang up overnight like mushrooms and it was difficult to keep track of the new faces at the fireside. Rori plucked the thistle and used it to prickle my ear.
‘Hey, that’s not on,’ I said, wrestling her off.
Not on. Where had that come from? Like glorious and absolutely, that was a definite Rori-ism. Since my return from Stevenage, we’d spent every moment of every day together, and in the evenings we curled up, sheltering from the bitter cold, our conversations stretching long into the night. She told me about the depressions that sometimes came over her, like blankets she couldn’t kick free of. She talked about her family and asked if I minded not having brothers and sisters, and I explained how there’d been a complication after I was born which meant Mum couldn’t have more children. According to Dad, she’d stayed in bed for three days after the doctor told her. Lying beside Rori with the jam jar candle between us, I tried to imagine what it would be like bringing her home to meet my parents, how she would look in our front room, willowy and radiant, Mum fussing around, Dad offering up his chair. I remembered the way Mum had said ‘Tessa’s friend Aurora,’ sampling the name like an exotic fruit.
We paused at a clearing in the fence and peered through to see the GAMA compound – the Ground Attack Missile Area – where the cruise were going to be stationed in a few months’ time. The silos were half constructed, six enormous bunker garages, but their completion had taken on greater urgency. Gravel trucks were constantly going in and out. We couldn’t blockade every time they entered, but we went regularly to the gate in protest.
We walked on in silence for a while and then, needing something to lighten our mood, went back to discussing the party for Barbel’s birthday. It was to be a big, morale-boosting event.
‘I scribbled this last night,’ said Rori, pulling a scrap of paper from her pocket. I read the pencilled lyrics. ‘It’s for you, me and Angela.’
‘Angela?’
Rori frowned. ‘Are you two all right? I don’t see you talking.’
The cold war was still on. When Angela had spotted me at the fireside after the weekend at home she’d given me a look which clearly said Not you again.
‘We’re fine.’ I pictured her face, so small and pale and closed; it made me think of a shop in sunlight with the blinds pulled down.
We continued our loop through the birches, heading back to camp the long way round, through a cathedral of tall trees overlapping above like fan vaulting, stopping to remark on whatever interested us, hawthorn berries, or the rich clumps of fungi which flowered on a dead tree and helped – so I’d learned – to break down the wood. The shadows amongst the trees deepened and spread, and through their branches the sky turned smoky dark.
Angela and I were never going to be friends, but if we had to rehearse with each other we’d need to make at least an occasional effort, so I decided to approach her after dinner as she scraped veggie curry into the pig bin. A lima bean shone in the moonlight and a spicy waft rose up in the night air. It hadn’t been a good meal; Barbel had added too much turmeric to the pot again.
‘So you’re going to do it?’ she said, still scraping. We’d been talking for a minute or two, but she seemed unable to look at me, as if the sight of my face were of too much annoyance.
‘Course. But we need to rehearse.’ A slop of sauce splashed into the bucket. I’d never found out if the pig bin was actually for pigs, but if it was, their stomachs must be getting extremely dicky by now.
She cleared another bowl. ‘I suppose.’
Was that hesitation? I’d never heard Angela dither over anything. She continued to examine the sludge in the bucket before finally meeting my eyes. ‘Performance isn’t exactly my strength.’
‘But you organise everyone at the blockades. And you do speaks.’
‘That’s different,’ she said, ‘that’s disseminating necessary information, not singing.’ She continued to fill the washing-up basin with kettle water, adding detergent from the slimy bottle which had long ago lost its stopper.
‘You’ll be with us.’
‘Yes but…’ She trailed off, unable or unwilling to explain the but.
I shrugged. ‘It’s up to you.’ We could ask Sam or even Jean.
She frowned, like a child presented with a challenge she didn’t want but was determined to meet, and I tried to soften my voice. ‘Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.’
I took a plate from her, stacking it on the wire drainer. Unlike the lima bean, the plate didn’t glisten – plates never got properly clean, only clean-er. Angela held my eyes as if wondering whether to believe me, then cast her gaze back to the scrap bucket. I took another plate.
‘It’s all right, I can manage,’ she said briskly. So I left her to it.
We tied balloons to the trees and looped streamers in the branches, and because the day was fine and freezing, the paper chains stayed intact. The weather had become so cold that every in-breath hurt. We’d prepared food and mixed a mighty jug of punch, sloshing in some of the donated booze, fruit juice and handfuls of jaggedly sliced oranges – most of the knives were blunt. Jean chopped up more oranges and added cloves to three boxes of Sainsbury’s Cote de Vin, turning it into something like mulled wine, and I wrapped family-size bars of Fruit and Nut inside newspaper for Pass the Parcel, and found a suitable bucket for bobbing apples. Jean had driven to Newbury for party poppers, hats and birthday cake, but luckily we already had enough festive food to feed a female army. After Embrace the Base, donations had poured in, and gifts arrived from all over the country, not to mention Europe, with at least two famous actresses and one rock star signing substantial cheques.
At three o’clock the party officially kicked off and Helene, a French friend of Barbel’s who worked as a street performer, dipped her juggling clubs into the fire and began tossing them in a flaming arc. She could apparently swallow knives too, but nobody wanted to risk her with the wobbly breadknife. The women were in party mood, talking, passing around cake in their gloved hands, and the cider had been circulating for a good forty minutes. Significant inroads had also been made in the punch. A woman from Ruby gate turned her battery-powered record player up high.
Rori, Angela and me watched from behind the clump of trees which doubled as the green room, keeping an eye on the performance area, a clearing swept free of rubbish and lit with jam jar candles, our improvised footlights. I’d managed to fashion us costumes from the donations box which might suggest kimonos if you imagined hard enough. We’d whitened our faces with foundation borrowed from a Goth friend of Sam’s, applied berries of red lipstick and made our eyes Japanese with black liner. Angela was so pale already her face had practically disappeared.
‘Don’t forget the shuffling,’ said Rori as we huddled.
‘And giggle,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to giggle.’
‘Exactly,’ she said, practising a shy laugh behind her hand. ‘Are you all right, Angel?’
Angela leaned against the tree as if to support herself. She nodded. Earlier I’d seen her gulping a mug of Merrydown, which wasn’t like her at all. ‘Ready?’ I whispered. With our umbrellas standing in for parasols, we shuffled on as best we could given the bumpy ground.
Rita, our accompanist, gave the nod and began playing the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan on her fiddle.
On cue, I revolved in a slow circle, head cocked. Rori turned after me. Angela half turned. We sang the first verse together:
Come to say no to the NATO army
Most of the locals say we’re barmy
Three little Greenham maids.
Rori and I poked our heads coyly from our umbrellas as we’d practised and shuffled around each other in a figure of eight. Angela was next to sing a line by herself and Rita played her cue. Nothing happened. Rita played again. But Angela wasn’t moving or singing, she was standing immobile and staring at the audience. Rita looked to us for direction. A woman in the front whispered to her neighbour setting off an uncomfortable ripple. Angela knew the words – during rehearsal she’d only needed to glance at them before she had them perfectly. Rori and I exchanged a look. Suddenly understanding that something was required Angela opened her mouth and her voice came out, thin and tremulous, barely a whisper.
She was supposed to crouch down protecting herself with her umbrella, but me and Rori picked up our lines anyway. ‘Two little maids in attendance come,’ we sang, shuffling towards Angela, who stood like a block of granite. ‘Three little maids is the total sum, three little Greenham maids.’
On instinct we continued, taking her lines between us as Rita bowed with extra vigour.
All very loud and quite contrary
Not quite a ladies’ seminary
Three little Greenham maids.
The song continued. Angela managed somehow to assume the final position, the three of us peeking out from our umbrellas, kneeling at different levels.
The crowd clapped and whistled as we shuffled off, and backstage by the tree, Rori reached her arm around Angela in a hug.
‘Sorry,’ said Angela, her voice still faint. She dragged the back of her hand over her mouth smearing the lipstick berries, then said she needed to get changed and disappeared while Rori and I filled paper cups with punch and seated ourselves in the audience.
‘What happened?’ I whispered.
Rori shrugged. ‘Mysterious.’
When Angela reappeared, clean of make-up and zipped securely into her parka, she didn’t sit down with us but began busying about, sorting mince pies onto paper plates and tidying a stack of half-empty boxes which had nowhere to go.
‘Dear Angel,’ said Rori. ‘I don’t know if she’s a party kind of girl. Some people detest them. My aunt Clara hasn’t celebrated a birthday for twenty-five years, but then there’s Jocasta, she’d have a party every night of the week if she could.’ She pinched a glazed date between her thumb and forefinger before biting it in half. ‘If she were well enough to be at parties every night, which, quite frankly, is highly doubtful. My father had to bring her home in an ambulance one evening when she went berserk in one of their friends’ gardens and fell off a trampoline.’ She continued chewing. ‘Skittle, these are luscious, like toffee.’
I tried to imagine Mum going berserk on a trampoline but it just wasn’t possible.
Angela still hadn’t come to sit down. Now she was standing by herself, breaking up boxes. ‘Yum,’ said Rori, packing another date into her mouth. There was no love lost between us, but Angela was obviously unhappy, and what was the point? It was only a song. I went over. The cardboard juddered in her hands.
‘You’re missing the other acts,’ I said to the back of her head. She didn’t reply. Her shoulders tensed, she picked at a peel of tape and tore it violently along a seam of cardboard. ‘Look, it doesn’t matter.’
‘What doesn’t?’ She stopped tearing.
‘You know, the song.’ Now she grabbed at another strip of tape. ‘It was only a bit of fun…’
‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ she said, throwing another flattened box on the pile.
‘Sam’s on next.’ Sam had been working on a comedy routine which wasn’t for the easily offended.
But Angela wouldn’t turn around. ‘Could you go away?’ she said, and carried on ripping.
By the time it was Sam’s turn to come off, the women were stamping their boots and banging pots. There were demands for more, but like a seasoned professional, Sam had already cracked open a beer and was basking in the afterglow, surrounded by groupies. Before we had time to let the cheering die down completely and put the music back on (the woman with the record player only had three records, Leo Sayer, Songs from The Musicals, and Hits of 1980), a woman spoke up.
‘I have a poem.’
According to our running order, we’d have a short break then Deeksha was going to sing – before she’d joined The Orange People, she’d been a successful session musician. We hadn’t opened the entertainment to everyone, but when the woman unfolded herself from her crate, there was nothing we could do to stop her. Besides, this was a place of equality where everyone had the right to be heard – even if her name wasn’t on the bill.
The woman must have been over six feet, with large hands and a head of soft hair, the sort of hair you associated with a baby animal. She stood before us in the height-reducing stance of the very tall, her weight shifted to one hip. It occurred to me that she was about the right height for the American serviceman. The audience hushed. The woman scanned her piece of paper then dropped her arm to her side and began to recite from memory in a voice much louder than anyone expected: You, with your weapon shaped like the penis.
Rori looked at me with raised eyebrows.
The woman rocked as she spoke, inching towards us as we stared back, caught in her headlights. All laughter ceased. The metaphors were bold and disturbing. Menstrual blood. Vultures. Somewhere after the fifth verse, Rori took out her tobacco tin and began rolling a cigarette, whispering something about sincere feeling resulting in appalling poetry. I remembered my Tony poems and stayed quiet. She offered me her cigarette.
‘Where are your gloves?’ I whispered, inhaling.
‘Lost them,’ she replied, considering her red hands and nestling them into the pockets of my jacket for warmth.
We were arriving at the poem’s excruciating climax, a scene of apocalypse, the earth powdered with white dust. After the final line, the tall woman continued to rock on her toes, looking to the horizon as if she could see the poem becoming smoke. The audience clapped and whoever was in charge of the record player acted swiftly because Leo Sayer came on immediately singing, ‘You make me feel like dancing.’
The party resumed its rhythm.
‘Having fun?’ asked Jean, sitting on the seat which Barbel had recently vacated. She and Di were dancing together, the beads at the end of Di’s cornrow plaits skipping as she moved.
‘Yes thanks.’ And I was, we all were, except perhaps for Angela, who stayed on the periphery – what she needed was a book, but even Angela knew that reading wasn’t acceptable party behaviour. It was the strangest but definitely one of the best parties I’d ever been to: here I was outside in the freezing cold, numbed through but among friends who cared for each other and trusted one another, not at home in Stevenage watching telly, not reading a paperback in my bedroom, or in the pub with Maggie listening to her latest list of conquests. Maggie. I nudged away the painful memory of her dangling that packet of crisps in her teeth.
After some party chatter, Jean lowered her voice and asked Rori if she’d told me about the Christmas Eve plans.
‘I wanted to pick the right moment,’ said Rori.
‘What plans?’ I asked.
‘I think now’s as good a time as any,’ said Jean. Sam and her groupies had joined the dancing and were jumping about with abandon.
‘Some of us are planning to break into the base,’ said Jean.
‘To get to the missile silos,’ added Rori. I pictured a wall of soldiers barely restraining their slathering Alsatians. ‘There’s a double layer of fencing, but we’ve found a weak section.’
Jean checked me for a response. ‘But we wouldn’t expect anyone to be involved who wasn’t aware of the consequences.’
‘Consequences?’ I shifted on the crate.
Barbel twirled holding a length of material, winding and unwinding it around herself and Di as they danced.
‘We don’t know what the MoD situation is. They could charge us with offences relating to the Official Secrets Act,’ said Jean.
‘We’d be arrested?’
Jean nodded. I thought about prison. Suffragettes being force-fed. Rori put her arm around me, ‘Oh Skittle, we’ll all be together.’
I looked at Rori, her green eyes, like a cat’s glinting in the darkness. This was it, I’d made a commitment, this is what I was here for and this was my chance to be courageous. This time I’d be properly involved, not like during the blockade when I’d ended up on the sidelines.
‘What’s the plan?’ I asked.
Rori grinned and squeezed me to her.
The party went on for most of the night; we stripped the willow, bobbed for apples, played anarchic musical statues, but by midnight things were winding down. Rori and I had been talking about the action as we huddled around a satellite fire we’d made for ourselves, warmed with cider and a quantity of DIY punch. She snuggled into me, resting her head on my breast. A bird clattered in the braches and was still. I was thinking about the action.
‘This will be the most serious thing I’ve ever done. This is something necessary, isn’t it, something that really matters?’
She took my gloved hand and held it to her cheek. ‘Lovely Tessa,’ she smiled, ‘best beloved.’ I pulled one of her ringlet curls; it sprang back in a quick coil.
A twig snapped in the fire.
She smiled again, cradled her bare hands around my face and kissed me, very gently, and then with greater pressure, on the mouth.