I didn’t go to Greenham Common because I wanted to make the world a better place. I only went to piss off my parents. That, and because I happened to own a teddy-bear suit.
It was my seventeenth birthday, but had that stopped Mum and Dad being really annoying? It had not. I’d been wondering if they were getting divorced or something: Dad was really quiet, and had been for a few weeks; and recently Mum seemed like one of those small plastic toys on a spring – the ones where you licked the suction base, pressed the top to stick down, waited a few seconds for the spit to dry and then watched it boing up and off the table. Mum was boinging up every five minutes, running her hands through her wiry hair, shouting at me for no apparent reason. Even though it was my birthday, after they’d given me and Pete our presents (driving lessons – brilliant – and some new guitar strings from my brother, ten pounds from my uncle and auntie), she asked me to run down to the newsagents to pick up a copy of the Times Educational Supplement.
‘I can’t, I haven’t done my make-up yet,’ I said, packing The Anatomy of the Industrial Revolution into my backpack. I couldn’t see why she wanted the teachers’ magazine right that minute, anyway. ‘I’ll bring one back this afternoon. I’ve only got fifteen minutes before I need to leave.’
‘I need it now!’ Mum’s eyes were wild and bulging.
Dad sat on a bar stool at the counter, mute and miserable, like he wished he could be anywhere else.
‘The new jobs will still be there later.’
‘Meredith, please just do as you’re told. It’ll take you ten minutes!’
I looked at my watch. ‘Why can’t you ask Pete?’
‘He’s already left. Meredith. Please.’
I hitched up my backpack – the Industrial Revolution was heavy – and grabbed the only apple with fewer than two bruises from the fruit bowl. ‘Sorry. I can’t go in without my make-up on, and I’m not going to be late. I’ll get a detention, and it’s my birthday. I don’t see why you can’t go.’
To my shock, Mum burst into tears. She never cried. But – being selfish and seventeen – all I could think was, how could she cry on my birthday? Emotional blackmail!
Fuming, I ran up to my bedroom, grabbed my make-up bag then stomped out of the back door and down the garden path, without stopping to comfort her. I’d have to do my face at school, and if any of the boys saw me without mascara on, I’d be mortified.
‘Happy fucking birthday, Meredith,’ I said out loud.
I was, retrospectively, deeply embarrassed at how selfish I’d been as a teenager.
Caitlin was just pulling up the shutters outside Sarum Discs when I passed through the Old George Mall on my way to school, an unlit rollie stuck to her bottom lip. The little bells at the bottom of her crinkled Indian drawstring-waist skirt tinkled as she moved. ‘Hi Meredith, beautiful day, isn’t it!’
I grunted. Caitlin was one of life’s relentlessly cheerful people; even more so in the past few weeks since she’d had a new boyfriend. It was ‘Sam this, Sam that, Sam thinks … Sam says…’ all bloody day. It sometimes made it a bit hard to work with her on a Saturday, particularly if I was hungover. I usually just turned up the volume on the stereo to drown her out.
‘Oh dear!’ Her voice chimed like the tiny bells. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s my birthday,’ I said. ‘And I hate my parents.’
She rushed over and gave me a tinkly hug, wafting patchouli as usual. ‘Happy birthday! What a bummer you have to go to school. And don’t worry, everyone hates their folks. Come in after and we’ll have a special celebration, Alaric’s got the new Bauhaus record in. I’ll get a cake and … Oh wait, what am I thinking? I can’t. I took a half day. Guess where I’m going?’
My mood plummeted again at the immediate retraction of the offer – even though it wasn’t like this was my only chance to mark the occasion; I was having a night out with friends at the weekend. ‘Oh right. Don’t know. Somewhere with lover boy, I imagine?’
A brief, agonised expression flitted across Caitlin’s face, and I thought, uh-oh, trouble at t’mill?
‘No – Sam’s … busy this weekend. We’ve had a bit of a fight, actually. Try again.’
I wanted to ask if she was going to dance naked in the moonlight at Stonehenge. Caitlin was what my mother called ‘a loosely woven sort, probably knits her own yogurt’. Mum didn’t like hippies.
‘I’m going to Greenham!’
‘Wow, no way. Really?’ I probably sounded sarcastic, but was actually quite impressed. The women’s peace camp had been on Greenham Common for more than two years, and apparently there were tens of thousands of women living there, camping around the airbase perimeter fence. Living! I’d often wondered how they supported themselves financially. Or bathed. Whenever it featured on the news, I was simultaneously curious and appalled at the sight of all the mud, filth and violence. A few months back they’d managed, just by sending out a chain letter, to get thirty thousand women linking hands around the fence. ‘Embrace the Base’, it was called, and the media attention had been huge.
Caitlin extracted a lighter from the pocket of her patchwork waistcoat. ‘Yeah. This friend of mine’s borrowed a camper van, and we’re all going for a few days. I’m so psyched.’ She dropped her voice. ‘There’s going to be a special protest tonight – well, two, apparently: a human chain all the way from Greenham to Burghfield – there’s a big weapons factory there. We’re not doing that, though. A load of us are going to dress up as teddy bears and break in while the human chain’s happening. Honestly, Meredith, it’s so amazing there at the moment. The vibe is incredible.’
I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her correctly. ‘Teddy bears?’
‘Yeah. How brilliant is that? A sort of teddy bears’ picnic, you know, to symbolise what those weapons could do to our children, and their children. And it’ll be a statement, you know, contrasting with the macho militarisation of the base.’
‘I’ve got a teddy-bear costume,’ I said contemplatively, accepting a drag of the roll-up once she’d lit, inhaled and offered me it. ‘You could’ve borrowed it, if I’d known. My granny made it for me for a school play when I was thirteen. Might be a bit small now, though…’
‘No problem!’ she chirped. ‘I have one too. I sewed it myself last weekend. It’s so cute, I want to wear it all the time!’
An idea formed in my mind, one that would really piss off my slightly right-wing parents. ‘What time are you leaving?’
‘After lunch,’ she said vaguely. ‘I wish you could come. It’s gonna be epic. But Willow says they’re squeezing me into the van as it is. I’m going to have to sit on someone’s lap.’
So much for that, then. Nothing was going right today. Nothing.
‘Oh well,’ I said grumpily. ‘Couldn’t go anyway. Got a mock history exam at two. Just what you want on your birthday. Well, I better go, or I’ll be late.’
I thought with a pang of guilt that in the time I’d spent stopping to chat to Caitlin, I could probably have run to the newsagents and back for Mum.
All that day I couldn’t stop thinking about the protest, and the camper van full of militant teddy bears. As I daydreamed through each period, I realised I was desperate to go. In the free period before lunch, when I ought to have been doing revision on the role of Edmund Cartwright’s power loom in the mass production of textiles, I went to the library, got a roadmap down from the shelf marked ‘Maps of Britain’ and worked out which trains I’d need to take to get me to Newbury, where RAF Greenham Common was. It was only an hour away, with one change at Westbury. Easy. And I had Uncle Mike’s birthday money to buy the ticket with. Of course I didn’t have any more details, like, what time this protest was, where the rendezvous point would be; because the whole camp surely couldn’t be dressing in bear costumes – it must only be a breakaway faction. I had no idea of the size of it, but I knew it must be pretty big.
At lunchtime, as was our wont, my friends Julie and Charlotte and I set off down the path to the back of the school to sit in Julie’s ancient two-tone 2-CV and drink Baileys (I only had one swig, since I did actually want to do well in the mock history exam). They’d bought me a piece of lardy cake on a paper plate from the baker’s – my favourite – and stuck a candle in it, which Julie lit and I blew out. Then they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ lustily and tunelessly while Julie fluffed her perm in the rearview mirror. Charlotte lit a cigarette mid-refrain.
‘Guess where I’m going later?’ I announced indistinctly, my mouth full of dough and sugar, unintentionally echoing Caitlin’s earlier words.
They thought I was insane when I told them. Julie, in the driver’s seat, puckered her lips in horror. ‘With all those … old lesbians? Why?’
‘I’m sure they aren’t all lesbians. Lots of them have kids living there with them. And they definitely aren’t all old. Caitlin’s only twenty-six. Anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is…’
I paused. Why were they doing this? Did they really think it would make them take all the nuclear weapons away?
‘Being part of something,’ I said vaguely.
Julie and Charlotte looked at each other and rolled their eyes.