Chapter 10

An ornery son-of-a-bitch

At work in the post office one day, I was astounded to hear the overseer call from her office doorway, ‘Phone call for you, Mr Wilkinson.’ It was rare for anyone to get a phone call: as I walked towards her office, she said with a raised eyebrow, ‘It’s someone calling from Canada.’ Canada? I knew no-one in Canada. I took the handset.

‘Hello.’

‘Is that Peter Wilkinson?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hi. My name is David McTaggart and I’m in the UK to set up Greenpeace here. I wonder if you’d like to come and help us get Greenpeace set up in the UK.’

‘Sure.’

‘Can we meet?’

‘Come to my parent’s flat in London next weekend. Do you like football . . . soccer?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well maybe you’d like to come to the game. My team is playing at home on Saturday.’

In just a few words lives can be utterly and irrevocably altered. My life changed that day so fundamentally that I would never again work at what might be called a regular job.

We finished the conversation with an exchange of contact numbers and I gently put the receiver back in its cradle. I looked into the middle distance and let things sink in. I had just been headhunted by Greenpeace, an organisation I had read about and admired from afar for two years as they carried out imaginative and headline-grabbing peaceful direct actions in North America: protesting about the clubbing to death of tens of thousands of seal pups before their lactating mothers on the ice floes of Newfoundland; sailing ships into exclusion zones around nuclear weapons testing sites and disrupting commercial whaling in the Pacific carried out by the Russian fleet. Wow! That’s what I called environmental campaigning. That’s what I’d been longing to be involved in. And now the head honcho McTaggart, had called me, had sought me out in an obscure post office in Essex and offered me a job. I drove home that evening on cloud nine.

McTaggart and I met in the Black Horse pub, close to my parents flat the following Saturday. He was short, stocky and balding. His eyes sparkled with a fire I hadn’t seen since I met Graham Searle six years previously. McTaggart was overly effusive yet strangely evasive. He dismissed any question relating to himself, his past or to his exploits, yet painted a visionary picture about the embryonic Greenpeace with a few sweeping statements delivered with economy and directness. His face, tanned as a result of his outdoor lifestyle, could crumple like a piece of well-worn leather one minute as he grinned at a remark, only to assume the impression of an impenetrable wall of disinterest if the topic of conversation moved onto issues he felt were too close to home or not on the agenda. He was a rogue, I decided, and in his flitting mannerisms and his deep, fathomless eyes, I knew I had met a man who would do – had already done – great things. I didn’t know, as I sat with McTaggart in that pub, but his mind was already planning and scheming events for Greenpeace years hence. While he was bodily in the here-and-now, he was without a shadow of doubt light years ahead of me and anyone else I knew, with respect to his vision and determination.

As an opener, I had to ask the question which had been burning inside me since that fateful phone call.

‘Tell me why you decided to track me down in particular, and how you did it,’ I demanded.

‘Well, I called FoE and asked them if they could tell me who the most ‘ornery son-of-a-bitch that ever worked for them was. They told me, straight up – Wilkinson. I need ‘ornery sons-of-bitches. How did I track you down? Oh, I just called around. People knew where you were.’

We finally got round to talking money. ‘How much do you need?’ he asked between sips of beer and drags on his cigarette. ‘I have to make £50 a week.’ ‘I’ll guarantee you £25 a week for two and a half days. You’ll have to work out the rest. Take a part-time job until we can take you on full time. Shit, it’s a shame you’re married,’ he muttered, as if he didn’t really want me to hear it. I downed my pint. ‘Let’s go and see the game.’ I drove back to Suffolk in a state of highly mixed emotions: I was about to embark on an unknown journey with Greenpeace, the prospect of which made my spirits soar and the hairs on the back of my neck to involuntarily stand on end.

My dad was ill – in excruciating pain for much of the time and when I visited him, I could see his face lined with stress and pain. He was thinner than I had ever seen him and I feared that he had cancer. The doctors, however, refused to confirm that fact, giving us hope by telling us they were still carrying out tests. Every time I left, I felt despair welling up inside me. Dad was in and out of hospital like a yo-yo and some of the tests the doctors were carrying out on him, Mother told me later, would cause him to burst into tears of embarrassment when he arrived home. His stoicism was something to behold. I can’t recall him ever once complaining. Every time I lamely asked him, ‘How is it, Dad?’ he would reply with a predictable and dismissive, ‘Not too bad, boy.’ Yet I knew it was bad. His face was lined and drawn. I wanted to hug him and sob together, to tell him how much I wanted to get next to him, to bare my soul and talk about both our fears for his health. But we never did. We were too stiff and proper to do any of the things that I take for granted with my own children. Our relationship was hands-off and almost cold although he knew that I loved him with an emotion we had silently agreed not to discuss.

Having finally left the Halstead office, I secured a part-time job at a sub post office in Ipswich which, along with the money McTaggart had promised, would bring in just enough to keep us fed and a roof over our heads. I turned up at the Greenpeace office in Whitehall, just down from Trafalgar Square, a few days later. I walked into a sparsely furnished office. A tall guy with lank hair squatted, rather than sat, on a chair, a baseball cap back-to-front on his head, typing fast on a manual typewriter. He nodded a chiselled, handsome face adorned by a moustache briefly in my direction. This was Allan Thornton. He was a vegetarian; passionately defensive of animals and, as he later showed to my own discomfort, politically astute, although I thought him to be more than a little over-confident of his own abilities. Susi Newborn, a colleague from Friends of the Earth days, bounced around the room with her undiminished energy and zeal. Denise Bell – in-your-face, uncompromising and straight-talking – was the third and, later in the day, Charlie Hutchinson arrived. He was courteous, spectacled and spoke with the clipped, precise accent of the upper echelons of the Home Counties.

Within the hour we were discussing the publication which had been proposed as the first collected, public utterances of Greenpeace in the UK on the range of issues which exercised it. I was asked to write the nuclear section. I was amazed to have been given such a responsibility with so little preparation or questioning. I reflected how this sort of thing would never have happened at FoE but here, within minutes of meeting, these guys gave me the onerous responsibility of articulating Greenpeace’s energy policy. I got down to writing my piece for the Greenpeace Chronicles, based solely on the fact that I had worked at FoE for a few years under the unofficial tutelage of Professor Amory Lovins and Dr Walter Patterson.

Of all the things which Greenpeace were in those early days, and for all the reservations I was to eventually harbour about Allan Thornton, it was the total freedom of action everyone was allowed which attracted me to the organisation. You went to the desk, pulled out a blank sheet of paper and designed your own campaign programme. In my first article for Greenpeace, I outlined the case against nuclear power and mapped out a campaign profile. It went straight from my typewriter into the first edition of the Greenpeace Chronicle. No-one had time to vet copy and indeed no-one asked to vet it. A few weeks before I arrived, Greenpeace had been donated £38,000 with which to buy a ship. The grant came from the Dutch branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The air in the office was electric with expectancy and anticipation. I adored the connection Greenpeace had with indigenous, North American Indian people.

Greenpeace promised excitement and difference. Its imagery exuded challenge, possibility, adventure. It was vibrant, engrossing and international. It united, welded and moulded everyone who came within its influence into a unit of common purpose. Its early merchandise material smacked of mythology and internationalism: the Rainbow Warrior myth of the Red Indian tribe had allegedly been adopted by the early Greenpeace people in America as the embodiment of their belief that, one day, a tribe of people from all walks of life, all backgrounds, creeds and colours would unite to protect the natural world against the avarice and excesses of the modern world. This myth united us in the belief that, unlikely as it was and as implausibly romantic as it sounds, we were its embodiment. This rainbow tribe would be comprised of those from all walks of life, from different creeds and colours and from all parts of the world and would be called Rainbow Warriors.

The links Greenpeace had developed with indigenous peoples on the back of that relationship was vital to the psychology behind the organisation and was to bring the UK office of Greenpeace into sharp and terminal conflict with its international HQ years hence, with devastating consequences for us all and me in particular. However, for the moment, I figured that if Greenpeace would have me, if I could meet the demands of the Rainbow Warrior legend and help realise the dream, then I wanted to stay. And to be in the organisation at such an early and influential stage in its life was an added bonus, although, at the time, the subject of the longevity of Greenpeace, let alone its structure and individual roles within in it, were the furthest things from my mind. David Fraser McTaggart was to change all that.