‘Yes, but that’s not until much later.’
‘Marjorie Crawford,’ Peggy shook her head, and with some effort levered herself up onto her elbow. ‘Go. Go for the sake of our kids, like we said. And their kids; that’s if no one’s blown the planet to bloody kingdom come by that time.’
Marjorie frowned as she tried to decide what to do. She wanted to go; at least, she ought to go because, as Peggy said, it was important. But it was one thing for the two of them to go together, and quite another for her to go on her own. Could she really do this by herself? She looked at Peggy again and rested a hand on her forehead. ‘You’re clammy. And you look dreadful.’
‘Sod what I look like.’ Peggy flopped back onto the pillow. ‘Honestly, Marje, you won’t forgive yourself if you don’t go. Look how you felt last time, after Aldermaston. Just bring me some water and a couple of aspirin and I’ll be fine.’ She pointed to the dressing table. ‘In the top drawer, that photo I was going to take – can you take it and put it up for me?’
Marjorie hesitated, then nodded. ‘All right. If you’re absolutely sure you’ll be okay.’ She opened the drawer and took out the photo of the twins. The organisers wanted everyone to take some memento, a symbol of peace or love. What better symbol of love than a photo of your children? The boys were about a year old here, sitting one at either end of a Silver Cross pram and grinning at the camera. They’d both left home now; Michael was in his final year at university and Martin, who’d left school at sixteen and trained as an electrician, was working in Saudi Arabia for a year and making lots of money, apparently. She knew Peggy missed them more than she let on.
‘I’m still not sure what I’m going to take. I only have the one photo of the two of them. I hadn’t looked at it for years when Eleanor found it, but now I don’t think I can bear to part with it.’ She glanced at Peggy, whose eyes were closing again. ‘I’ll think of something. I’ll bring you water, aspirin and a flask of tea before I go. And a flask of soup as well.’
‘Lovely,’ Peggy murmured, and closed her eyes.
*
It was someone Peggy knew from her yoga class who’d told them about it and organised seats on the coach. She was a nice enough woman, but she wasn’t really Marjorie’s type – always going on about things she’d read in Spare Rib. Peggy had got talking to her about this because it turned out they’d both been on the Aldermaston march in 1960. Marjorie hadn’t gone on that one, although she and Peggy had been friends by then – they’d started nurse training together a few months earlier. And after the march, when they’d talked about wanting a better world to bring their future children into, a world without the H-bomb, Marjorie thought maybe she should have gone after all. It was ‘an incredible experience’, Peggy had said, and Marjorie wished then that she’d been part of it. But despite all the passion and determination surrounding that march, here they were, over twenty years later, and the threat of nuclear annihilation felt just as close now as it had then.
What they hadn’t known when they had had that conversation was that Peggy was already pregnant. And now they were both mothers – although Marjorie sometimes wondered if she deserved the title – and they’d intended to make their protest as mothers, as custodians of the future. We should think not only of our children, the organisers said, but of our children’s children.
Marjorie almost ended up missing the coach because she spent so long looking for a suitable memento. She’d hidden things so well that she had to get the step ladder out of the old scullery so she could reach the boxes at the back of the top cupboards. She hadn’t kept much because it was painful to have too many reminders in the house, but there was a little white romper suit with embroidered blue rabbits scampering across the chest that Ted’s mum gave her just before Peter was born. There were two of these; the other one, the one he was buried in, was blue with white rabbits. Also in the box was a fluffy yellow chick that was part of a gift set from the other nurses when she left to have Eleanor. It had a ribbon loop made of yellow and white gingham so you could hang it from the pram hood. Eleanor had loved it, barely taking her eyes from it as she lay on her back gurgling and kicking her legs. When Peter was born, the chick hung in exactly the same place so he could see it all the time. He never looked at it, though.
She wrapped Peggy’s photo, the romper suit and the chick in an old cardigan and put them carefully in her bag, along with some string and a handful of safety pins. Then she packed her sandwiches and a flask of Bovril before letting herself out into the dark morning. It had been raining all night, but now the rain turned to sleet as she hurried through the quiet streets to join the other women on the coach.
They’d been told it was definitely a women-only protest, but apparently not everyone had heard because two of the women came with their husbands, and she thought it rather a shame when the men were turned away. Surely this was something everyone should be protesting about?
Most of the women on the coach were Marjorie’s age or younger. There were a few typical CND types with short hair and mannish clothes, no doubt concealing unshaven armpits from what she’d heard. But they turned out to be very nice. There were a couple of ladies who must have been in their sixties or even seventies. One of them, Betty, proudly announced she would be seventy-six next birthday, and cheerfully handed round deliciously chewy, oaty biscuits at regular intervals. There were so many requests for the recipe that she ended up calling it out rather than write it down so many times. The atmosphere on the coach was friendly and optimistic, and it was clear that the protest would go ahead despite the appalling weather.
The trip to Thatcham took longer than expected, partly because the driving rain made visibility difficult and everything was moving more slowly, but also because, as they neared the base, the roads were choked with coaches and minibuses from the all over the country. There were CND symbols in many of the windows, and peace slogans and flowers painted on some of the smaller vehicles.
It was sleeting again when they got off the coach, and the recent rain had turned the ground into a muddy bog. The bottoms of her trousers were already soaked about six inches up and the mud was sucking at her shoes; but as she allowed herself to be swept along with the others, she realised that no one else seemed to care about the mud, and with so much going on around her she soon forgot about it. There were lots of policemen milling around, and several Black Marias parked at odd angles, but it was hard to credit there’d be any trouble when you looked around and saw all these women, some with children, all smiling, all calmly determined.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but was surprised to realise that there was very little organisation. She knew the plan was to ‘embrace the base’; you were supposed to link arms, apparently, to form a human chain around the whole nine miles of the perimeter fence. She felt a flutter of nerves; she wished Peggy was here. Peggy was so much better at this sort of thing.
No one knew when they were going to actually start making the chain, but it didn’t seem to matter because there were so many women here that everyone felt sure someone would know what to do when the time came. In the meantime, she wanted to pin the tributes she’d brought with her to the fence, which was already half covered. There were lots of coloured balloons, banners calling for peace, CND symbols, a collage of a rainbow with BAN THE BOMB written across it; and once she’d scrambled up the grass verge to add hers and Peggy’s contributions, she was able to see the array of photographs, children’s drawings and poems that adorned the wire, not to mention the Babygros, booties and matinee jackets, the teddy bears and dolls. The sleet was easing off now, but everything was soaked. Swallowing the lump that had formed in her throat, she reached into her bag for the things she’d brought with her. There was another rainbow banner along to the left, heavily decorated with embroidered flowers and appliquéd white doves. It was beautiful; the amount of work that must have gone into it! She pinned the romper suit and Peggy’s photo just beneath it, then tied the little chick by its ribbon close
to the romper suit.
She was still looking at it when she became aware of someone standing next to her. ‘Sorry.’ She stepped back automatically. ‘I’m in your way.’
‘No, no, did mine further down. Just having a look, really.’
Marjorie recognised her from the coach, probably because of her severe pudding-basin haircut and tweedy appearance. ‘Bloody moving, isn’t it?’ The woman gestured along the fence. ‘Damn good turnout, too.’ That was when Marjorie realised just how many people must be there. She turned to the left and then to the right; the lines of women were three or four deep for as far as she could see in both directions, and more were arriving every minute.
*
By the time they were all back on the coach that evening, Marjorie was cold, her feet were wet and she was shattered. As they’d driven away from the base, lit up in the darkness by hundreds of candles, she’d felt almost as if she wanted to stay, to be with those women who’d left their other lives behind to focus on the continuing peaceful protest. But much as she admired them and was glad she’d been there today, she didn’t think she’d be up to sleeping in the mud under a sheet of plastic with people she didn’t know. At first she’d been worried about the lack of organisation, but somehow the thousands of women had organised themselves and they’d made their point. They’d linked arms and formed a circle around the enormous military base, then later some of them had lit candles and sung Christmas carols. Had Peggy been there, they’d have probably joined in with the singing, but although Marjorie had got talking to one or two of the others, she’d mainly hovered on the peripheries of the bigger groups. She’d always liked Christmas carols, and there was something about them being sung in this cold, bleak place that made them particularly affecting. What moved her to tears, though, was when dozens of women, possibly even hundreds, began singing ‘Imagine’. As she stood there listening in the darkness, she felt hot tears sliding down her freezing face. She knew it was a good song, but it always made her sad because she only ever focused on the first line, and she didn’t want to imagine there was no heaven; she liked to think there was one, and that there was someone up there – Ted, or her mother, maybe – taking care of Peter. And poor Maurice, of course. She felt a familiar wave of guilt when she thought about Maurice, as though she were disobeying her mother by even allowing him into her mind.
On the way back, she sat at the rear of the coach next to Hilary, the woman she’d talked to earlier in the day. The return trip was a quieter, more subdued affair, probably because everyone was so tired and emotionally drained. Hilary’s daughter, Carole, who was about the same age as Eleanor, was dozing with her head on her mother’s lap. Hilary talked quietly to Marjorie, absent-mindedly stroking the girl’s hair as she did so. After a while, Marjorie couldn’t concentrate on what Hilary was saying; it didn’t seem to require any response, anyway.
Her mind spooled back to one morning in the spring, before they’d had that dreadful row about Eleanor spending so much time upstairs. She’d gone in to wake her up for school, and had paused to look at her sleeping face, which was illuminated by a sliver of early morning sunshine that fell through a gap in the curtains. Eleanor was almost eighteen, but she looked younger when she was asleep, her skin smooth and glowing with childlike peachiness, hair spread messily over the pillow. It was long then, still blonde but darker than when she was a child. It came halfway down her back, and the sunshine picked out golden highlights. Marjorie moved nearer to the bed. She’d have to wake her soon, but for just a moment she wanted to pretend that they were a normal mother and daughter. She gently reached out and stroked her hair, which was thick and healthy, and fell into enviable waves around her shoulders. When was the last time she’d touched it? When Eleanor was tiny it had been fine and silky, always a mass of tangles in the mornings, and she’d stand between Marjorie’s knees, biting her lip and trying to be brave as Marjorie brushed the knots out and then plaited her hair into two pigtails before tying on ribbons. She would probably have plaited her hair on that morning, oblivious to the fact that it was something she’d rarely do again. While she was in hospital, Peggy had taken over getting Eleanor ready for school, and had carried on dealing with her hair, plaiting it, tying ribbons in it, whatever Eleanor wanted, long after she came home. That familiar sense of regret bloomed inside her again. Ted had been right about that – she should never have abdicated motherhood so completely, but she hadn’t realised there would be no way back.
Now, as she watched Hilary stroking Carole’s mousy head, she tried to recapture the sensation as she’d carefully lifted a strand of Eleanor’s silky blonde hair and allowed it to slip over her fingers like a waterfall. ‘Oh, Eleanor,’ she murmured, ‘why wasn’t it my hair instead?’
‘What’s that?’ Hilary said.
‘Oh, nothing,’ Marjorie replied, surprised to realise she’d said it out loud.
Eleanor: December 1982, Greenham Common
It was a long, uphill walk from Newbury station to the camp, but Alex told her it was better to get off here rather than Thatcham or Aldermaston, because both those stations would still be crawling with police.
It had been misty even when they got off the train, but as they trudged up the hill past the dark, dense mass of trees that loomed on either side, the mist became thicker and it was difficult to make out much apart from what was immediately ahead. Even though it wasn’t raining, the air felt heavy with moisture and the dampness somehow managed to creep through her clothes, creating a chill that reached her very bones.
The walk was arduous, but they talked more on the way and, before long, she was considering the possibility of staying at the camp for the night. ‘Jill will sort you out somewhere to sleep,’ Alex said. ‘Then you can decide what to do in the morning.’
Her legs were tired and her feet were getting sore, and just when she thought she couldn’t bear to walk any further, Alex pointed ahead and said, ‘There it is. Still a way to go yet, though.’
The base seemed to appear from within the mist, giving the whole place an eeriness that sent a shiver though her. Being so close to it made her think about nuclear war, and thoughts like that tended to stay in her head for days at a time, the same as when she thought about what had happened to Peter. As they got nearer, she could see the perimeter fence. ‘Is this where they pinned teddy bears and Babygros and things?’
‘Yeah,’ Alex said, pausing for a moment to look. ‘They took it all down a few days ago.’
‘Took it down? Why?’
‘Not the women; they didn’t do it.’
‘Who did then?’
‘The MOD mainly, but there were local volunteers as well. Some of them brought their children, and that was really sad, seeing all those little kids shoving everything into black bin bags as though it was just rubbish.’ He shook his head. ‘There are a few bits left where the women have put them up again, but you should have seen it the day after. It looked brilliant. Especially all the kids’ things, the clothes and toys and that. Dawn did a picture – just crayon scribbles, really, but we put it up anyway.’ He looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘We lit candles when it got dark, and when you saw all that stuff on the fence in the candlelight, all the toys and the baby things – it was a bit, what do you call it? Tear-jerking.’
‘I can imagine.’ She put her suitcase down and looked up at the fence. ‘Can I have a closer look?’
‘Sure.’ He shrugged. ‘Not much to see now, though; just a lot of wire fencing.’
She scrambled up the verge and tramped over brambles. There were scraps of string here and there left tied to the wire, a shrivelled balloon that had been missed. On the news on the night of the protest, the camera had panned along the fence, past all the banners, mementoes and photographs, and zoomed in on a section where someone had woven strands of green fabric through the wire in the shape of a Christmas tree and pinned on little gold CND symbols to look like baubles. There was tinsel, too. Many of the protesters would be here over Christmas – A
lex and his mum were definitely staying, he told her.
‘Shall we carry on?’ Alex said. ‘It’s still quite a way to where my mum and her mates are.’
‘Okay, sorry.’ She was negotiating her way back down through the brambles when she spotted a mud-spattered scrap of yellow and white gingham caught on a thorn. It looked like ribbon, obviously from something that had been pinned to the fence, and she felt an unexpected ripple of sadness as she passed it.
The camp was vast, and the expanse of cold, grey concrete on the other side of the wire fence only added to the bleakness. Parts of the site were just a sea of mud-covered plastic. There were Calor gas bottles everywhere; bundles of clothes, crates and dustbins filled with tinned food; pots and pans hanging from nails banged into planks of wood. There were tents, most of them tiny, and a few caravans, but Alex said they sometimes had to sleep under plastic sheeting. They passed a teenage girl sitting on the step of one of the caravans, reading to three small children, who were sitting on upturned buckets and looking up at her with rapt expressions. There were plumes of smoke coming from a campfire which was surrounded by groups of women talking quietly. No one seemed to be particularly bothered by the cold or the damp, but Eleanor could feel the mist clinging to her clothes already. There were lots of police around, but they weren’t doing anything, just watching or talking to each other.
What would it be like to spend Christmas here, she wondered? Alex said she could stay as long as she liked; he said she would be more than welcome, and they had a spare sleeping bag. At first, she’d laughed and told him not to be silly. But now she found the possibility of not going home growing larger in her mind. After all, there was no law that said you had to spend Christmas at home, was there? Last Christmas, she’d eaten turkey and all the trimmings with her mum and Peggy and Ken, then they’d all sat by the fire watching a James Bond film while eating chocolate Brazils and crystallised ginger. But this year would be different; it would be just her and her mum. And if all these women were giving up their cosy family Christmases to make their point about the horror of nuclear war, maybe she could, too . . .
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