Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

  You can’t kill the spirit.

  She is like a mountain.

  Old and strong.

  She goes on and on and on.

  You can’t kill the spirit.

  She is like a mountain.

  Old and strong.

  She goes on and on and on.

  You can’t kill the spirit …You get the idea, Harry. They repeat it ad nauseam, and believe me, the emphasis is on nauseam …”

  A woman struggled past carrying two children and leading a third. One of them managed to spill orange fizzy stuff onto Jack’s letter. He sighed and called for the check. He could sit in that restaurant no longer. The noise and the smell were getting on his nerves. Old chip fat and baby sick were competing for supremacy in his nostrils, and BBC Radio One was clashing with the dirges running round his head. The song playing was called “Karma Chameleon”, sung by some kind of transvestite called Boy George who seemed suddenly to have become more famous than God. Jack had noticed that when the British liked a song they liked to hear it a lot and “Karma Chameleon” had been number one for ever. Jack had liked it at first, but in that depressing place it seemed as tinny and irritating as the three girls who were singing along to it while simultaneously drinking milkshakes and smoking cigarettes. Jack liked to smoke himself but he never ceased to be amazed at the smoking capacity of the British teenage girl. He bet they could do it underwater. Jack finally gave up on his grubby coffee cup, scarcely having tasted its gloomy contents, and got up to go. For all its soulless concrete and its dreadful women, RAF Greenham Common was beginning to look preferable to his current surroundings.

  Then, rather abruptly, Jack sat down again.

  An old couple looked up from their all-day breakfasts and stared. They were no doubt glad of a moment’s diversion from eating their meal, from the unpleasant task of consuming the formless mess they had unwittingly ordered under the mistaken impression that they would be brought food. They were more than happy to take a break from fossicking about on their plates to find a bit of bacon that had actually been cooked. They were grateful for the chance to look, if only for a moment, at something other than the snot-like puddles of raw eggwhite that surrounded the chilly yokes of their partially fried eggs. What a disaster. Yet they would no more have dreamt of complaining than of robbing a bank.

  They stared at Jack for a moment and turned wearily back to their disappointing meals. Jack had not noticed them anyway. His attention was absorbed elsewhere. The reason he had sat down again was because, just as he had risen, a young woman had entered the restaurant. She was accompanied by a middle-aged couple, probably her parents, but Jack scarcely glanced at them. He was only interested in the girl. He recognized her the moment he saw her.

  She was the interesting one. The beautiful one.

  The one with the pink streaks in her hair. The one he always looked out for when he drove into the base, slowing his jeep down in plenty of time to make sure he got a good look. Each time Jack surprised himself at just how attractive he found this girl. He had certainly never been taken by any of that monstrous muddy regiment before, and the young woman in question was scarcely what he might have thought was his type. Her eyes were often surrounded by great dark purple circles of eyeshadow, which made her look like a negative photograph of a Panda. On some occasions she had the female gender symbol painted on both cheeks. Jack feared that she might be colour blind because of the green lipstick she sometimes wore, although usually it was a garish, aggressive red. None the less, despite all of this, the girl’s fresh, sparkling beauty never failed to shine through. She had the sweetest face that Jack had ever seen, and the neatest of bodies, like a dancer. Jack always tried to get a good long look at her as he drove past and now fate had afforded him the opportunity to absorb her properly. The more Jack looked, the more absorbed he became. In fact it would not be putting it too strongly to say that he was transfixed. His mouth watered and his eyes became lost in dreamy contemplation.

  The women at the till wondered if perhaps the coffee was improving.

  10

  “Don’t freak out,” his voice said. “It’s Jack. Jack Kent.”

  Polly was freaking out. She stood shaking in her nightshirt, staring at the answerphone machine as it delivered a voice into her life that she had not heard for more than sixteen years.

  She had met him in a roadside restaurant on the A34. She was seventeen and a committed political activist. What is more, she had been a committed political activist in a way that only a seventeen-year-old can be. More committed, more political and more active than any committed political activist had ever been before her, or so she thought. She would have made the secret love child of Leon Trotsky and Margaret Thatcher look like an uncommitted, apolitical layabout.

  Polly described herself as a feminist, a socialist and an anarchist, which of course made her an extremely dull conversationalist. Smalltalk becomes wearisome when no two sentences can be negotiated without the words “fascist”, “Thatcher” and “capitalist conspiracy” being crowbarred into them. So when Polly had announced her intention of joining the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common her parents had secretly been extremely pleased.

  “It’s only for the summer,” Polly assured them, under the impression that they would be devastated.

  “Yes, dear, that’s fine,” her parents said.

  “It’s just something I feel I have to do,” Polly continued. “You see, white male eurocentric hegemony has developed a culture of violence, which …”

  Polly’s parents’ eyes glazed over as she spoke at length about the socio-political development of her commitment to the anarcho-feminist peace movement. They had very much preferred it when she had been obsessed with Abba.

  The problem with idealism in the young is that, like sex, they think that they are the first people to have thought of it. Polly’s parents were lifelong liberals and would have assured anybody who cared to listen that they were very much against the world being destroyed by nuclear war. Yet their daughter bunched them in with Reagan and Ghengis Khan and seemed to feel that it was her duty to convert them from the warmongering ways of all previous generations.

  “Did you know that the US defence budget for just one day would feed the whole Third World for a year?” Polly would tell them at breakfast over her fourth bowl of muesli, “and what are we doing about it?”

  By “we” Polly’s parents knew that really she meant them and the truth was that, apart from maintaining a standing order to Oxfam, they were not doing very much.

  Therefore, although they were certainly going to miss their beloved daughter, it was none the less going to be rather a relief to be able to enjoy breakfast again without feeling that by doing so they were shoring up the Pentagon and murdering African babies.

  And of course Mr and Mrs Slade were very proud of their daughter. They admired her moral zeal. Other kids were going off grape picking in France or working in supermarkets to pay off the hire purchase on their motorbikes, or having it off in Ibiza. Their daughter was saving the planet from complete annihilation. Mr and Mrs Slade felt that if she could do that and complete the prescribed reading for her A-level year then she would have spent a useful summer.

  And, of course, one thing they did not have to worry about now was boys. Polly was a headstrong girl and between the ages of fourteen and sixteen had alarmed her parents by bringing any number of extremely off-putting young thugs home for tea. Scrumpy-swilling, long-haired bumpkins who kept falling off their mopeds; snarling rude boys in sixteen-hole Doc Martens; cocky New Romantics who wore far too much make-up – and, for a brief, distressing period, a green-haired lad who called himself Johnny Motherfucker and claimed to have eaten a live pigeon. Mercifully, since Polly had discovered politics there had been fewer of these horrible youths hanging about the place, although Mr and Mrs Slade lived in fear that on some rally or other their daughter would get involved with an anarcho-squatter peacenik punk with a tattooed penis and rings through his scrotum.


  There would be no risk of such disasters at Greenham Common. The Greenham Peace Camp was separatist, women only. Men were not allowed to stay overnight. Mr and Mrs Slade thought it all sounded splendid. Summer camping, with plenty of time for reading, in the company of serious and idealistic women, struck them as a very good idea indeed. Of course the first mass evictions and the sight of their daughter on the news being carried away by policemen was rather a shock, but still, better a bobby manhandling her than some dreadful yob who rode a motorbike and washed his jeans in urine.

  11

  Jack skulked behind his newspaper and watched the girl as her parents ordered tea and teacakes. He watched as they attempted vainly to spread the lump of icy butter that had been crushed into the centre of the bun by some joyless jobsworth in a stupid white hat, dry teacakes with a bit of butter in the middle being a speciality of the restaurant chain they were in.

  When they’d finished the father figure asked for the bill. Jack sighed to himself, his pleasant diversion nearly over. The little ray of sunshine was about to be extinguished. He hoped the girl would be the last to leave so that he would be able to look at her legs as she walked out.

  Then the two older people got up, kissed the girl and left without her.

  This was a surprise. Until that point Jack’s interest had been entirely passive. He was merely passing a few minutes of his dull day on his dull tour of duty, eyeing up a pretty girl. Now things were different. The girl was alone and devilish thoughts were playing on his mind. Should he say hello? Of course it was madness. He was a US army officer and she was a peace protester, dedicated to the confusion of all that he held dear. What was more, she was at least ten years his junior.

  On the other hand, she was gorgeous and it could do no harm to say hello. She would probably tell him to shove it anyway and there would be an end to the matter.

  Polly did not notice Jack approach. She was lost in her own thoughts and was feeling rather sad. This had been her parents’ first visit since she had joined the camp and now that they had gone she suddenly felt rather homesick. Strange, she thought, that having spent most of the last five years imagining that all she desired was to leave home she was now discovering that home had its advantages. The devoted love and affection of her parents and a regular supply of clean knickers were two that sprang immediately to mind.

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, ma’am?” said Jack. “If you can dignify the swill they serve in these places with such a name.”

  Polly couldn’t believe it. An American soldier! She had only ever seen them at a distance before, or whizzing by in their cars. The Americans were a different, more glamorous breed, officers and technicians and the like. It was poor little teenage British squaddies who actually guarded the fence and got sung at.

  Having overcome her initial shock, Polly asked Jack to sit down. She was certainly not going to let an opportunity like this go by. Here was her chance to convert the enemy. Jack ordered the coffee and asked if she’d eaten. Polly said that although she had, she’d be happy to do so again. In fact she was starving, having only allowed her parents to order a snack lest they think she was not eating properly at the camp.

  If Jack had been at all concerned that his impulsive gesture would result in an awkward silence he need not have worried. While ordering the food the girl managed to call him a fascist, a mass murderer and a zombie-brained automaton. She also asked him if he ever thought about what he did, appealed to him to desert the army and enquired whether he knew the temperature at which a human body combusted. From there it was, of course, a short step to a detailed description of the Hiroshima shadows.

  “Those people were burned into the walls, you know. Babies’ skin peeled away like parchment while their eyeballs literally melted.”

  Vainly did Jack protest that he too wished only for a peaceful world and that it was his opinion that the vigilance and armoured might of NATO’s forces had prevented such horrors occurring more often.

  “Oh, sure,” Polly sneered. “You want to stop nuclear war so you build more bombs. Brilliant. That’s like fucking for virginity. You’re just a bunch of sweet old peace-loving hippies, aren’t you? Do you realize that one day’s budget for the US military would feed the entire Third World for an entire year?”

  Polly had ordered a three-course meal at Jack’s invitation and at this point the tomato soup arrived. Jack was impressed to discover that this girl could even be furious about that. She had good cause to be. This was the time when microwave ovens were still a relatively recent invention, when the microwaves actually continued to be generated even when the door was open, thus making it possible for teenage wage slaves to contract bone cancer while at the same time failing to heat up the food.

  “It’s hot on the top and cold in the middle. With a skin on it! I mean, how do you do that? It’s almost as if it was deliberate.”

  Jack just nodded and stared. He simply could not get worked up about the soup. He was feeling too happy. She really was beautiful, this wild English rose, and so angry. He loved how angry she was, passionately angry, angry about everything. Angry about nuclear bombs, angry about soup. “The system” certainly had a lot to answer for.

  How astonished would Polly’s parents have been had they returned at this point. Polly had found a boy, after all. Or, rather, a man, and no punk or hippy either but an American army captain. Their daughter would, of course, have explained that she had only just met the bloke. That he had nothing to do with her at all. But something in the eagerness of her manner, and the way she was blushing beneath the female gender symbols on her cheeks, would have warned them that this was to be no brief encounter.

  And how astonished would Jack’s parents have been to see their deeply conservative son hanging upon the lips of such a strange-looking girl. A radical girl, a hippy girl, a girl not so different from the students whom Jack Senior had taught in the sixties and whom Jack Junior had despised as traitorous apologists for Hanoi. How they would howl with laughter when, later, they heard from Harry the extraordinary news that their little soldier son had fallen for a subversive! A peacenik! Their Reagan-loving, Red-bashing, Liberal-hating offspring, for whom it was and always would be hip to be square, had come under the spell of the enemy.

  Because that is certainly what happened. Jack fell for Polly like a man with no parachute. Even at that first meeting he was already half besotted. He wanted their lunch to go on for ever. He could not remember having ever been in the company of such an exuberantly free spirit. This girl was the opposite of everything he wanted in his life, and yet he loved it. She was rude, untidy, undisciplined, unfettered and anarchic, and he loved it. How happy Polly made him feel, how liberating it was just talking to her. Of course Jack knew that he was taking a considerable risk sitting openly in a restaurant with her. She was quite definitely not a suitable dining companion for an army officer, and were he to be spotted it would mean a severe reprimand. But on that special day Jack did not care. In fact, he gloried in the risk he was taking. Polly was making him feel as free-spirited as she was herself.

  Polly’s second course arrived: chips, baked beans, peas and carrots. She had asked if they had anything vegetarian but this being the days before that type of option was common in British catering the unpleasant youth in the silly hat had said the best he could do was to take the meat out of a meat and potato pie for her.

  Polly squirted red sauce out of a large plastic tomato all over her food and seethed at the fascistic, Thatcherite injustice of it all.

  “They might at least offer something that isn’t dripping with blood. I think we should protest.”

  “I thought you just did,” Jack replied. After all, Polly had announced loudly that she resented being forced to eat in a fucking charnel house. This had sounded like protest to Jack. The manager (who had enough to worry about what with having arrived at puberty only that morning) scuttled over and told Polly that she was not being forced to eat anywhere and that she was welcome
to leave at any time, the sooner the better, in fact.

  Polly told the manager that in fact she was being forced to eat in his establishment because multinational capitalism had ensured that the only food available on the roads of Britain was supplied by the owners of the dump in which they sat.

  “And when I say food,” Polly added, “I mean of course shit.”

  A pretty comprehensive protest, Jack thought. Certainly enough to be going on with. Polly, however, had other ideas and, taking out the superglue with which she was wont to block up police padlocks and car doors, she glued the sauce bottles to the table.

  “Well, that’ll certainly show them,” said Jack.

  “Non-violent direct action. Anarchy, mate. You have to do it,” Polly assured him.

  “Yeah. I’ll bet they’re really gonna rethink their policy on animal welfare once they find out you vandalized their ketchup.”

  “Protest is accumulative,” Polly assured him.

  “Protest is self-indulgent and pointless, pal,” said Jack. “Believe me, I know. My parents tried it. They spent the sixties knocking their country over dinner and waving banners at a liberal president. What did they get for their trouble? Richard Nixon. Ha! That showed them. Now they’ve got Reagan! Jesus, are they pissed. I phone them every time he cuts welfare just to rub it in. They’re a couple of sad, fucked-up anachronisms who don’t have the sense to see that God is a Conservative and the Gospel is money. The only way you’re ever going to change anybody or any institution is to hit ’em in the head or hit ’em in the pocketbook. If you want to hurt these people you take their money.”