Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

  The Greenham camp was a bit like the Foreign Legion for Polly, a place to nurse a lost soul. She was relatively content there, apart, of course, from her aching heart and Madge going on at her all the time about her far too infrequent evacuations. Camp life was tolerable but, then again, if you consider yourself worthless and don’t care whether you live or you die, which was how Polly felt, pretty much anything is tolerable.

  Some aspects of Greenham life Polly never got used to. Even in her numbed state of mind all the singing and the holding hands could get a bit wearing. The peace women were so anxious not to emulate the aggressive posturing of the male of the species that sometimes they ended up just looking a bit wet. Sometimes at night, when the women were having their lentils, the British squaddies would pile back from the pub all pissed up and chanting, “Lesby, lesby, lesbiANS.” When that happened Polly always longed to lob a ladleful of hot roughage at them and inform them that they were a bunch of brainless no-dicks, but that sort of behaviour was not how things were done. The camp was there to stop aggression, after all, not to fuel it, so instead the huddled women would confront the baying young men with their impenetrable female energy, constructing a forcefield of love and calm through which the soldiers occasionally urinated.

  Polly was not very good at this type of mystical feminism. She was more for the give as good as you get school of protest. Madge often tried to explain that this was exactly the type of attitude that had started the arms race in the first place, but Polly remained restive and unconvinced.

  Try as she might, she never could truly welcome her periods as an old friend. She simply could not regard the monthly stomach cramps as a small price to pay for the privilege of celebrating the timeless mystery of her menstrual cycle. Being as one with the rhythms of the moon was of very little comfort to Polly when she had a hot water bottle clamped to her stomach. It turned out that she wasn’t very good at puppet-making either. The She-God Wooma’s head had fallen off on its first outing, nearly killing a baby outside Boots in the Newbury shopping precinct. Nor did Polly have any children’s paintings to pin to the perimeter wires, or peace poems and haiku to send to the prime minister. Above all, apart from the mass protests and camp invasions in which Polly always played an enthusiastic part, life at Greenham could be very very boring. It was all right for the lesbians – they had something to do of a night – but for Polly the hours of darkness were long and lonely, and she would lie there shivering, listening to Madge snoring, trying not to think about Jack and wondering what she was doing with her life. Certainly she was saving the world, but was that enough?

  After about a year Polly was ready for a break, and the miners’ strike in 1984 gave her the opportunity to move on. The whole of alternative society had been galvanized by the confrontation between Mrs Thatcher and the miners. The prime minister seemed finally to have found an enemy worthy of her metal, and everybody wanted to be a part of what was confidently expected to be her defeat. Polly decided to leave Greenham for a while in order to carry a fundraising bucket for the NUM.

  She went to stay with friends in Yorkshire, where she signed on the dole and offered her services at a miners’ support group. There she took up with a middle-aged communist shop steward called Derek. He was a nice man but the relationship did not last long; despite both of their being politically on the far left, they were incompatible. This was, of course, inevitable, given that one of the hallmarks of the far left in those days was that almost everybody on it was politically incompatible with almost everybody else. The factionization was surreal. Groups would split and split again until individual members were in danger of being rendered schizophrenic. It made for an incredible array of radical newspapers. On the steps of every Student Union and on every picket line one could buy The Socialist This, The New Left That and The International God Knows What … Sadly, most of these papers were read exclusively by the people who printed and sold them.

  And the only thing that all the disparate factions had in common was that they all hated each other. What is more they hated each other with a venom and a passion that they could never feel for the Tories. The Tories were just misguided products of an inherently corrupt system. Other Lefties were the anti-Christ.

  Polly and Derek fell out over a point of sexual politics. He objected to her wishing to stand on the front line at the secondary pickets, which were becoming more and more violent as frustrations grew on both sides.

  “Look, Poll,” Derek said. “When me an’t lads are stood standing at dock gates, tryin’ t’stop foreign bastard scab coal comin’ in, and Maggie’s boot boys in blue are tryin’ t’kick six types of shit out of us we do not need to be worrying about protectin’ our womenfolk.”

  Derek, like most of the miners, still believed firmly that there was men’s work and there was women’s work. It was, in fact, to be the last year that men like Derek would believe such a thing, because within a very short time virtually every coalmine in Britain would be closed, the men would be out of work and the women would become the principal earners in the home.

  At the time, though, Derek definitely believed that women were the gentler sex. Faced with such positively Neanderthal sexism, Polly scarcely knew where to start.

  “But … you … For God’s sake …!” Polly could feel her eyes beginning to water with frustration.

  “Well, there’s no need t’cry about it, love,” said Derek, and there their relationship ended.

  The miners’ strike finally collapsed in January 1985. Polly was alone and with no clear sense of purpose. Like Bono at about the same time, she still hadn’t found what she was looking for. She thought about moving to London where yet another once mighty union, this time the print workers’, was preparing to dash itself against the walls of Castle Thatcher in a futile attempt to maintain their old working practices. In the end, however, she couldn’t face it. Even the peace dirges of Greenham seemed preferable to endlessly chanting, “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!” and “Here we go, here we go, here we go,” when clearly no one was going anywhere. So Polly returned to the camp to await the delivery of the cruise missiles.

  That was what she told herself, anyway, but the fact that for the first month after her return she scrutinized every American face that came or left the camp suggested that Polly’s heart had not yet healed. Madge could see that Polly was still troubled, but of course she thought the whole problem was lack of roughage.

  But it would take more than a high-fibre diet to cure Polly’s pain. Only time would do that and time moved slowly at the Greenham camp that spring for Polly. She had not told Madge about Jack, or any of the women with whom she began again to share her life. They would not have understood. Polly did not understand it herself, except to know that love is blind. Everything Jack stood for Polly truly did despise, and she despised herself for having fallen in love with such a man. What was worse, she despised herself for not having the strength to forget him.

  When the missiles finally did arrive, Polly was amongst that briefly celebrated group of women who managed to breach the perimeter fences and carry their protest on to the base itself. Polly’s poor, horrified parents opened their newspaper one morning to discover that she and her comrades had reached the landing runway and had very nearly forced the huge US Air Force transport planes to abort their landings. It was a great propaganda triumph, which in the opinion of the USAF very nearly caused a nuclear disaster. In court Polly pleaded guilty to criminal trespass but stated that she had acted in order to prevent the greater crime of millions of people being vaporized in nuclear explosions. The magistrate declined to accept global geopolitics as mitigating circumstances and Polly was bound over to keep the peace.

  “Ha!” said Polly. “Keeping the peace is what I was doing anyway.”

  Which she thought was rather a clever thing to say.

  21

  Polly was not the only one still grieving for the past. Jack too found himself unable to step out from under the long shadow of their re
lationship. With Jack, however, the effect was more positive; the memory and continuing presence of Polly in Jack’s heart was to prove a considerable influence on his life and career.

  After leaving Greenham Jack spent most of the rest of the eighties stationed in the lovely old German city of Wiesbaden, a part of the vast American military presence that had been camping in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Wiesbaden was the headquarters of the US Army in Europe. Over the years the local German community had grown accustomed to the presence of hordes of young foreign men in their midst and an uneasy relationship had grown up between the military and its host community. Of course, there were tensions and conflicts, but discipline was strict and scandals were rare. Rare but not unknown. One night in a bierkeller in Bad Nauheim, a town a few miles up the autobahn from Wiesbaden, there occurred an incident which the army subsequently quickly tried to forget.

  Normally Jack would not have been in a bierkeller at all. He was not much of a pub man. Being extremely ambitious, he tended to reserve his spare time for study or sports. However, on this particular night Jack was ready to relax. He had been out on a week’s field training, a week of camp food and camp beds, during which time he had been cold and wet for twenty-four hours a day. Jack was ready to spend an evening drinking the German winter out of his bones.

  Being a little tired of Wiesbaden, he took the army bus to Bad Nauheim, where he very soon fell in with some fellow officers.

  “Hey, Jack, come over here and have a beer, you enigmatic bastard,” a captain known as Dipstick shouted as Jack entered the bar. Dipstick was so called because he was a mechanical engineer and also because he liked to talk about how much sex he was getting. He shared an offbase house in Bad Nauheim with another army captain called Rod. Dipstick and Rod were a real couple of good ol’ boys and were already half full of beer. Between them sat a German girl called Helga. Helga was the sort of girl who liked soldiers and in particular getting drunk and having sex with them. Had Helga been a man she would have been called a good ol’ boy too, just like Dipstick and Rod, but because she was a woman it was well known that she was a scrubber.

  Helga had been seeing quite a lot of Dipstick in the weeks preceding the night in question, but on one occasion she had also slept with Rod. Originally, the evening had been planned by Dipstick and Rod as a threesome. They had brought Helga to the bar in the hope of persuading her to have sex with them both. Rod and Dipstick had every reason to think that Helga would be amenable to this idea, because they had laughed about the possibility together on a number of occasions. Helga had even boasted that it would take at least two of them to handle her properly. A threesome was just the type of dangerous game that Helga was likely to get herself into because beneath her bravado she was a lonely, insecure girl and what she craved most was attention. A psychologist might have made much of Helga’s exhibitionism and lack of any real sense of self-worth. Dipstick and Rod just thought that she was a crazy, horny bitch.

  Also at the table when Jack arrived were Brad and Karl, two young lieutenants who had been in Germany for only three months, and Captain Schultz, Jack’s characterless, ineffective acquaintance from the Greenham base. Schultz had been dropping his wife off at her bridge club and had popped into the bar for a Coke and some food. True to form, Schultz was dithering over the bar menu, unable to decide between the roast pork sandwich and the wiener schnitzel with sauerkraut.

  Jack got some drinks and joined the group, which meant that there were now six men at the table and one woman.

  “We’re kind of guy-heavy here, babe,” Dipstick remarked to Helga. “Could you call a friend?”

  “OK, baby,” said Helga and went off to make a call.

  Sure enough, in a short while a girl called Mitti turned up. It was fun for the older men to watch Karl and Brad’s eyes pop out as Mitti joined their table. Her tiny waist and substantial bosom turned heads right across the bar. Mitti and Helga were both good-looking girls who were skilled at making the most of what they had, the fashions of the time being well suited to advertising one’s wares. Both women wore short, ballooning ra-ra skirts and cowboy boots. Helga had on a denim jacket encrusted with glittering fake diamonds and with a picture of Los Angeles painted on the back and the words “Hot LA Nights” picked out in twinkling studs and costume jewels. Under this she wore a pink shining spandex boobtube, from which her bosom seemed permanently in danger of escaping. Mitti wore a wetlook leather jacket, also jewel encrusted, with a collar that stood up round her ears and shoulders that jutted out about a foot and a half both ways, making it necessary for her to go through narrow doors sideways. Both Helga’s and Mitti’s hair was astonishing in a way that only mid-eighties hair could be; it was “power” hair, “me” hair, “fuck you” hair and “will you fuck me?” hair all rolled into one. Two great tousled blonde manes with platinum highlights. Gelled, sprayed, teased, streaked, glittered and glued and no doubt sheltering enough CFCs to bash a hole in the ozone layer the size of Germany. These were young women with lovely skin, but they had covered their faces in make-up, tan foundation, laden lashes and great bruises of purply blusher dusted across each cheekbone as if both women had been punched on the sides of their faces. They spoke through smoke-filled mouths, their glossy shining baby-pink lips edged with dark liner which made them look hard and vain.

  Drinks were poured and then more drinks, and the conversation got dirtier. That old favourite, swearing in different languages, came up and caused roars of laughter as Helga regaled the soldiers with the various German words for a blowjob.

  Karl and Brad were loving it. It felt great being real soldiers, hanging out with the older guys, talking dirty with the Kraut tarts. Even Jack was enjoying himself; it was all harmless enough, the girls were witty in an obscene, streetwise sort of way, and Dipstick as always knew the latest gags from the States.

  “Why does Gary Hart wear underpants?” he asked. “To keep his ankles warm!”

  The Democratic primaries were underway back home and Gary Hart, a promising, charismatic politician who had at one time been frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was now in deep trouble over what were coming to be known as “bimbo eruptions”. Hart had a reputation as a womanizer, a reputation that had been confirmed when he had been caught on a yacht canoodling with a bikini-clad girl who was in no way his wife. Most of the guys on the base were aghast that such a thing could be enough to fatally wound the man’s professional aspirations.

  “He’d get my vote,” Dipstick assured the company. “What do we want in the White House? Faggots?”

  The two young men roared their approval at this comment and slapped their thighs to show what regular guys they were. Schultz felt a little differently.

  “Well, I don’t know. I think we have a right to expect the very highest standards from those in public life,” he said. “After all, if a man lies to his wife, how can we tell he’s telling the truth to us?”

  “Bullshit, Schultz,” said Dipstick. “If a man says he doesn’t lie to his wife then he’s a liar anyway.”

  Jack realized that Mitti was looking at him intently. He returned her stare and smiled, thinking to himself that she was probably very attractive underneath all the hair and make-up. Mitti’s lips fell open slightly in the orthodox manner of the femme fatales of Dynasty. Her lips and teeth glistened, and slowly the pink, wet, pointy tip of her tongue gently journeyed from one corner of her hard-looking but soft mouth to the other. Mitti was not a subtle girl. She could not have made her intentions more clear if she had sent Jack a note asking for sex. She liked the look of Jack. She had quickly realized that he was a cut above the other men at the table. He roared less loudly, he leered less obviously and he was not forcing his legs against hers under the table.

  Jack was surprised to find that he was interested too. It had been a long time since he had made love. He had not been entirely celibate since running out on Polly four years before, but he’d not been very active either. He still thought
of Polly every day. He wanted her every day and no girl he had met since had remotely matched up to her. Certainly not this tawdry, brassy, blousey woman waggling her tongue at him across the table. She was everything that Polly had not been and vice versa. Yet there was something in Mitti’s eyes, something behind the silver eyeshadow, the thick liner, the great caked mascaraed lashes, that Jack recognized. Perhaps it was honesty, or a sense of humour; it might well have been loneliness. Jack found himself returning Mitti’s stare.

  “This dump’s getting kinda crowded,” said Dipstick, a white moustache of beer froth on his upper lip. “How about we all go drink champagne at the American?”

  The Hotel American was a favourite venue for one-night stands among the more discerning members of the Allied Armed Forces in the area. It was not sleazy, being rather well appointed and expensive, but neither did it object to partying. Its two suites boasted whirlpool baths in which three could sit comfortably and four even more so. This was a time when the almighty dollar was so strong that other currencies cowered before it; even the not unmuscular German Mark doffed its cap respectfully in the face of the purchasing power of the US buck. Americans overseas were far better off than they were at home and suites at the Hotel American were well within the budgets of discerning US officers.

  Helga said she was happy to drink champagne any time, Rod was of course enthusiastic about the idea, and Brad and Karl could hardly believe their luck. Mitti just shrugged. She shrugged directly at Jack, a shrug that suggested that she would like the idea a whole lot better if he was in on it. All eyes turned to Jack. Nobody considered Schultz. Even the young officers ignored him; he was just that kind of invisible person.