Canvey Island (19 page)

‘What do you mean?'

I knelt down and turned to their little girl, imagining she was Lucy. ‘Come on, get on to my shoulders. I'll carry you.'

‘What are you doing?' the mother screamed. ‘Leave her alone. You're mad, you are.'

The dad shouted at me, ‘Don't you touch our little girl.'

‘I'm trying to save your lives.' I stood back up. ‘Can't you see the danger? The storm's coming.'

‘But it's miles away,' the man said. ‘And we've got shelter here. The tide never comes this far up.'

‘Today it will,' I said. ‘And it's not just the tide, it's the cliff.'

I could see the veil of rain approaching, the sky whitening now from dove-grey to an almost arctic-white blur.

‘Come on,' I shouted. ‘I'm a water engineer. I know what I'm talking about.' I crouched and said to the little girl, ‘Get on my back.'

‘What will I do, Mummy?'

‘You're a what?' the man interrupted.

‘A water engineer.' I looked at the girl. ‘Come on, darling.'

She climbed on to my back even though her parents had not decided whether to obey me or not.

‘All of you.' I grabbed the boy's hand. ‘We have to get out of here.'

‘What are you doing?' said the woman. ‘You can't just take our children off like this.'

‘Look,' I said. ‘Can't you see that I know what I'm talking about? Why else would I be here? Stop buggering about and come with me.'

‘There's no need to swear.'

I stopped and looked at the man. ‘You have to trust me. Come on. Move.'

‘All right, all right,' he said.

His wife grumbled as she grabbed at their beach stuff. ‘We're coming as quick as we can.'

‘I told you we should have gone home before this,' said her husband.

‘Leave it, Malcolm.'

‘Come on,' I called, setting off with their children. ‘We have to beat the tide.'

Behind us both sea and sky had become a whiteness brightened only by lightning.

‘I can't see,' said the little boy.

‘It's all right,' I said. ‘Hold on to me.'

The waves had reached the edge of the cliff and were striking the boulders at the base, rebounding in white sprays of foam. The rocks began to shake from below.

‘Run,' I shouted.

We made our way through leftover picnics, broken deckchairs and abandoned sandcastles. I could just make out the coastguards near the top of the cliff chasing people back, cars turning in the middle of the road, people bent forward and heading for shelter.

I looked back, checking if we were still together. The little girl cried that she wanted to get down. She was frightened of falling.

‘It's all right, darling, it's all right.'

Her brother kept holding on to me. ‘Come on,' I shouted, ‘we're nearly there.'

At last the sands began to harden beneath our feet as we neared the shore. The storm was relenting, moving beyond us.

‘Are you all right, love?' the man called to his wife.

She looked back at the sea and at the bay where they had been sheltering. ‘Are we safe yet?'

‘I think so,' the man said, waiting for her to catch up. ‘It's all right, love, it's all right.'

He held out his arms and his wife tried to smile. ‘I know, Malc. I'm sorry I was cross with you.'

‘I love you, Kath.'

At last we reached the safety of the dunes, throwing ourselves down on to the grass. The two children cuddled into their mother. The man was about to say something to me but gestured that he was waiting to get his breath back.

And then we began to hear a deep rumbling, not from above, but from under the ground, a low dark sound amidst the weight and the drama of the storm, building in volume until it dominated all the noise around it.

The cliff under which the family had sheltered now began to wrench itself away from the land. The earth was so sodden that the fall wasn't so much stone rent apart, cracking and tumbling, as a great implosion of overhanging mud, grass, road and housing. The cliff disintegrated from all angles and slid heavily down, sloughing itself off from the mainland and splitting against the sea.

I had organised boulders and stone, scaffold and cement to restrain just such a storm and just such a tide but the water had found each weak spot, surging through the defences, the sea greedy for the land, hungry for the fabric of the cliff.

The bay became a mass of mud, water and storm. I watched a house teeter uneasily and then slowly tip over and inch away down the remains of the exposed cliff face. It broke apart as it fell, the windows of its conservatory bulging out and cracking, the brick walls fracturing and the furniture tumbling: sofas, chairs, televisions, beds, wardrobes and tables, all falling in a dull roar of earth, stone, rubble and chalk.

I saw a red dress caught in the wind, floating down like a parachute above the debris, and an exposed bedroom wall with
a mirror still hanging. A brass bed slid across the last of the flooring and down into the sea, before the rest of the home followed: its garage and garden shed, its front porch and bird bath, its swing and its sandpit. Everything was given over to the sea.

I looked at the people around me and I heard my mother's voice:

There was an old woman called Nothing-at-all
Who lived in a dwelling exceedingly small
A man stretched his mouth to its utmost extent
And down at one gulp house and old woman went
.

‘Bloody hell,' said the man. ‘You saved our lives.'

Afterwards he bought me a drink and we sat with our pints at the window of the pub. Still the rain fell, streaking the glass, each drop skittering down, leaving tadpole trails.

‘We're a close family,' the man said. ‘I don't know how we'd cope if something bad happened to any of us. The kids, Kath, I don't know.'

His wife was drying the children in their camper van. Then they were going to join us. He'd decided to have a few drinks and then order a family fish and chip supper as a treat. Malcolm said he knew that's what Kath would like.

‘The thing about our family,' he went on, ‘is that we always know what everyone else wants without them saying. It's incredible. I can even tell what my children are thinking.'

Well, I can't
, I thought.
I rarely know what Lucy thinks at all. And as for Claire
…

How was I supposed to know anything when they'd taken themselves away from me?

I wondered what they were doing. I wanted them to come home and to love me and to understand what I had been through. I wanted Claire to sympathise with what I could not do and to be proud of what I'd actually done, at least in saving the lives of these people. I could have died and she wouldn't have known anything about it. She didn't even know where I was.

I wanted her to return and tell me that she loved me. Because, for all the good she was doing at Greenham, I couldn't help but
think she was causing damage elsewhere: to Lucy, to our marriage and to our future.

I didn't know how much longer I could hold on without her. I decided that in the morning I would drive over and bring them both back. It was crazy that we weren't together.

When the women found out I was a teacher I soon had my own little children's class: informal school in the week and crèche at weekends. I slanted the lessons to suit the situation. We used maths to count policemen and missiles, art to make banners, and English to write letters to members of parliament. We even made trips round the perimeter fence and I talked about the geography of England and why it had to be preserved. I realised that sometimes when I talked I was using Martin's words, adapting his thoughts, and I began to miss him all over again. I wanted him to be with us and felt guilty when so many of the other women spoke of how glad they were to be free of men. They made jokes about the smell of them, their endless exhaustion, their selfishness and laziness in bed. Some of them impersonated their former partner's pomposity, ridiculing their sense that life was so much more difficult for them if only we women knew. We remarked how men's clothes were such depressing colours – taupe, beige, grey, slate, mud and fawn – how they kept hoisting their belts in an attempt to show that they were losing weight; and how they leant back and swayed from side to side as they spoke, sometimes closing their eyes so that they could not be interrupted.

I laughed with them even though I knew in my heart that Martin wasn't like that at all.

But Lucy and I soon made friends. There was Joyce who wanted to be one of the first women priests; Martha who had been training to be a doctor; and Kate who was also a musician. We started by staying at the Green Gate, the one nearest the silos, but then
moved to the Orange Gate, because it had become the official musicians' area and from there we organised much of the singing. Together we played ballads and folk songs of unity and protest: ‘Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream', ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' and the Phil Ochs song ‘Do What I Have to Do'.

The women told us what they had done so far: wedging potatoes deep into the exhausts of the trucks, bolting security gates together to hamper movement in and out, and keening repeatedly whenever large vehicles came near.

The previous Hiroshima Day they had gathered a hundred thousand stones and placed them round the Newbury war memorial, one for each life lost to the atomic bomb. A veteran shouting, ‘Where would we be if we hadn't fought the Japs?' had slapped Joyce in the face. Another woman had yelled, ‘My husband died for the likes of you.' There were even anti-peace protests in Newbury town centre, with ‘Women for Defence' in floral skirts, carrying handbags that matched their shoes, brandishing banners saying ‘Squatters Out' and ‘Greenham Women, you disgust us'. They looked like the local Conservative Association on a day out.

I suggested we bought a great swathe of red material and held up a sign with it saying: ‘The blood of one family; imagine the blood of one nation.'

My first action was a die-in at Orange Gate. I had the idea of painting outlines round our bodies, like a mass-murder scene, so that even after we had been dragged away people would think what it meant. Lucy was given one of the paint pots but she found it difficult to keep up.

‘It's so hard, Mummy.' She was painting round Julie, a woman who had already been arrested five times for causing criminal damage to the perimeter fence.

‘Just do one pot. Then you can lie down and I'll paint you.' I wanted the outline to look like a dead mother and child. I thought it would be more shocking that way.

Lucy lay down and I told her to cup her hand to her cheek to protect it from the hard surface of the road. Then I began to paint around her. A local photographer came up to us and started taking pictures. Lucy smiled, almost posing for the camera.

‘Keep still,' I hissed. ‘You're supposed to be dead.'

‘But I want to look pretty even if I am dead.'

‘That's our girl,' said Julie.

‘Thanks,' said the photographer. ‘You can get up now.'

‘We don't want to get up,' Julie said firmly.

‘No, it's OK,' he said. ‘I've finished.'

‘We're not doing this for you.'

‘Then what are you doing it for?'

‘We're doing it for the future,' I said. ‘For all of us.'

‘Shame you have to drag your child into it.'

‘She wanted to come. Perhaps if yours came too we could get rid of the missiles and be done with it.'

‘I don't have children,' he replied. ‘But when I do I'm going to look after them properly. I'm not going to make them lie down in the middle of traffic with a bunch of bloody lesbians.'

We decided we had to ‘increase the peace'.

We planned to embrace the base once more, thirty-five thousand women in a human chain round the nine miles of the perimeter fence.

We started singing and dancing in groups, forming small circles and gathering hands with all who came near. When the circles broke up or we needed a break for a cup of tea, we started to fill the fence. We wedged photographs of our children, cardboard doves and poetry inside the gaps, turning a wall of destruction into a frieze of colour. When we saw the helicopters overhead we held up shards of glass, cathedrals of light, to deflect the negative energy. We wanted to lock in the violence and surround it with healing.

The helicopters flew low over the base. I think they were trying to blow us away from the fence, but we kept holding on to each other. Inside was the dead grey cement of aggression and destruction. Outside lay the green of summer. When the police accused us of being lesbians in need of a good man we sang back: ‘We're here because we're queer because we're here because we're queer.'

I tied Lucy's pale-brown hair in purple, green and white ribbons, the colours of the suffragettes, and gave her a packet of seeds wrapped in mud to throw into the base so that life might re-grow there. There were white poppies, sweet violets and lily of the valley. Lucy sat on my shoulders and lobbed the ball over the fence. We watched its soft arc against the sky and its flight downward on to the
ground, the smallest gesture, a simple act of hope. Then one of the policemen smiled and I heard him say, ‘I wish my daughter could do that,' and I knew that we were winning.

It was so obvious that what we were doing was right. I couldn't understand how anyone could be against us. All we wanted was a gentler world.

When I arrived the women were lighting candles and holding up signs: ‘Grannies for Peace', ‘No Cruise', ‘Give Peace a Chance'. There were banners that at first I thought contained bizarre spelling mistakes – ‘Womyn for Peace', ‘Womyn for the Future' – until I realised there were no ‘men' in these ‘women'.