Love and Fallout (41 page)

A stream of footage from the sexiest charities is projected on a screen, interspersed with clips of celebrities promoting the causes nearest their hearts, and between unpacking a box of leaflets my gaze falls on a soap actress who's describing a well-building project in Tanzania. Dressed in a simple black t-shirt she offers high cheek-boned sincerity as the camera moves in for a close-up and the charity strap-line glides under her chin. I'm pondering our chances of securing the patronage of a local celebrity for Easy Green – perhaps a Look East presenter – when I catch sight of Pippa on the other side of the tent. Not a look-alike this time, but definitely my daughter. A spark of joy fires in my chest like a wick flaming on a long-dead candle. She's with a boy and they're moving in a circular path around the stands. I have a flashback to our last meeting, me in the stonewashed denim and blonde wig, her smeared with blue powder. Never mind, she's here, she's come to see me. I wave a leaflet in the air and track her arrival through the crowd.

‘Hello, Mum.'

It's not an unfriendly hello, but neither is it the voice of loving enthusiasm. I resist the urge to hug her, unsure how it'll be received. She's wearing the sort of outfit that seems to be popular, spotted Wellingtons and a short floaty dress that flares out prettily revealing an expanse of tanned thigh. The festival is bursting with teenage girls working the tantalising gap between welly and skirt. To keep it casual she's slung over an old cardigan, recognisable as one of Pete's, the sleeves rolled up to show off her bangles and wristbands.

‘We've got some time to kill, and Mikey wanted to have a look in here so…'

In one breath the flame in my chest is extinguished, but I carry on smiling.

Mikey is tall, good teeth, drainpipe jeans and Ramones t-shirt. Perched on his head is a little straw trilby. He has beautiful features and speaks a hybrid of public school dampened with estuary English.

‘You didn't say your mum was an environmentalist.'

Pip's eyebrows lift, as do mine, because the way he says environmentalist is the way someone might say concert pianist.

‘Yeah, she's been into the environment and stuff for years, I mean for as long as I can remember.'

I'm waiting for the crack about me signing her up to The Woodcraft Folk at birth but it doesn't come. Mikey nods. ‘Not like some of this lot, jumping on the bandwagon,' he turns his head to indicate the people outside the open wall of the tent. A new line is forming at the vegetarian risotto shack: options include porcini mushroom, grilled aubergine, and Tuscan bean. Never mind burgers and chips, this festival offers everything from macrobiotic salad to French bistro classics. It's the first time I've seen Bouillabaisse served in a field. While Mikey pours serious scorn on the middle-class masses, Pippa stares with a serious expression too, but hers is serious adoration and is directed at his neoclassical profile. When he's finished despairing, she says, ‘Mum was at Greenham Common actually.'

I swallow the overwhelming desire to laugh.

‘Right,' says Mikey.

I'm fairly sure he has no idea what Greenham Common is or was, but he pays the information due reverence anyway and in order to spare him the bluffing, I change the subject and ask what they've been to see. But after a brief rundown, he turns the conversation back to Easy Green. Pippa is quick to answer his questions and the guttered candle flares into life again – this might be the first time she's stood beside me with something like pride rather than embarrassment. He soaks up the information from Pippa and says to her, ‘So you're into this too?'

‘Yes. No! Well…' She regards me fleetingly, a glance that is almost an apology. ‘Not like Mum exactly… when she was my age she was a hard-core protestor.' She offers information about Greenham and as she does, Mikey regards me with extra admiration and I realise with new and swift understanding that Pippa is under a misapprehension. The version she has of her teenaged mother is nothing like the truth. Her face has become concentrated. ‘She was living outdoors and everything, and from what I've read…' She's read about this? When? ‘It was really hard, fetching water from a stand pipe, dealing with the police…' Somehow she imagines me as a former heroine of the frontline. ‘There's no way I could have done that.'

‘Pippa, Pip…' I place my hand on her arm to stem the flow, ‘I had next to no idea what I was doing back then.'

She faces me, puzzled.

‘But you were in the camp, weren't you? You left Gran's and went to live with those peace protestors.'

‘Yes, but it didn't mean I knew anything. I stumbled to Greenham partly by accident.'

She positions her head at a new angle, as if she's misheard, and I explain something about Stevenage and Tony and wanting to reinvent myself. Mikey glances from mother to daughter and seeing this is family business, moves tactfully along the trestle table to browse a stack of leaflets. As she listens, I sketch a picture of Stevenage in the 1980s. My days of copytyping. The lure of activism.

‘But what about
Never let a man be the reason for your decisions
, that's what you used to tell me,' she says. I shrug. ‘And you went off and… you mean, a bloke dumped you and you went to live on a common…'

‘It wasn't exactly like that.' She's staring at me in disbelief. ‘There was a bit more to it…'

‘That is desperate,' she repeats. I shrug, contrite. Mikey interrupts politely to remind Pippa that Little Boy Roots is on in the Feeling Wordy tent.

‘He's a slam poet,' she informs me before resting her eyes on Mikey once more. I haven't been inside the graffiti-sprayed spoken word den yet, only heard the poets echoing outside and admired their swagger from afar. ‘We better make a move,' says Pippa, consulting her festival brochure, then adds, ‘but this subject is not closed.' I hold my hands up in surrender, which elicits a grin.

For the next two hours, until it's time to leave the stand and meet Angela for coffee, I am foolishly, deliriously happy.

Suitably casual in flip-flops and jeans, Angela sits opposite me on a picnic bench, dipping her chopsticks into a box of Thai noodles while I sip a black coffee. She's wearing minimal make-up, only a sweep of mascara to emphasise her eyelashes which, as I remember, were so fair they almost disappeared. We've been discussing Easy Green.

‘What's your mission statement?' she asks.

‘We don't exactly have one.' I tell her some of the things we do, the energy advice service, and the schools workshops, and the gardening project. She interrupts, chopsticks aloft.

‘This is the problem, Tessa, you're attempting too much. You're unfocussed. You need to project a single, clear message.' I nod, remembering the young Angela and her bullet points. She takes another mouthful of noodles then adds as an afterthought, ‘And you should reconsider the name.'

‘Really?'

‘
Easy Green
, it sounds like an airline for hippies,' she replies, neatly pinching a cube of tofu. I try not to feel bruised: she's directed lots of charity campaigns, she knows what she's talking about, and I trust her in the way I trusted her at camp, the girl with the clipboard ready to oversee all eventualities. ‘You need to concentrate on defining your brand, raising your profile, diversifying your funding streams, all that stuff. We should arrange a strategy meeting.' I'm touched by that use of
we
, grateful she's making it her business to help.

On a nearby stage, a small Andalusian woman is stamping and clicking in an impressive display of flamenco and the audience cheers her on. I take another sip of my rapidly cooling coffee. The morning began with blue skies, warm buttery light filtering across the grass, but since midday the cloud has moved in and the wind has changed direction. A delicious smell of green curry comes wafting over, reminding me of the less appetising aromas of the common and the long hours and days when we had nothing to do but sit and chat or stare into the fire. Or, if you were Angela, work through a pile of books. I picture her deep in her parka, deep in a Russian novel.

‘What's amusing you?' she asks.

‘Oh, nothing. I was thinking about Greenham, what we would have given for some of this entertainment.'

‘There was always the women's puppet theatre.'

‘True.' I remember something else, ‘What about that girl who visited once with the harp? Dragged it over the mud.' We agree that making our own entertainment was part of the challenge. I nearly mention Barbel's birthday party but edit myself in time, ‘My kids can't live without their technology.'

‘I know, even here we're offering Wi-Fi pods,' she remarks. ‘It's a modern disease, the fear of boredom. There's a name for it.' Two blinks are all it takes for her to find the word. ‘Thaasophobia. As opposed to Theophobia.'

‘What's that?'

‘The fear of God,' she says, tilting the box. ‘I might have suffered from that myself once.'

A crocodile of children winds through the crowd, following a woman in orange pantaloons who leads them onwards while clanging a pair of cymbals. Feel Good kids don't have to settle for the usual climbing frames and face-paint; they're invited to learn circus skills or devise their own plays with the assistance of professional acting troupes. I marvel to Angela again about everything on offer.

‘People come for the entertainment, but they're really paying for something else,' she says motioning to the glut of recycling bins, and the fresh fruit stand and the Feeling Caring Zone, ‘All this helps to create a mood. People like being in a community, and that's the experience they get here, even if it's only for a long weekend.' She's right, the atmosphere is co-operative, relaxed and almost self-consciously friendly. ‘And research shows that being green, or rather perceiving oneself to be green, makes us feel good about ourselves. So we push that.'

‘Hence the solar-panelled shower blocks?'

‘Better to have them than not. I love this festival, but no one's here to solve global warming, they're here to have a good time and they don't want to feel guilty about it.' She says it matter of factly, and looks to the crowds migrating between tents. ‘In the end, what everyone wants is some great entertainment, a few drinks, Pad Thai,' she lifts the empty box to indicate herself, ‘…and a nice fuzzy feeling on the way home in the Prius. Of course the ultimate answer is to consume less, but the world would stop spinning if that actually happened. So it's our job to deliver another message: consume
differently
. Make a
difference
.' A cloud of applause rises and breaks from the flamenco stage. ‘People like you are rare, Tessa.'

‘People like me?'

‘People who aren't just talking the talk.'

She's waiting for me to speak and I do, awkwardly. ‘You just have to remind yourself what's important and what isn't.' I don't mention the fact that between conducting home-visits to discuss cavity wall insulation I've been tormented by daydreams set in swanky advertising offices, none of which feature conversations about reflective radiator panels.

‘And what isn't?' she asks.

‘I don't know… shopping.' This is the first thing to enter my head, and definitely the wrong thing to say given that Angela works in advertising and hers could be the hand that helps to feed us. But she isn't offended.

‘The truth is people like stuff. And they like new stuff. Novelty. It makes life more joyous. I have a good lifestyle – could I give it up now and live in a one bedroom house and never buy another designer frock or try a new restaurant? Probably. If I had to. But I don't want to. In the end you make a choice.' I listen to see which way the conversation will go. ‘I mean, obviously I
recognise
the argument that we're conditioned to buy more than we could ever possibly need.' I meet her eyes, unnerved by her ability to second-guess my thoughts.

‘Sorry, I didn't mean to sound pompous. I think I might be a little jealous of your choices actually. There's nothing glamorous about what I do.'

She smiles; the ground is safe beneath us.

‘When I think back, it's hard to believe we lived like that on the common.' Her tone is unsettling. ‘It seems unimaginable to me now.'

The young Angela never complained about the weather, she never complained about anything tangible like wet feet or poor food. Her grievances were large and global.

‘One of my toenails went black and fell off,' she says in sudden memory and laughs, startled anew. ‘Probably from wearing those same wretched boots.'

‘Really? I had no idea.'
Why would I have had any idea about Angela's toenails? They were as private as her feelings.

‘I limped around for about three weeks.'

I picture a ring of booted feet propped on hot stones at the fireside. While we were chatting and joking Angela must have been hidden away in her tent, ministering to her toes. ‘Everything's easier when you're young,' I say.

‘True,' she says, ‘but think of Jean and all those older women who gave up their comforts…'