It was Maureen who said she’d be an eejit to go through the fence until she turned sixteen.
“Do you want to get arrested? You won’t be getting a slap-up down the Rokeby if social services get involved I can tell you.”
“They don’t own me.”
“Yes they do,” said Dawn and Maureen at the same time.
“Since when?”
“Wake up Bridgit,” said Dawn.
“You’ll be front page of the fucking Daily Mail. Can’t you see the headlines,” said Maureen.
“Dirty Fucking Kidnapping Lesbians,” said Dawn. “They’ll love it.”
And so Bridget stayed camp side of the fence, not content at all to watch her friends run raids and come back buzzing with the power of proving the whole thing was a scam dreamt up by the boys in power to make themselves feel big. Reporters off the news pointed microphones and no one pretended they weren’t breaking the law, they said to journalists whose hair blew about like Heseltine’s, who stood in the mud looking worried, If a bunch of women with no training can get to the missiles, then anyone can, and it widened Bridget’s understanding. They weren’t just against the bomb, they were against the government selling the lie that the bombs would be safe there, that there was no danger to the people having nuclear warheads lodged in their back garden, that the military were all over it yet everyday women went in, climbed over or through the fence that ran flimsy round the base, a few snips of the bolt cutters and that was it, doorways all over the wire, hidden unless the squaddies searched and they didn’t search, they marched on with their dogs and their guns while women covered in mud and brambles crept and held their breath and scrambled through to make trouble.
“That’s what makes me laugh,” said Maureen. “They call us a nuisance as if that wasn’t the point.”
Bridget crawled with them through the undergrowth, bolt cutters hidden down her boots, a pair of wellies she’d been allowed to buy with money from the bucket of donations at Yellow gate, stopping short at the fence, turning back when they went through. She felt useless waiting at camp but it was better than being found out, better than being sent home. She’d be sixteen one day. April. Fucking forever away but Maureen wouldn’t have it. And she still got to make banners and blockade the gates and sing songs of protest and distress. She still got to chuck porridge at convoys.
In that bit between Christmas and New Year when no one knew what to do and everyone was sick of turkey she went to Basingstoke with Maureen and bought ladders and tied them on the roof of the car with bits of old rope. On the way back they stopped at every carpet shop in Newbury and asked if there were any off cuts they could have and as 1982 became 1983 she helped fling them over the barbed wire. There were journalists there that night, loads of them but none of them stopped the women from climbing over. Some of them even cheered like Bridget cheered when the women reappeared on the half-built silo and hand in hand danced the new year in, their silhouettes stark against the lightening sky.
It was with Maureen, Dawn and Cerise that she began to feel like there might be a person inside her fat and hair and spots. Not just lumpy Bridget that her dad poked fun at with his fingers, digging into her sides and saying, That’s where all the cake had gone, and her mum spoke to in quiet whispers about toner. Not just this failure in school, Janet Reynold’s daughter who got extra chips at lunchtime, as if she needed them, the one the teachers felt sorry for. At Greenham her body was useful, she was liked because she was there, not tucked up inside cosy middle England, but out in the cold and the mud putting blood and guts in the way of destruction. At Greenham she was free.
So she stayed through freezing winter into wet spring, through vigilante attacks and her mum trying to get her home on her own, not with her dad that time, but turning up as if they could talk woman to woman only Bridget felt like an animal beside something caged, she slammed the door on Maureen’s car where they’d gone to talk and stalked off not knowing that the next day the bailiffs would come and she’d wish for a minute that she hadn’t done that, that instead she’d said, Alright mum, and let her mum take her by the hand.
They turned up while she was washing cups in a bucket, a job no one had asked her to do, she’d just done it. She was washing cups, crouched over cold soapy water when a machine like a monster with gnashing teeth rolled into camp followed by men in limp ties and thin shirts who piled out of cars as if they owned the place, walked about with their eyes on the women who stood up like Bridget stood as soon as she saw them. Bridget ran into the woods but others were caught, rounded up, piled into trucks and held at Newbury racecourse like a herd of unwashed animals. She heard about it on their return, guiltily waiting in the wreckage, feeling like she should have gone with them.
“How is this fair?” she shouted at Dawn, not meaning to shout but it came out that way.
“They make the law,” Dawn replied. “Yesterday it was legal to camp on common ground. Today it’s not.”
It fired Bridget up, made her stay more, erased the moments when she thought of home, her mum, the softness of Hampton Close. The bailiffs came again and again, turned up with their dogs and munchers any time they pleased, cheered on by Heseltine, licenced by Thatcher, applauded by the people of Newbury to remove the ugliness of women saying no; the refuse lorry with its teeth, indiscriminate, a different animal to the women, a metal monster that ate every bender, tipi, tent, every scrap of tarpaulin strung between trees, every sofa and tatty red armchair, nothing left, not even the food or water barrels, the fire kicked over and pissed on.
They chucked a woman rolled in her sleeping bag in amongst the jaws, only Dawn and Maureen got her out in time. They smashed up cars and caravans and towed the wrecks away. They set tents on fire while the police stood by and it taught her to set her sights on her sixteenth birthday, the 1st of April, April Fool’s when she could do more than wash cups and go down the Rokeby Arms, when she could break in and break the law and no fucker, no police or parents could stop her.
Bridget! God, her transformation is stunning.
Watching Bridget’s transformation demonstrates just how powerful and influential an environment can be on a developing self. At home, she was timid, lost, insecure. At Greenham she’s fierce and unabashedly so. So curious to read how this all evolves for her, will it ever become too much or will she rise to levels of leadership at the Commons? Don’t answer.:)