England

The Obsessive Diary - 2nd August

Housekeeping: I’ll be LIVE in conversation with S.E. Reid today 4pm BST / 8am PDT. Sally writes Talebones, an ongoing collection of character-driven speculative fiction with a spiritual, supernatural, or uncanny twist. Though we know each other here in the pages of Substack, we’ve never met. Let’s see where the conversation takes us.

Keep an eye 👀 on Notes for the live link.

I can’t seem to get the engine started. Literally yesterday, B’s car wouldn’t start and we strained and pushed trying to get it up hill through gravel, failing and throwing on the handbrake before it rolled over all three of us and crashed backwards into a motorbike and a wall. That’s what I saw happening as we took a breath. Jump leads and a lesson in car maintenance and I was off to the aerodrome where empty jumbo jets leaned against each other in the heavy light. They make movies here. The track was the home to Top Gear. Once upon a time a long time ago an annoying neighbour convinced me I should send my tiny babies to nursery here, a 10 month stint I regret deeply. The hangers and wide open spaces reminded me of searching for Greenham on the day they buried the Queen.

While the entirety of England sat down in front of their tv’s or lined the Mall or held sombre pastiche’s in their living rooms, I drove the blissfully empty highways to Berkshire, pictures in my mind of 1982 and fences, of women with shaggy mullets and policemen in bobby helmets, Thatcher and Reagan, the British Empire fallen but its reputation still intact. In 1982 England still didn’t think it had done anything wrong.

The place as a whole is easy to find, there are signs for Greenham Common and even for a peace garden that represents in tragic, rubbish strewn neglect the nineteen years of the women’s camp. It was lucky I’d done my homework - if the first you knew of the protest site was that circle of brambles, a small plaque commemorating a woman who died - you’d let your dog off the lead for a pee, check your phone and move on. It made me even more wild with determination that Fallout would be a success, that it would reach people, tell the story of Greenham to the ears and eyes and sensibilities that would not forget. In the silence of a land in mourning for a Queen I tracked the place of Main Gate, drove silent paths, stopped amongst low buildings and a picnic bench where unmonarchist bikers gathered with styrofoam cups.

I’m looking for Greenham I called across the sprayed grass.

The what? They called back.

The airbase. You know, Greenham?

You’re in it, said one, like Captain Barbossa to Miss Swan. And as he spoke, the airbase swam into view. What I’d taken for prefab put me up shacks were mess halls and bunk rooms of an American Army long gone. I was standing in the US airbase that thousands of women had relentlessly broken into, larked about on, hot wired jeeps and strung with wool. The chainlink fences in which they had cut doorways, on their bellies amongst nettles and thorns watching army legs walk by, were vanished. The gates they’d chained with bike locks were taken down. There was no trace of tarpaulins and ropes and fires, the buckets of blood and maggots thrown at them, the singing in the air. All that fight, almost two decades of non-violence from the women in the face of the ultimate violence from government had removed not only the nuclear warheads from British soil and common land but all trace of their existence. England had relented but in a final act of vengeance and shame, taken their memory with it.

The Silos remain locked behind barbed wire, but that’s it. There is a concrete post, all that remains of Blue Gate on which a snake is painted. On the other side of the common, the lookout tower has become a cafe. There’s an information sign but it gives nothing of the true history of the place. Herstory, as Bridget would say.

Rachael Spavins sent me this picture yesterday, a painting from the summer exhibition at the RA, and Greenham is on my mind. I’m reproducing it here with the kind permission of Adam Foreman, the artist.

Greenham Common 1983: They Are Still Present by Adam Foreman

And also, we have a cover for FALLOUT. It’s coming soon, next year, April 2026 and though there’s much to happen between now and then, here’s a sneak preview with credit to the genius that is Alisa Kennedy Jones and the team at Empress Editions…

Eleanor