Visiting the past

After posting last night's memories, I was driven to look for the few photos I have of our visit to the US cruise missile base at Greenham Common. I don't think I had a camera of my own in these days, so the photos I have were taken by my friend and given to me as prints - and there are actually only two of them on my computer. The left hand photo shows me at the end of our day, at the camp where the bus was going to pick us up in an hour or so. You can see the tents, and the rounded forms of the more permanent dwellings, one of which might be a bender (made from the branch of a tree to which it was still attached, if I recall correctly). There was a great deal of polythene sheeting in evidence.

The women sitting round in pairs and groups are part of our busload; I'm not sure to whom the feet on the left belong. You can see that I'm dog-tired, and probably have a sore back too. This is the main gate area, I think - it's certainly beside the road. There is nothing glamorous about it. 

The right-hand photo was actually taken in the morning. I'm feeling revived after that little lie-down in a tent, and by my breakfast, and I can't believe I'm actually touching the wire of this notorious base. (I know. I was hyped up.) You can see one of the patrolling soldiers behind me to the left. It looks just as bleak inside the base as it did outside.

I admired hugely the women who stayed there, not only among the squalor of what nowadays we call "wild camping" but also in the face of the creative opposition of the law enforcers and the military. They worked very hard at creating cheerful spots along the fence, and at regulating the necessary activities of anyone who was there. (I remember a notice: Wimmin: shit in the pits and not on the common). They sang, they cooked, they greeted us - not as chancers who'd appeared like protest tourists, only to disappear home to comfort, but as fellow campaigners who were there to show solidarity. 

Tomorrow, I'm led to believe, the sun will shine, the temperature rise, and I will get to see my hairdresser. Today, it's been so miserable the only photos I took would merely depress. But I may return to this era on another rainy day ...