A Museum Peace

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I admit to feeling unease and a sense of cynicism around the memorialising of the Greenham Common peace protest, like it belongs in some kind of peace museum. I feel irked by all the choirs, films, books and documentaries which look back on this time. Why? Because nothing has really changed. OK the nukes at Greenham Common have gone, it’s a common again and that’s wonderful. But what about now? We still have US nukes at Lakenheath, we are still a launching pad for US bombs, we are still America’s poodle. Mutually Assured Destruction is still very possible. What a pity war is not in a museum, instead of peace protests like Greenham.

As a kid I was asked to sit on the front steps of our house, Inshallah, and talk about why I was going on the Star March, ‘Because my Mum is,’ I said. Needless to say, my words fell on the cutting room floor. I was eight years old for fuck’s sake. What was I supposed to say? I was not like Keridwyn, that precocious, politicised daughter of my mother’s friends. The one who hung around with dodgy men at Medina, the Rajneesh commune near to their house. Did anything happen to her there? Her parents worried about her, whilst choosing weird names for their new offspring. Kerdiwyn’s little sister was called Zilla, which always made me think of Godzilla. Her brother, Fergus, saved my life. His name always made me think of the Fun Guys, a Ladybird book about mushrooms.

The heatwaves of July ‘83 made the tarmac on the roads melt. Local farmers allowed us to pull on to their land en route to the base. They let us swim in their outdoor pools. I’d been in the shallow end but slipped into the deep end and started drowning. None of the grown-ups noticed. The other kids thought I was laughing. Fergus, only one year older than me, dived in and pulled me out.

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I search the internet for modern day UK anti-nuclear peace protests, mostly made up of old people, small in number. The police are filming them, intimidating them, pretending to be nice. Most ‘ordinary’ people ignore them. Some denigrate them. If you try to find newspaper articles online about what they are up to, the page is covered in click bait, older women with massive tits, adverts for fat men who should be doing Thai Chi walking to slim down and get some pecks. We’re all hypnotised by You Tube and adverts to buy shit.

The truth is, I hated protesting. Most of us kids did. Mum loved it. Now I’m older than she was back then. Now I crave peace. I think about Thomas Merton, the reclusive monk who wrote controversial letters from his sanctuary in Gethsemane. He knew a nuclear war was not winnable. His pacifism got him into trouble. He collaborated with a peace loving Vietnamese Buddhist monk then died under mysterious circumstances.

Am I coward not to give up my life and protest like my mother did? Would it be hypocritical to memorialise our part in the anti-nuclear movement back then? My intention is to give a child’s eye view. I wonder if it is it possible to live in peace; to be the change we want to see.

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I’ve been having nightmares about war and climate change. Whether we choose to look away or wear silly red dresses and look mournfully at police at scantily attended O.A.P peace protests, these facts are always in our collective psyche. The earth is getting dryer, hotter. Wars rage. The seas rise. The. nukes. are. still. here.

Breathing in, I am alive, breathing out, this is not my fault.

1. Taking up the lead aged 8, in my t-shirt dress, en route to Greenham from Norfolk with Mum and our wagon (no idea who the shirtless man is).