Obedience is Freedom. Jacob Phillips
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the dusty Berkshire lanes with leaves in their hair’.2 The single-carriage roads that led up to the site were arched over by the boughs of ancient trees, under which far more orderly battalions had once marched in lockstep. The woodland on either side was birthing its September fruits. The leaves were still green and lush, just tinged by the encroaching autumn.
When nature called, the kids would run ahead and duck under these trees, clambering through the leaves into dusty enclosures enclosed by broad, low branches. Some would dare to run further into the woods, wanting to be first to glimpse the eight-foot wire fence recently erected around the Common. On the other side of this fence, the grass had that scorched yellowy colour that can make the English countryside in late August feel almost Mediterranean, if only for a few long days. Squinting in the summer sun after emerging from the trees, the kids saw freshly tarmacked roads and a few clusters of USAF buildings in the distance. The marchers emerged from the mysterious hollows and reaches of the English countryside to approach the main gate. Mowed grass verges appeared, with gorse between them and the woods, and neatly trimmed little privet hedges in front. Coming from the musty darkness of the trees into the brightly dazzling sun, the newly landscaped terrain seemed fuzzy and unreal.
There was a carnival atmosphere. The women had a folk band playing alongside them and ‘they all looked so beautiful with their scarves and ribbons and flowers … The colours, the beauty, the sun … and so many people’.3 Some had decided to chain themselves to the fences and maybe it was the joyful intensity of the occasion that led some of the others to decide they could not simply go back home and return to normal. Some set up a large campfire and slept out under the stars. Over the following days provisions arrived, makeshift structures were erected and, around the nucleus of the fire, some of the women decided to stay indefinitely. The encampment was later named Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Over the next three years it developed into what is now a well-known chapter in recent English history.
Within a few weeks it was decided it should be a women-only space. Some of the men present had been confrontational with the authorities, taken control of elements of the camp, or been overprotective of the women during skirmishes with bailiffs and police. These behaviours were not welcome. Numerous direct actions, court cases, imprisonments and campaigns took place in the next three years. The most well-known event is probably the ‘Embrace the Base’ event on 11 December 1983, when 30,000 women encircled and enclosed the entire base, linking arms around the nine-mile perimeter fence. There were marquees set up by the main gate for refreshments and childcare. The kids inside were kept amused with painting and makeshift puppet shows and their creations were later used to decorate the barbed wire. The event was on national television news. During the report, talking heads were interviewed in front of the main gate, voicing either approval or disapproval of the action. The kids’ brightly coloured paintings and puppets could be seen some way behind them but the wire fence was not visible at such a distance. Their creations thus seemed to be suspended in mid-air, hovering on the horizon. The women’s children, seeing their pictures on the TV, would be overcome with excitement and pride. Their triumphant cheers drowned out the droning commentary on the merits or demerits of the event itself.
Other direct actions were more volatile, taking place under cover of darkness. The project to house cruise missiles at USAF Greenham Common involved regular manoeuvres, when military trucks would take the missiles out of the silos and drive them around the surrounding countryside of Hampshire and Wiltshire, usually to a firing range on Salisbury Plain, five miles west of Stonehenge. To prepare and practise for a launch, the missiles would be edged out of the Greenham silos with great care, with much monitoring, pacing and controlled moments of focused pushing. Then the warheads left their dark place and were exposed for a moment to the night air and the stars, before being bundled hastily into the cribs built onto the military trucks waiting outside. These nuclei of awesome atomic power were then borne along the country lanes, passing through the high streets of small local towns, around the market squares and past the pubs, newsagents and grocery shops.
The women had phone networks on 24-hour alert all around the surrounding counties and would mount spontaneous blockades and sit-ins on the country lanes to stop these manoeuvres. These blockades developed into liturgies with regular features; sometimes the lighting of flares or the smearing of mud on the trucks’ windscreens while the convoy waited for police to clear the roads. Often, the operation would be aborted and the missiles sent back in retreat. Returning to the Common, the ancient role of Greenham would then recommence. This was always a site of both exit and return; a place from which people could depart into battle, but also come back to peace. The missiles went from ex utero to in utero. The shutters would be reopened, the cargo carefully laid back in the immersive darkness. As the soldiers trekked back to their lodgings shortly before dawn, they would hear the triumphant women drinking and singing in victory around the dots of flame they could make out coming from their fires all along the perimeter fence. With each battle’s end, there was a common place to which people returned.
The Women’s Peace Camp was a nexus of intersecting battlelines. There was the intersection of west and east. This was the making local in parochial England of the architectonic power blocks of the Cold War. This was where the opposition of the ‘free world’ to ‘communism’ was not rhetorical, it was real. It was also where the faultlines in domestic politics met, still then largely categorizable as Left and Right. The actual battles of the Cold War were never really between Americans and Russians, nor did the Greenham Women interact much with the American troops who worked in the compound. When there was combat, it was between fellow citizens, between the protestors and the police or bailiffs, or between others sympathetic to either one side or another. One woman described the locals of Greenham with contempt as exuding a ‘kind of deferential, cap-touching Toryism’.4 The villagers were angry about the encampment, as were many of their magistrates, councillors and judges. Stories were passed from woman to woman along the pathways encircling the base, of local men lurking in the brambles ready to pounce or gangs of lads pouring sacks of cement into their tanks of drinking water. Even among the women various tensions flared up, usually between those with more radical and separatist impulses, against those with careers, husbands and children to factor into their plans. Yet another battleline surrounded the camp; that between men and women. This is the most primordial division of them all, a boundary always assumed until recently to be the most insurmountable.
Looking at this episode of history now, certain things command our attention. The command is heard all the more forcefully because the official chroniclers of Greenham have been so inattentive. Looking at history with your eyes firmly focused upon it makes your own time look different when your gaze turns back. Glance at history lazily and your eyes will never see the horizon beyond your own. Then history affirms the status quo, the boundary between then and now is just as expected, not fuzzy and unreal as your eyes adjust to something new. But Greenham does not just ratify the values of today, there are times when it also revokes them. That is, this episode shows a clear intersecting of things today’s culture wars cannot countenance as belonging together.
Today’s identitarian feminists would struggle particularly with Greenham’s celebration of natality, of the primordial commonality between mother and child. Those who hold that defining womanhood through life-giving capacities is but an outdated remnant of obedience to the patriarchy only see things from the other side of a broken binary. Their eyes cannot be focused on those moments when such things were held in common. If the duties of motherhood are always enslaving, women’s liberation is freedom from procreation. But, to look attentively means that behind the permitted voices hover the remnants of very different experiences – suspended along the horizon, out of focus, some distance away – the wire fences holding our contemporary maladies in place disappear, leaving only the colourful expressions of a more innocent time. Greenham is striking today because many of these women went into battle precisely because they saw themselves as the handmaidens of life on Earth, by virtue of being women.
The quote given above from a mother moved to political activism after she was ‘sat in front of the television, my one-year-old in my arms, my heart sinking with fear’ is but one example. The bind between mother and infant unbinds her energies to be expressed in political action. The name ‘Women for Life on Earth’ would