The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  When I started to drag myself up the sand to my clothes, I saw the boys. They were playing ball with my dress, footwear, cane, towel. There were eight of them, teenagers, fleet of foot and laughing their heads off. I stood up, with dignity, and informed them that they were too big for this game and please give me my effects. They instantly invented a new game. They ran in close and flicked me with dress and towel, twirled my sneaker against my face, feinted and jabbed with the cane. After lurching once for my dress, I realized that pleased them; also that it was useless. I imagined, with dread, hobbling up the street in my white bathing- suit while all Jacmel came out to jeer. But I could not make it, not without foot covering and cane.

  I limped on the comfortable sand toward the path, maintaining cold silence and, I hoped, a calm face. They followed, same game, same taunting laughter. My good resolves left me. I wanted to cause them grievous bodily harm. Failing that, I wanted to curse them at the top of my lungs. But I was afraid to anger these white bully boys. They could do much worse to a defenseless Negro. And who would punish them, who would care? Monsieur Réné, the tolerant educated white, could hardly stand up to the whole nigger-baiting town. I had to conceal rage and alarm, as other Negroes have surely done, and stand and take it. Suddenly, they had had all the fun they needed, threw my things around the beach, and ran up the path. I collected them piece by piece, got organized, and climbed to the street, knowing I would not risk the sea again. Jacmel had defeated me.

  Now it was Mardi Gras and Jacmel seethed with excitement because the Carnival Queen of Haiti was arriving by air to preside over the festivities. Everyone was costumed and painted and bouncing around the streets. Alone on the pension balcony, I watched this throng of merry Haitians and thought them grotesque and hideous, just as they thought me. My only interest in the event was the Queen; I had to get a ride back to Port-au-Prince. Neither the Queen nor her plane were available to a white-Negro but an ancient limousine had brought the Queen's mother, as chaperone and the Magistrate, whatever that meant. I elbowed through the crowd to this gentleman and made him a threatening speech. If I were left here, probably to die of gangrene, the entire world would know and blame Haiti; I was a famous journalist with powerful connections and etcetera. I don't think I have ever behaved worse and I didn't care.

  They allowed me to pay for a place in the limousine. I was ordered to the front seat where the chauffeur, a servant, had to put up with me. The grand passengers in the rear did not deign to speak to me. If they thought I wanted to sit near them or talk with them, they were crazy. We were all racists together. And I had the best view of the country, lush and flowered like a Douanier Rousseau jungle, and beautiful every mile of the way.

  Air service between the islands was sketchy. I got to St. Thomas where I met a man who frolicked about in a Piper Cub, an air bum. He gave me a lift to Philipsburg on the Dutch side of St. Martin, an enchanting island that was, and still is by choice, half Dutch, half French. I had been blissfully becalmed on the French side, ten years earlier; why didn't I come here at once and spare myself Haiti? Because Haiti was the unknown, that's all, and that's enough. I haven't yet learned to be careful in travel.

  Philipsburg had a dear dinky Dutch charm; freshly-painted shutters on little square houses, starched white curtains, neat gardens, swept streets. The houses belonged to friendly composed black people, speaking Caribbean English. Accommodation was in the Government Rest House, four barely furnished but spotless rooms. Here, at last, I would get to work. But I felt tender to myself, I deserved a long convalescence to recover from Jacmel. Beyond the village, I found a cove where I spent my days, swimming naked in aquamarine water, lying on white sand, dreaming a novel instead of writing it.

  A handful of white people lived on the Dutch side of the island. We had no reason to foregather and didn't. The two races lived in amity under the guardian eye of a lone black policeman. Since no one despised and maltreated me because of my skin, I stopped being a racist. Much later I began to think, imagine, hope, that maybe, somehow, possibly I understood just the tinest bit of what it really means to be black in a bad place.

  The Women of Greenham Common

  THE OBSERVER MAGAZINE, February 1984

  Nine miles of fence surround the American base and the cruise missiles at Greenham Common. The steel mesh outer fence is 10 ft. high with out-and-down sloping steel bars draped in barbed wire. A continuous roll of barbed wire, 2 ft. in diameter, lies just behind. A patrol path separates the outer from the inner fence, also steel mesh, about 5 ft. high, topped by more barbed wire. Small wooden guard towers stand empty on this clear cold day. That fence has a very strong personality. It reminds me of Nazi concentration camps. The fenced-in land is bare, the dispersed buildings bleak, ugly, prison type. It is a dark place, alien in the countryside. The people who live and work on the base, and the missiles, are further protected by police, soldiers, dogs. They have all the power but seem helplessly trapped. They are under siege by a small group of women who have no power at all except an idea.

  At four gates outside the fence, the women of Greenham Common camp in conditions of such startling hardship as would cause mutiny in a peacetime army. Those camps also have very strong personalities but they remind me of nothing because they are new in the world, unique, and amazing.

  Over two years ago, 60 British women met at Cardiff and walked to Greenham Common. They had no plan but shared a sense of outrage. Nuclear weapons poison life and the future; children could not grow up sanely, hopefully, with the fear of planetary massacre. Now new needless deadly weapons were to be stationed in their homeland, increasing an already intolerable danger. They believed it was time for ordinary people to say no. Then they decided to stay where they had walked. The camps have grown and never been empty since that day. Any woman from anywhere in the world can come, remain, go, return; and be welcomed. No questions are asked. There is no hierarchy, no “structure.” There is no distinction by race, creed, color, money, age, class or nationality. These unpretentious women, in their beat-up warm clothes, have become a world-wide symbol and model for countless ordinary people who also say no.

  The women's headquarters is outside the main gate: a campfire circled by junkyard bits, ancient damp sofa, big collapsing chair, old straight chairs, and a makeshift canvas roof over the food supplies. We check in and are taken on a sightseeing tour along a path by the fence. “See that? It's new, it's razor wire.” Progress even in barbed wire. A shiny roll of the new wire lies behind the second fence; instead of the old fashioned rusty barbs, silvery bits of steel maybe an inch long by half an inch wide. These slash like razors instead of gouging like barbs. “We were worried about it: we didn't know if it sprang back at you when cut but it doesn't, it springs outwards.” Our guide is the oldest woman there, in years and length of residence: a tall strong grandmother, a war widow, with a wind-and-sunburned face, her hair pulled back in a rubber band.

  Two mounted police ride along the path and we step off into the bushes. Our guide says good morning pleasantly and is pleasantly answered. “We were terribly afraid of the horses but we aren't anymore. They're lovely. If you stand right up under their heads they won't do anything.” Now we see three policemen inside the fence, huddled by a guardhouse. Again our guide speaks pleasantly but is not answered. “They're Ministry of Defense police; they're always like that.” The men look curiously shrunken by cold, boredom, sullenness. ‘The Americans are forbidden to have eye contact with us.” What? “They're not allowed to look at us; they can't see us. They drive in from their other bases, in their buses, staring straight ahead. But the local police are very nice and friendly. It's when they bring in the police support groups; the Thames Valley ones are very rough. They don't care what they do.”

  Back at the fire, the only heat in the camps and the only means of cooking, we find eight women at lunchtime, some casually making sandwiches. They cook one hot meal at night: Who does? “Anyone who wants to.” I ask what they all were before coming here. A
sociologist, a worker in a hostel, a teacher, a forester from Scotland, a psychotherapist from America, a young German kindergarten teacher, a housewife, aged 50-plus, who announced that she was going home for a while next week as it was her son's 17th birthday. Next to me, a pretty brown-haired girl, a researcher by profession, spent seven weeks last summer at seminars and meetings in Japan as a rep from Greenham Common to the Japanese women's peace movement.

  The brown-haired researcher was saying, “It's no good blaming Reagan and Andropov and Thatcher. We all have to take responsibility.” Yes indeed, nuclear weapons are too important to leave to politicians. What have they done, in 39 years, except waste the nation's wealth on more and more of the abominable things, an insane overkill? As you get older, I find, politicians seem increasingly tiresome. There they are, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, solemnly mouthing identical prophecies: without these nuclear weapons, the Communists, the Capitalists, as the case may be, will invade our countries. They never explain why either side should wish or need to invade the other.

  I wanted to talk about suffragettes because I am haunted to remember that I never thanked my beautiful mother, a suffragette, but took for granted what those women struggled to provide me: a legal identity, the freedom to choose how I live. Suffragettes were reviled, mocked, maltreated, yet without them, all of us women would still be tyrannized by Mrs. Thatcher's beloved Victorian values and Mrs. Thatcher would not be in 10 Downing Street, decrying peace women. How proud the suffragettes would be of their descendants in these hardship camps. How impressed Gandhi would be by this non-violent, determined protest. The women attack a fence, much as Gandhi attacked salt.

  The women have learned from Gandhi and thought about the suffragettes. “Why do you think we wear their colors?” asks the researcher, showing me a Greenham badge with streamers of purple, green and white ribbon. I didn't even know the suffragettes had colors. “But we are going further.”

  Now a very small girl in a poodle coat, cheap imitation astrakhan, arrives with a wonderful baby. The baby was born here, aided by “a radical midwife.” They all love the baby, who is healthy and contented in his unusual extended family. Thinking of the girl mother, I ask about injuries. She says she stays out of actions. But five women have had legs and arms broken, one woman was badly kicked in the stomach, another girl had fingers broken by a deliberate boot, another's hand smashed by a truncheon at the fence, an ear torn, a scalp cut; all know what it feels like to have arms twisted up behind the back, to be dragged along the ground. What happens to the injured? “We go to the hospital in Newbury.” “I think the police select us at actions; they must have photos; they know who we are. We're usually the ones who get hurt.” But there are no heroics about this, not even rancor.

  The vigilantes are something else, and news to me. At night, unidentifiable men have come and thrown buckets of maggots, animal blood, slurry into their shelters. They say that volunteers for this vile work are recruited in a pub in Newbury. “But who are they?” I ask, unable to imagine such people. “Angry men,” says a woman, shrugging.

  We cross the road to visit the living quarters, the “benders,” so named because they are built by bending twigs into an igloo shape and covering them with plastic sheeting. I have no idea who invented this or how they learned survival skills. They carry water from some distant tap; they find firewood in the surrounding forest and chop it to size; they dig latrine pits in the woods. The light in the camps is from candles and a few kerosene lamps. No wonder they don't look like what the fashionable outdoor woman will wear this year.

  I ask how many women live here. This camp is big enough to need three fires. Nobody knows. Our guide thinks there are women from France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, but everyone moves freely so you can't keep count and no one wants to.

  We crawl into our guide's bender on hands and knees; the opening is small to shut out wind and rain. Leaves are still on the twigs that hold up the plastic hut. “Isn't it lovely? Much better than tents because you can stand up.” “But the floor,” I say, with horror. “It's wet!” An old piece of carpet laid over something else. “No, it isn't. Come here, sit on the bed, I have boards under the bed.” A thinnish foam mattress. Dear God, the long freezing nights, the freezing morning.

  Our guide, who owns a van, has to hurry with two days’ mailed checks to the bank in Newbury. She picks up a sheaf of checks from the van's seat. Checks for £5, £10, £65, money orders, dollar bills in an envelope from America. Many checks signed by men. “And they say we get our money from Moscow.” On Wednesdays, there is a “money meeting.” Women from the four camps meet at headquarters to share out money where it is required, beyond what the camp members can contribute.

  Checks also flow to finance another brilliantly original protest. In the U.S. District Court of New York, 13 Greenham Common Women, joined by a few admirable U.S. Congressmen, have sued the U.S. Government, naming as defendants President Reagan, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Verne Orr, the Secretary of the Air Force, top boss of the Greenham USAF base for the missiles, and John O. Marsh, Secretary of the Army. Their case is that cruise missiles breach Human Rights Law, the Law of War, and the American Constitution. They are backed by chilling testimony from an impressive list of experts, and supported by peace movements throughout Europe and the Green Party in Germany. The Federal Judge has ordered the United States Government to produce its defense.

  The Greenham women cannot win but they will not give up easily and I must say I love the nerve of it. Their aim is to arouse more American public opinion against further deployment of the new missiles in Europe. There is plenty of aroused anti-nuclear public opinion in America and it will grow because Americans learned very slowly, from Vietnam, that their government is not always right.

  The Green Gate camp, known as the “eviction camp,” has the most attractive site, down a steep path inside the woods. The girls are gathered around their fire in the fading light. I use the word girls because of their youth. They never do. They are all equally and firmly women. “On Thursdays, at dusk, a podgy little man, he's the bailiff, appears and says, ‘Eviction, ladies.’” The speaker is a very pretty student with long red hair and emerald green ski clothes. “Then two women run out to the road, to the dump truck, and shout That's mine! That's mine!’ before they can throw in any of our chairs to be chewed up. They can't destroy personal property.” Another girl continues, “The rest of us grab the benders and everything and run down there.” She gestures to the woods beyond. “A man owns some land in the common and he lets us park our stuff on it, until the bailiff's men go away.” After which, in the dark, they try to sort themselves out and rebuild their shelters. It cannot be fun; they laugh about it.

  “They haven't come for seven weeks,” says the oldest women there, formerly a teacher of weaving, now engaged on a bright piece of crocheting. “Maybe they're getting tired of it.” “There are fewer police, too,” someone says. “We think they're running out of money.” The bailiff is a standing hassle but the vigilantes have been here, burning several benders. Some girls think the vigilantes are National Front, one says perhaps police in plain clothes; they can't tell, in the dark. By good luck, nobody was sleeping in those benders.

  “You look so clean,” I say, which causes merriment. “We have a bathroom.” Another plastic sheet, hung up to hide them from police eyes, and decorated with soggy towels; cans of water; a homemade table for an enamel washbowl, glasses with toothbrushes. “Toothpaste freezes,” says a girl cheerfully. Another says, “You have to wash your hands quickly before ice forms.” Instantly, because they reject the sound of complaint, everyone explains that they can take a hot shower at the swimming baths in Newbury.

  I had seen on TV news a women being dragged by her arms by two policemen; I thought how painful that must be. The red-haired girl says, “If you sit like this, they can't get at your arms.” She joins her arms under drawn-up knees. A blonde beauty in a Chilean poncho says, laughing hard, “They've got
workshops now, to learn how to handle limp women.” Beside me, a girl says quietly, “They're all sorts. I've had my arm twisted but then another one has picked me up gently and when he put me down he said, You all right?’ All sorts.”

  I said, “You all seem happy.” I meant much more. I had never seen any women so sure of themselves and each other, so easy together, without any sign of rivalry or tension or hostility. All of them, from the oldest to the youngest. Yet they are very different, probably would not have met in ordinary life. You feel their trusting and respecting friendship; it is an atmosphere of remarkable peace. And freedom. And lightness of spirit. “We know why we're here,” the blonde girl said gravely. “We know what we're doing.”

  Women from the Main Gate arrived; they visit among the camps. Greetings and laughter. They were joking about my cleanliness remark and describing the surplus of baths and showers they used to have. We drove to the newest camp at the Blue Gate, the “singing camp.” Wedged between a noisy main road and the fence, the benders are squashed together. They looked abandoned until we saw firelight through a chink; here they have rigged up a communal bender around their fire, for some privacy in this exposed spot. “Why singing?” I asked. “Do you have fine voices?” “No, we have useless voices,” said the girl next to me, formerly a journalist on a provincial paper. “We just like to sing. And they hate it,” nodding to the nearby police post. “I heard one of them saying, ‘Oh God, not again.’ “ On request, they sing gaily but not very tunefully a song with the refrain, “Ban the Bomb.”

  It is night at 5:30 and they are about to cook supper, a vegetable curry. This is the youngest age group except for the middle-aged housewife from the Main Gate, who apparently lives here. She says, “Kirsten, are you on watch tonight?” Kirsten is one of three Dutch girls in residence. We talked of harassment. A helicopter circles at night and beams light on them. “I don't mind the helicopter,” said the housewife. “I mind the light when they park their trucks close up. Last time, I began reading a newspaper so they went away.”