by Ian Watson
And that zany evening when Donna….
No.
Yes!
Donna Hodges was a mature student, who’d previously been at Ruskin on a trade union grant. When her Somerville servant was urged to address Donna by her first name, the servant replied patronizingly, “Ah, I see: a young lady trying to better herself!” Thirty or thirty-two, Donna was built like a tough little tug-boat, but a well-manicured one, spick and span. She was reading PPP, with philosophy tacked on to psychology and politics rather than economics. Prior to Ruskin she’d been a psychiatric nurse. Apparently she’d shed any family or relations. She still spent the vacations working and lodging in mental hospitals.
Years before she had also spent time as an inmate in these same institutions. Teenage schizophrenia accounted for a curious lump on the end of her nose (kept neatly powdered). Donna had tried to cut her proboscis off, requiring plastic surgery.
Jeni thought it was clever, though sinister, how Donna had managed to swap roles from prisoner to wardress of the insane wards. One side of the keyhole or the other, a mental hospital was her only constant home. Home was a wardrobe full of strait jackets, beside power points ready to deliver electroshock, a bathroom cabinet stocked with chlorpromazine and LSD. Set a thief to catch a thief; set a loony to look after loonies? Donna had theories about how to unzip mad people’s character armour.
And that bloody evening….
Because Jeni was young, Donna fascinated her. Many were the cups of cheap, tarry Camp coffee she sipped in Donna’s room late at night, hearing tales of asylum life, chewing the fat about the psychology of politics, or telling Donna resentfully about her own parents just as if Jeni was visiting her own private psychiatrist. For Donna dominated her, rather as did the SLL.
“So how’s your sex life?” Donna asked Jeni one midnight. “Ah, you’ve tensed! That’s armour in action. Have you had a man? I don’t think so.”
“I haven’t. Not yet.”
“You should. It would loosen you. So do you masturbate? Nothing to be ashamed of! Sexual energy demands release, otherwise it cramps you up.”
In a poem by Sylvia Plath Jeni had come across the line, “Every woman loves a fascist.” This was a line that Jeni felt she fully understood; for she masturbated to the image of authority figures. In her early teens those had been blond Nazi officer types in black uniforms. Now it was Trotsky, as head of the Red Army purging opposition. Gerry Healey; the stabbing finger like a stiff penis. Donna might tell her, incorrectly but forcibly, that these figures represented Jeni’s own father. Jeni didn’t want simplistic explanations.
So she nodded, and lied. ‘I think of tall dark Latin types. Italian hairdressers. Waiters in tight trousers. Bull fighters.”
“Do you reach orgasm?”
“Of course.”
Donna’s teeth clicked like knitting needles coming together. “Bull fighters wear uniforms and stick sharp tools in the flesh of victims, yes?”
It was June, and hot. The Whipmaster was becoming more robotic week by week, conversing like a Speak-Your-Politics machine. On a Friday evening Jeni and spotty Carol and the Whipmaster were driven to Cowley in Phil Daniels’ banger of a Morris Minor, which Phil flogged up the Banbury Road then along the ring road far too fast and carelessly. After a fair effort had been made to sell the paper and the other two had been returned to St Giles, Jeni invited herself back for a coffee to Phil’s digs in Parktown.
Phil Daniels enjoyed dark good looks, wild shoulder-length hair, a Zapata moustache and ever-stubbly chin, soft large liquid eyes. His political commitment was becoming as erratic as his driving. Jeni guessed that Phil was on the brink of graduating out of Trotskyism, decently prior to graduating from the university. After all, he’d been educated at a minor pubic school, his parents were flush enough to present him with a banger, and he roomed in upmarket Parktown, not half way along the Cowley Road.
Jeni’s blouse clung to her breasts. She was wearing a long light Laura Ashley skirt in pastel blue from the shop in Little Clarendon Street, and tan boots from Oasis Trading over the way. The Whipmaster had torn her off a strip for this unrevolutionary outfit (which actually sold a record number of papers); Phil had eyed her with interest.
She set down her china mug. Lenin’s head on the outside, genuine percolated Arabica within. She uncrossed her legs. Commenced, “One hears talk about making revolutionary love….”
Though Phil had ejaculated rather quickly and it seemed ages till he could enter her again – and despite his Mexican moustache he was no fantasy authority figure – she at least left her virginity upon his sofa.
Naturally Jeni reported to Donna – who shocked her by lunging and grasping Jeni so tightly that she could hardly move. More like a strait jacket than a congratulatory hug. But before Jeni could protest, Donna had released her.
“You’re still much too armoured, Jennifer. You’re still Jennifer. I have some LSD – you ought to take some with me. Not for adolescent thrills, understand? For therapy. It’ll help you know yourself, free yourself from the armour.”
So the next day after lunch, in Donna’s room, Jeni took a tab of acid. Not a home-laboratory microdot, but a proper tablet from some mental hospital’s pharmacy – she supposed. Donna explained that she herself wouldn’t take one. Her job was to guide Jeni through the experience.
Four
In the event Jeni opted to go the long way round. The direct route to Kerthrop looked like being choked. So Meg the Mini (named from the letters on the number plate) buzzed along a lane between pastures and ploughed acres. Would that soil be under oil-seed rape again this summer – painted an alien sulphur yellow? She passed the odd ironstone farmhouse with accompanying barns and a silver silo or two. Meg startled a pheasant.
Just short of Higham at the gravel pits a robot conveyor belt soared from its scooped-out lake like the start of some big dipper ride. A grading gantry shat hillocks of pea shingle and ballast. Next, the hamlet of Higham itself, and Higham Hall in its railed beech park – home of the local Tory county councillor since forever for this blue hole.
And then Thrushby Wood: two square miles of fir trees managed by the Forestry Commission, a slice of Norway. Jeni ended up approaching the peace camp from Churtington direction, along the main road which bisected the base.
Residential side, operational side. On the latter, reinforced hangars humped like beached whales which had been dipped in a lake of rusty concrete. Huge concrete tail-flukes jutted out of the rear ends. A radar dish rotated atop a squat tower of girders. Distant grassy mounds topped with ventilators gave access to storage bunkers for warheads presumed to be chemical as well as nuclear and conventional. During the previous decade five hardened sub-levels had been excavated under the base, with the work split among a number of contractors so that no one would get the complete picture. The Officers’ Mess, a piece of 1930s redbrick mansion architecture, cut off her long view, then many other buildings: billeting, welfare, security…. Behind the wire fence further bales of razor wire concertinaed across lawns. Sandbags and bulldozers protected gates.
On the other side of the road a car dealership had yielded to more masses of wire guarding Smalltown, USA, though it wasn’t all that small. Kids cycled American streets, but rode on the left. Disco music blared from a hall window. A dozen junior children were working out at karate with a black instructor, wearing a black belt, on green practice mats out in the open.
Meg was tailing a Chevy Camaro; in the mirror was a Mercury Cougar with Texas plates. As the cars approached green traffic lights the Camaro slowed, winking broadly to turn off through the main gate on the residential side. Several vehicles were waiting on ID checks. The Camaro blocked Meg; the lights went red. Jeni sat watching a USAF guard who seemed about eighteen, with casually slung M-16, as he glanced at pieces of plastic and waved cars through. He pulled a pack of Marlboro from a trouser pouch and lit up. A gangly companion who looked every bit as callow handed his good buddy a can of Bud for a swig.
The next gate was monitored by an asiatic soldier in steel helmet, backed by an armoured car and MOD Land Rover. Two WASP Yanks in caps, fatigues, and heavy gloves were gardening the neighbouring barbed wire, tying in a new roll like bizarre rose pruners.
Beyond, the line-up of Sky High Bowling Center, Run-in Chef, and the busy main Exchange. Opposite these: the Keesler Credit Union building next to some permanent portakabins housing British businesses – Waterways Holidays, Antique Boutique.
“Prostitutes,” Jeni muttered to herself. She patted the big envelope lying on her passenger seat as if this might have flown out of the window in the wake of the American cars.
The peace camp was just beyond the western fence where trees and hedgerows flanked chain-link with a simple barbed wire topping. Jeni pulled over on the verge by a speed restriction sign, from which a plastic dustbin lid painted with a white CND logo hung on twine.
Over the way, beyond the main road, a full multi-track set of high barbed wire and razor wire stretched away into the distance, ploughed field to one side, turf on the other yielding to concrete and rows of green-painted Nissen huts. The grassy fenced acre adjacent to the peace camp itself was a guard dog compound with kennels a hundred yards back.
Three caravans stood, Indian file, just off the earthen lane. One lacked wheels but was painted in rainbow colours. The others were beige and battered. Windows facing the main road were missing, blocked with boards. There was also a derelict-looking yellow bus with boarded windows, Nell’s old white VW, and a couple of tarpaulin igloos. A pow-wow parliament of tree stumps and deck chairs and a rickety aluminium table surrounded a campfire of sawn branches.
The lane was walled by skeletal elders and hawthorn. Ground was still winter-firm and mightn’t yet be a quag by Easter, but space here was tight. For the festival Jeni had managed to rent a huge pasture from a semi-sympathetic or economically hard-pressed farmer about a mile away. That would take the coaches, portaloos, inflatables, hot dog vans, and such. The marchers, including the usual clowns, stilt-walkers, jazz band, banner-bearers, and saffron-robed drum-thumping Buddhist monks from Milton Keynes, would tramp along verge and highway past the peace camp and right through the midriff of the base, like some motley medieval crusade of innocents invading Middle America. Then they’d follow the perimeter on the residential side all around the American housing before returning past the peace camp to the festival field.
Ideally. Jeni hoped it wouldn’t rain on the day. She also hoped that the Class War anarchists wouldn’t venture so far from their city haunts to start fights, provoke the police, and cause a bad press. How the media loved to bray about twenty arrests when twenty thousand other people had protested peacefully. With the Mediterranean and Near East trouble hotting up, and all the other hot spots blowing their lids like volcanoes, the cause was too urgent, too important, for those adventurist anarchists to stick their oar in and stir a mess.
Already she could visualize the banners: Christian CND, Punks Against the Bomb, Labour branches, maybe some beautiful trades union lodge banners, Ex-Servicemen’s CND, and Young Tories Against Trident well in the vanguard for the benefit of TV cameras. Sure as hell, you wouldn’t see that wretched Cessna circling overhead towing some besotted sky-sign such as WELL DONE, YANKS or CND LOVES MOSCOW – not unless the base commander deliberately invited the Freedom Through Security crusade into his air space for the day. No, he’d want his Chinooks up in the air to keep watch and intimidate and take photos. All to the good. That would look better on TV.
“Hello, Jeni!”
Mitzi rose from the fireside, quitting Big Mal and Jack, and ran to greet their visitor. A skinny, short blonde girl in her late teens, Mitzi was dressed in dungarees, sandshoes, and a loopy purple sweater. She wore a cluster of sparking plugs dancing from a chain by way of jewellery. Mitzi had spent time at Greenham and she now treated her visitor to what Jeni thought of as Greenham grooming: a quick, primate-like patting of the cheek, stroking of the hair. New forms of female tenderness-bonding had evolved at that other all-wimmin peace camp. Momentarily Jeni was reminded of Donna clutching her, and stiffened.
However, Mitzi who was a defector from a working class household in Swindon had quit Greenham after six months. She’d confided to Jeni how she found its emotional togetherness liberating at first but then increasingly exclusive of the outside world, of non-initiates. Greenham seemed a specialized club, almost as though a separate subspecies was evolving psychologically. (“Mind, that’s only my reaction!”) Jeni thought she understood the reasons: the fierce commitment of Greenham, the continual discomfort and hassle and drain on energy. Mitzi retained some of her learned behaviour, which was really an unlearning of male impositions.
Jeni knew exactly how it was to be imposed upon, to welcome being imposed upon. The SLL – and Donna, hmm? Nowadays Jeni imposed duties on herself, duties to the peace movement and the Labour Party, so that people could live free of fear. Yet didn’t she sometimes in a sense obliquely court her own fears, at the same time as she fought them? Didn’t she woo her own horrors, of the hunt, and Tories, and the American bases? Every woman loves a….
No! She’d thrown Donna off!
(Had she thrown Donna off?)
Jeni squeezed Mitzi’s hand, as Mitzi told her, “There’s lots of activity on base. Engine tests. Pick-up trucks dashing around. They had a black alert yesterday. We heard it all over the tannoy. ‘Mortar attack on Gate Ten…!’ ‘Hostile activity still in Zone Ruby.’ They stepped it down to red at tea-time, then relaxed.”
Jack’s black labrador, Bess, had woofed and lolloped to meet Jeni and was now thumping a rudder against Jeni’s thighs. A big dog, but fat. Labradors were designed to jump into freezing seas to rescue drowning sailors. Leaping into the Atlantic every day and hauling a body half a mile kept them in trim. Otherwise they turned into barrels of lard. Bess looked like a burly enough watchdog but she would only tackle marauding rednecks if they actually advanced up the lane. The main road scared her since an American car had finally managed to side-swipe her. Despite a vet’s care the labrador’s thigh was unreliable.
At least Bess was on site. Before Jack and his dog arrived a tiny office caravan had been burned down containing the campers’ records of aircraft movements and their log of which contractors delivered what supplies to the base. Even the civilian police conceded this was probably arson. But directed from on base, or off? They never knew.
“Fancy some tea, pet?” called Jack. A big blackened kettle balanced on the burning branches; he shifted it further on to the flames.
Jack was from Tyneside, and just turned thirty: a stocky redhead with curls of ginger beard and orange peel freckles. He’d been a joiner till the dole queue swallowed him. Even before that happened, he’d been sent south time and again with the lads by night in the backs of rattly vans, squashed in with tools and timber, bags of sand and cement. Tyneside wages were low enough for firms to put in almost half-price tenders against southern builders and still turn a profit, so long as they trucked all their materials south as well. Down to the very last nail – their craftsmen mustn’t even buy a two-by-four from a local southern supply yard. Jack had grown profoundly sick of canny buggers using him as a modern form of paid slave, cheaply cartable to any foreign building site. But by the time employment weaned itself from him, he’d weaned himself from Geordieland.
“Yes please, Jack!”
Skin peeped through the knees of Jack’s jeans as he rose. He headed past the brewing-keg of water to bring tea bags from the rainbow caravan. Water was lugged daily a quarter mile from the nearest standpipe in a field below Hobby Hill, where a spring freshened a cattle trough.
In the doorway he collided with Gisela, their guest from the German Green Party. Gisela squeezed past impatiently.
“Have you that information?” she called to Jeni by way of greeting. Gisela’s hair was a spiked punky green; she wore loos
e leather trousers and a bomber jacket to bulk out a spindly frame.
Jeni flapped the envelope by way of response.
“Where are Nell and Andy?” she asked Big Mal, hunched in that old Crombie of his which would have cloaked anyone else’s toes.
“Gone walkies up the hill. Plane spotting.” The bridle path was blocked beyond a bend where it curved east to follow the contour line, but you could walk six abreast into the neighbouring field that sloped uphill and penetrate the tangly hat of Hobby Hill from the west. The campers had trampled their own path through the upper thicket to their look-out post.
“We’d better wait.”
“No, let us hear the worst,” said Gisela. “They may be half an hour. You will leave copies, yes?”
“I made two spare xeroxes.”
“Fuck off,” growled Mal. “We’ll wait.” His chin was stubbled black, but he shaved his head scrupulously. The better to butt you with…. Mal’s right index finger was still in plaster, but he had broken the local yob’s jaw. Presumably his own injury was what prejudiced rumour had transmitted to the vicar as a broken arm. Pity Mal hadn’t taken out one of the Yanks; dislocated a redneck. Mal pulled a black corduroy cap from his pocket and jammed it on his skull. He looked like a Marxist bargee sitting in judgment. “We’ll wait.”
“They can read,” retorted Gisela.
Mal had a point, though he seemed to be in one of his moods. Big Mal from Brum was the longest-serving camp resident, preceding these others by, oh, a couple of years. He’d seen volunteers come and go. One winter he’d been completely alone for three months. That was truly heroic, but at the same time Jeni wondered whether Mal had suffered (or had invited?) some psychological warpage. His was the life of a tramp-the same shrinkage of needs – without a tramp’s mobility. Mal could react to stimuli effectively enough – he’d broken that young sod’s jaw – but sometimes he’d curl up in his mental shell like a hermit crab … with claws. Without Jack and Mitzi and company the camp could have collapsed by now, but Mal didn’t always appreciate their bustle. Jeni could never feel certain of his reactions: utterly realistic and clear-sighted one day, better genned up on news than anybody, at other times lost in his own world, which he defended guilefully, abusively. He’d caused problems, and perhaps had driven some volunteers away. Still, he had to be admired. He was the backbone, even if the backbone was a bit askew.
