Greenham Common Peace camp at the main gate circa September 1984 Photo: Christine McIntosh/flickr CC
Greenham Common: 30 years on
Kim Hope reflects on an experience that helped her to become a Friend
‘We are gentle, angry women and we are singing, singing, for our lives…’ ‘You can’t kill the spirit… she is like a mountain, old and strong, she goes on and on…’ These are words from just two of the songs that we sang over and over again at Greenham Common.
I was not one of the first; but soon after the women walked from Wales thirty years ago and chained themselves to the fence, I found myself standing, one autumn evening, outside a house in Sussex. It had a green front door and my hand was poised to ring the bell. Somehow, I knew that if I rang that bell, my life would be changed forever. I did. The door was flung open to reveal a room filled with masses of women. It seemed to me they were bathed in an orange glow of excitement. They were planning a trip to Greenham.
Facing the main gate, with hundreds of women singing, over and over, John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’, and with the young policemen looking so pale, vulnerable and nervous, gave me my first real taste of the extraordinary power of nonviolent protest. I longed to find a place in one of the tents, but I had not come prepared to stay over so very reluctantly found the coach again and went home to my husband and two young children. My daughter is now the age I was when I first went to Greenham. Over the years I stayed at Greenham for a week or two, a weekend, during half-terms and school holidays, and took part in many of the major events: ‘Embrace the Base’ – when 70,000 women held hands all around the nine-mile perimeter fence – and the mirror protest when we all brought mirrors to metaphorically shine the evil of the base back on itself. We tied photos and mementos of our children and loved ones on the fence to reclaim it for something positive. The women were creative and imaginative and we named the gates with colours of beauty: yellow, orange, emerald, blue, indigo, violet, red. The camps at the different gates took on their own characters.
We were three generations together: my mother, myself and my daughter. And my sister and sister-in-law came, too. We used to camp in my old camper van or a tent, and I impressed one friend greatly when I produced a hot water bottle for her one cold, wet winter night!
The lasting effect of Greenham on me has been the discovery of my own autonomy and my own spirituality. I realised that I could do nothing about my nationality, age, class, race or gender, but that it was what I did with those ‘givens’ that mattered. Women came to Greenham from all over the word, from every section of society, from every faith and belief system. They all had one desire in common: to create a peaceful world and to rid us of nuclear weapons. We haven’t achieved that (yet), but we did achieve our first objective – the removal of cruise missiles from that American air base.
And along the way, and partly thanks to Greenham, I became a Quaker.
