Photo of Annie Mechanic’s ‘bender’ at Green Gate, Greenham Common: ‘Where I was taken such good care of.’ Photo: © CB Dimyon 11 June 1995.
Protection of the Light
A Friend writes about an event near Greenham Common
‘Although I am out of the king’s protection [the law’s], I am not out of the protection of the Almighty God [the Light]’
Margaret Fell
Clare B Dimyon writes about an event near Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in 1984 that involved ‘speaking truth to power’. She recounts how a man responded unexpectedly, in this least likely of situations, and how it prompted some on the spot ‘restorative justice’.
By a curious coincidence, I was at the Meeting house to pick up the Friend (27 November 2015), although Friends are not entirely given to believing in coincidence. I was delighted to learn that Lynette Edwell had assembled various archives of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp. Later, the headlines ‘Travelling in the ministry’ and ‘Women of courage’ spoke to my condition and I started writing of a peculiarly successful Quaker witness that took place as the police say ‘…at Greenham in the County of Berkshire’ in 1984.
An eighteen-year-old Quaker woman got on a coach to spend Easter at the Women’s Peace Camp, passing through Oxford and getting off at Newbury. She made her way to Greenham by instinct up the A34, crossing the footbridge. Hopping over a fence she dislocated her shoulder. The large orange rucksack she was wearing pulled against the dislocation and she was in ‘…a right old pickle’! A lorry driver saw her plight and pulled over, gently removing the rucksack and helping her to his lorry to take her to the Accident and Emergency unit. She had a scarf, a birthday gift, which is kind of odd for late April, when you think about it, but jolly useful as a sling!
The lorry went to the nearby roundabout, and turned right around the southern roundabout, whereupon the shoulder happily re-located. At this point she said: ‘No need for A&E, carry on round the roundabout.’ The driver did a one-and-three-quarter turn of the roundabout, upon which would turn her whole life.
Adjacent to the Greenham Common airbase, she told him it was the next left. He mentioned something about reaching his tachograph limit and, after his kindness, it seemed churlish to refuse a brief stop for… coffee. He turned off and stopped in a siding. He then poured from his thermos and settled to drink when a rather too ‘familiar’ arm came round her shoulders, which our young Friend insinuated herself out of. She offered him all her money, to which he replied: ‘That’s not what I’m after.’ A physical attack ensued in which a physically smaller man beat this young woman viciously. Encountering further resistance, he took either end of the birthday scarf acting as a sling, held her aloft by her neck and strangled her so that she believed she had breathed her last.
Exhausted, and protecting the recently dislocated shoulder of her arm, further physical resistance was no longer possible. Yet, though many women freeze, this young woman had the advantage of a rape education courtesy of Peter Sutcliffe. Like other women and girls across the North of England she had lived in lockdown for several years with very real and very sensible discussions. Unusually, this eighteen-year-old Quaker brain went into overdrive with thoughts of judge James Pickles stating that ‘when women say “No” they mean “Yes”.’ It is strange that the law places the onus on women to decline consent but is remarkably lacking in the practicalities thereof. It is also curious how the pivotal issue of ‘consent’ is only now being discussed, some thirty years later.
This woman had another major advantage/disadvantage. She did not yet know it but she was a lesbian. One thing had always been clear – that sexual intercourse with a man was utterly repugnant to her. She considered telling him she was a lesbian but realised, given the social attitudes of the time, that this was likely to make things far worse. In her minds’ eye, it was as though, circling above their heads, were police and judge and juries and media, all cheering him on as she realised how every single action would be twisted by a defence barrister in court.
She reasoned: ‘He can take it but it will not be given.’ He will have nothing that he can even remotely think ‘this was consenting “sex”.’ Her recent non-violent direct action (NVDA) training came to her mind: to become a dead weight, like we had practiced for arrest by the police! He had to move a motionless body that might as well have been dead. While this eighteen-year-old Quaker prepared for an ordeal that one in five women face in their lifetime, she repeated in dullest monotone: ‘I don’t want this to happen, I don’t want this to happen…’ over and over again… according to her Quaker heritage, ‘speaking truth to (violent) power’, acting on instinct but, in fact, risking his further wrath and her life.
Then a very Quaker miracle took place, though it took twenty-five years to see past the myths and stereotypes of rape and sexual violence (not to mention lesbian naivety about heterosexual intercourse) to understand it for the very real victory it was. What this man had not understood through the life-threatening violence he had employed, he finally understood from her refusal to furbish his sexual/rape fantasies. He came to his senses, removed himself… and then burst into tears.
He let her out of the cab for some much needed ‘verticality’ and behaved, thereafter, with what I have no doubt was sincerest remorse. Many women do not have the luxury of their assailant admitting the reality of the transaction. There we were, a mile or so from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, with me in severest shock and with him desperate to get me to a place of safety but realising it wasn’t quite his place to offer! Finally, with little choice, and with a large rucksack wedged firmly in the middle, I did actually get back into the cab, even ‘joking’ to myself: ‘So what can he do? Rape and kill me?’
He took me to the junction, close to the gates of the Peace Camp, where I asked to be dropped off. I chose to look away when I could have seen the number plate. I knew the number would be burned on my memory to populate my nightmares for a lifetime. And that, dear Friends, is how this Quaker, aged eighteen at the time, came to ‘restoratively justice’ an accidental killer/rapist on the spot, by ‘speaking truth to power’. He kept his side of the bargain. I knew that the criminal justice system, in 1984, would only unpick what good had been achieved.
I can’t help observing that Friends were ahead of the curve for ‘homosexuality’. However, in Quaker faith & practice there is simply nothing to be found on sexual violence in which violence, injustice and the inequality of women intersect. Yet, how can that be when Quaker women are not immune from sexual violence, a terrorism that kills more women in the UK than all acts of terrorism? How can Quaker testimonies make any sense if, with reference to sexual violence, I do not also ‘Let my life speak?’
