My first memory of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was a woman at Reading Station on a boiling hot, busy day. Short hair and dungarees, a bulging rucksack matted with mud and badges, cigarette in one hand, her legs swinging over the platform. I envied her sang-froid as other occupants of the platform tutted and steered clear. The year would have been 1983 or 1984 and, at the time, her unconcern for how a young woman should be was powerful. It seemed revolutionary: no hairspray, no clumpy shoes, no lashings of makeup.
A year or so later, I myself arrived at camp – a ragged, mud-baked, desolate site in Newbury, Berkshire, strewn with muddy blankets and plastic, broken bits of furniture and a desultory welcome. It was a women-only space, established in 1981 in protest of the cruise missiles that were then sited at Greenham Common, ready to be deployed as first-strike nuclear weapons. From the site, the weapons would be deployed around the UK, supposedly in secret so that these giant convoys would not be targets for the Soviets.
The camp itself was made up of nine smaller base camps, situated at each of its nine gates. Numbers at each of the camps varied day to day, week to week. At the Yellow and Green Gates there would typically be around 20 or 30 women, with slightly lower numbers at the Orange and Blue Gates, and down to three, four, five or so at Emerald and Violet Gates. Other smaller bases, such as the Turquoise Gate, came and went. I remember one Christmas, when the total population of the camp sank to about ten women. But then, occasionally, on days such as the notorious ‘Embrace the Base’ event in 1983 – when 30,000 women held hands in a human chain around the perimeter of the nuclear base – there would be thousands. But that wasn’t the day-to-day reality of living there.
