Some aspects of Greenham life Polly never got used to. Even in her numbed state of mind all the singing and the holding hands could get a bit wearing. The peace women were so anxious not to emulate the aggressive posturing of the male of the species that sometimes they ended up just looking a bit wet. Sometimes at night, when the women were having their lentils, the British squaddies would pile back from the pub all pissed up and chanting, “Lesby, lesby, lesbiANS.” When that happened Polly always longed to lob a ladleful of hot roughage at them and inform them that they were a bunch of brainless no-dicks, but that sort of behaviour was not how things were done. The camp was there to stop aggression, after all, not to fuel it, so instead the huddled women would confront the baying young men with their impenetrable female energy, constructing a forcefield of love and calm through which the soldiers occasionally urinated.
Polly was not very good at this type of mystical feminism. She was more for the give as good as you get school of protest. Madge often tried to explain that this was exactly the type of attitude that had started the arms race in the first place, but Polly remained restive and unconvinced.
Try as she might, she never could truly welcome her periods as an old friend. She simply could not regard the monthly stomach cramps as a small price to pay for the privilege of celebrating the timeless mystery of her menstrual cycle. Being as one with the rhythms of the moon was of very little comfort to Polly when she had a hot water bottle clamped to her stomach. It turned out that she wasn’t very good at puppet-making either. The She-God Wooma’s head had fallen off on its first outing, nearly killing a baby outside Boots in the Newbury shopping precinct. Nor did Polly have any children’s paintings to pin to the perimeter wires, or peace poems and haiku to send to the prime minister. Above all, apart from the mass protests and camp invasions in which Polly always played an enthusiastic part, life at Greenham could be very very boring. It was all right for the lesbians – they had something to do of a night – but for Polly the hours of darkness were long and lonely, and she would lie there shivering, listening to Madge snoring, trying not to think about Jack and wondering what she was doing with her life. Certainly she was saving the world, but was that enough?
After about a year Polly was ready for a break, and the miners’ strike in 1984 gave her the opportunity to move on. The whole of alternative society had been galvanized by the confrontation between Mrs Thatcher and the miners. The prime minister seemed finally to have found an enemy worthy of her metal, and everybody wanted to be a part of what was confidently expected to be her defeat. Polly decided to leave Greenham for a while in order to carry a fundraising bucket for the NUM.
She went to stay with friends in Yorkshire, where she signed on the dole and offered her services at a miners’ support group. There she took up with a middle-aged communist shop steward called Derek. He was a nice man but the relationship did not last long; despite both of their being politically on the far left, they were incompatible. This was, of course, inevitable, given that one of the hallmarks of the far left in those days was that almost everybody on it was politically incompatible with almost everybody else. The factionization was surreal. Groups would split and split again until individual members were in danger of being rendered schizophrenic. It made for an incredible array of radical newspapers. On the steps of every Student Union and on every picket line one could buy The Socialist This, The New Left That and The International God Knows What… Sadly, most of these papers were read exclusively by the people who printed and sold them.
And the only thing that all the disparate factions had in common was that they all hated each other. What is more they hated each other with a venom and a passion that they could never feel for the Tories. The Tories were just misguided products of an inherently corrupt system. Other Lefties were the anti-Christ.
Polly and Derek fell out over a point of sexual politics. He objected to her wishing to stand on the front line at the secondary pickets, which were becoming more and more violent as frustrations grew on both sides.
“Look, Poll,” Derek said. “When me an’t lads are stood standing at dock gates, tryin’ t’stop foreign bastard scab coal comin’ in, and Maggie’s boot boys in blue are tryin’ t’kick six types of shit out of us we do not need to be worrying about protectin’ our womenfolk.”
Derek, like most of the miners, still believed firmly that there was men’s work and there was women’s work. It was, in fact, to be the last year that men like Derek would believe such a thing, because within a very short time virtually every coalmine in Britain would be closed, the men would be out of work and the women would become the principal earners in the home.
At the time, though, Derek definitely believed that women were the gentler sex. Faced with such positively Neanderthal sexism, Polly scarcely knew where to start.
“But… you… For God’s sake…!” Polly could feel her eyes beginning to water with frustration.
“Well, there’s no need t’cry about it, love,” said Derek, and there their relationship ended.
The miners’ strike finally collapsed in January 1985. Polly was alone and with no clear sense of purpose. Like Bono at about the same time, she still hadn’t found what she was looking for. She thought about moving to London where yet another once mighty union, this time the print workers’, was preparing to dash itself against the walls of Castle Thatcher in a futile attempt to maintain their old working practices. In the end, however, she couldn’t face it. Even the peace dirges of Greenham seemed preferable to endlessly chanting, “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!” and “Here we go, here we go, here we go,” when clearly no one was going anywhere. So Polly returned to the camp to await the delivery of the cruise missiles.
That was what she told herself, anyway, but the fact that for the first month after her return she scrutinized every American face that came or left the camp suggested that Polly’s heart had not yet healed. Madge could see that Polly was still troubled, but of course she thought the whole problem was lack of roughage.
But it would take more than a high-fibre diet to cure Polly’s pain. Only time would do that and time moved slowly at the Greenham camp that spring for Polly. She had not told Madge about Jack, or any of the women with whom she began again to share her life. They would not have understood. Polly did not understand it herself, except to know that love is blind. Everything Jack stood for Polly truly did despise, and she despised herself for having fallen in love with such a man. What was worse, she despised herself for not having the strength to forget him.
When the missiles finally did arrive, Polly was amongst that briefly celebrated group of women who managed to breach the perimeter fences and carry their protest on to the base itself. Polly’s poor, horrified parents opened their newspaper one morning to discover that she and her comrades had reached the landing runway and had very nearly forced the huge US Air Force transport planes to abort their landings. It was a great propaganda triumph, which in the opinion of the USAF very nearly caused a nuclear disaster. In court Polly pleaded guilty to criminal trespass but stated that she had acted in order to prevent the greater crime of millions of people being vaporized in nuclear explosions. The magistrate declined to accept global geopolitics as mitigating circumstances and Polly was bound over to keep the peace.