“Did you know that the US defence budget for just one day would feed the whole Third World for a year?” Polly would tell them at breakfast over her fourth bowl of muesli, “and what are we doing about it?”
By “we” Polly’s parents knew that really she meant them and the truth was that, apart from maintaining a standing order to Oxfam, they were not doing very much.
Therefore, although they were certainly going to miss their beloved daughter, it was none the less going to be rather a relief to be able to enjoy breakfast again without feeling that by doing so they were shoring up the Pentagon and murdering African babies.
And of course Mr and Mrs Slade were very proud of their daughter. They admired her moral zeal. Other kids were going off grapepicking in France or working in supermarkets to pay off the hire purchase on their motorbikes, or having it off in Ibiza. Their daughter was saving the planet from complete annihilation. Mr and Mrs Slade felt that if she could do that and complete the prescribed reading for her A-level year then she would have spent a useful summer.
And, of course, one thing they did not have to worry about now was boys. Polly was a headstrong girl and between the ages of fourteen and sixteen had alarmed her parents by bringing any number of extremely off-putting young thugs home for tea. Scrumpy-swilling, long-haired bumpkins who kept falling off their mopeds; snarling rude boys in sixteen-hole Doc Martens; cocky New Romantics who wore far too much make-up – and, for a brief, distressing period, a green-haired lad who called himself Johnny Motherfucker and claimed to have eaten a live pigeon. Mercifully, since Polly had discovered politics there had been fewer of these horrible youths hanging about the place, although Mr and Mrs Slade lived in fear that on some rally or other their daughter would get involved with an anarcho-squatter peacenik punk with a tattooed penis and rings through his scrotum.
There would be no risk of such disasters at Greenham Common. The Greenham Peace Camp was separatist, women only. Men were not allowed to stay overnight. Mr and Mrs Slade thought it all sounded splendid. Summer camping, with plenty of time for reading, in the company of serious and idealistic women, struck them as a very good idea indeed. Of course the first mass evictions and the sight of their daughter on the news being carried away by policemen was rather a shock, but still, better a bobby manhandling her than some dreadful yob who rode a motorbike and washed his jeans in urine.
11
Jack skulked behind his newspaper and watched the girl as her parents ordered tea and teacakes. He watched as they attempted vainly to spread the lump of icy butter that had been crushed into the centre of the bun by some joyless jobsworth in a stupid white hat, dry teacakes with a bit of butter in the middle being a speciality of the restaurant chain they were in.
When they’d finished the father figure asked for the bill. Jack sighed to himself, his pleasant diversion nearly over. The little ray of sunshine was about to be extinguished. He hoped the girl would be the last to leave so that he would be able to look at her legs as she walked out.
Then the two older people got up, kissed the girl and left without her.
This was a surprise. Until that point Jack’s interest had been entirely passive. He was merely passing a few minutes of his dull day on his dull tour of duty, eyeing up a pretty girl. Now things were different. The girl was alone and devilish thoughts were playing on his mind. Should he say hello? Of course it was madness. He was a US army officer and she was a peace protester, dedicated to the confusion of all that he held dear. What was more, she was at least ten years his junior.
On the other hand, she was gorgeous and it could do no harm to say hello. She would probably tell him to shove it anyway and there would be an end to the matter.
Polly did not notice Jack approach. She was lost in her own thoughts and was feeling rather sad. This had been her parents’ first visit since she had joined the camp and now that they had gone she suddenly felt rather homesick. Strange, she thought, that having spent most of the last five years imagining that all she desired was to leave home she was now discovering that home had its advantages. The devoted love and affection of her parents and a regular supply of clean knickers were two that sprang immediately to mind.
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee, ma’am?” said Jack. “If you can dignify the swill they serve in these places with such a name.”
Polly couldn’t believe it. An American soldier! She had only ever seen them at a distance before, or whizzing by in their cars. The Americans were a different, more glamorous breed, officers and technicians and the like. It was poor little teenage British squaddies who actually guarded the fence and got sung at.
Having overcome her initial shock, Polly asked Jack to sit down. She was certainly not going to let an opportunity like this go by. Here was her chance to convert the enemy. Jack ordered the coffee and asked if she’d eaten. Polly said that although she had, she’d be happy to do so again. In fact she was starving, having only allowed her parents to order a snack lest they think she was not eating properly at the camp.
If Jack had been at all concerned that his impulsive gesture would result in an awkward silence he need not have worried. While ordering the food the girl managed to call him a fascist, a mass murderer and a zombie-brained automaton. She also asked him if he ever thought about what he did, appealed to him to desert the army and enquired whether he knew the temperature at which a human body combusted. From there it was, of course, a short step to a detailed description of the Hiroshima shadows.
“Those people were burned into the walls, you know. Babies’ skin peeled away like parchment while their eyeballs literally melted.”
Vainly did Jack protest that he too wished only for a peaceful world and that it was his opinion that the vigilance and armoured might of NATO’s forces had prevented such horrors occurring more often.
“Oh, sure,” Polly sneered. “You want to stop nuclear war so you build more bombs. Brilliant. That’s like fucking for virginity. You’re just a bunch of sweet old peace-loving hippies, aren’t you? Do you realize that one day’s budget for the US military would feed the entire Third World for an entire year?”
Polly had ordered a three-course meal at Jack’s invitation and at this point the tomato soup arrived. Jack was impressed to discover that this girl could even be furious about that. She had good cause to be. This was the time when microwave ovens were still a relatively recent invention, when the microwaves actually continued to be generated even when the door was open, thus making it possible for teenage wage slaves to contract bone cancer while at the same time failing to heat up the food.
“It’s hot on the top and cold in the middle. With a skin on it! I mean, how do you do that? It’s almost as if it was deliberate.”
Jack just nodded and stared. He simply could not get worked up about the soup. He was feeling too happy. She really was beautiful, this wild English rose, and so angry. He loved how angry she was, passionately angry, angry about everything. Angry about nuclear bombs, angry about soup. “The system” certainly had a lot to answer for.
How astonished would Polly’s parents have been had they returned at this point. Polly had found a boy, after all. Or, rather, a man, and no punk or hippy either but an American army captain. Their daughter would, of course, have explained that she had only just met the bloke. That he had nothing to do with her at all. But something in the eagerness of her manner, and the way she was blushing beneath the female gender symbols on her cheeks, would have warned them that this was to be no brief encounter.