On the Greenham bus

Andrew Brown

Perhaps they're the last hippies. They're certainly the latest, and to understand them one must return to the first. 'The

Merry Pranksters' were originally just a group of friends who liked to get stoned together, funded and to an extent led by the

novelist Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They moved to a

house in the countryside, and set about throwing the most memorable parties that they could, assisted by various psychedelic drugs. Eventually, they bought an old bus, and set out to drive from California to New York, with the vague aim of staging 'hap- penings' along the way, but in fact convinc- ed that they were themselves the happening. They divided the world into people who were 'on the bus' and off it: the elect and the damned, if you like, but the criteria for election and salvation were vague and con- stantly shifting. Style, rather than conduct, was what they judged; and what united them most of all was the belief that having fun was the most significant thing that anyone could do.

This same belief makes the Greenham women immediately attractive. I don't remember what I had expected, but we might almost have been at Butlins. The sun shone; a naked woman with dyed red hair attended to her shining Citroen van; a woman shouted something about incest, but it was only part of a lovers' conceit.

The women carried themselves with the cheerful hostility displayed by tourists towards natives, and with a similar convic- tion that they were far more important and interesting than their surroundings could ever be. They were, after all, 'on the bus'.

Arlene who had made the joke about incest, is a New Yorker, tanned until her wrinkles show up as little white lines when she smiles. She has the invigorating charm of someone who knows she will always land on her own feet — or on someone else's. She borrowed my pen, and scribbled telephone numbers and instructions all down the margins of a newspaper carried by a girl who was leaving the camp for the weekend; there was some business of a lawyer to be contacted. As she dismissed the messenger, she asked: 'D'you mind?' The girl, who had earlier complained that she couldn't keep a fact in her head, replied that she had a lot to do. 'Don't give me that crap,' said Arlene, restored at once to good humour.

Katarina sat by the roadside, waiting for a car to Newbury. She looked to be about 18, with long dark hair, and eyes full of kindness and ignorance set in the sort of face that aunts with pleasurable charity call plain. She wanted to know if I were for or against the Peace Camp. You could hear the capital letters in her voice. I said that I

thought they were wrong, but that I was glad they were there. This reply puzzled her, so I explained that I would find it hateful to live in a country where everyone was right. Besides, I didn't know they were wrong. The future isn't knowable; you just have to consider the evidence and then decide what seems the best bet.

'Oh, but you can't let governments make moral decisions for you. You can't live without morality, because then there would be no rules. But the rules must come from within you. That's why people are strong. And you can know things in a moral way.'

The awaited car appeared, and Katarina lost interest in conversation as completely as an animal might. I decided that I needed an interpreter. Some of the language I could translate myself: 'People', to Katarina, obviously meant 'those who are on the bus'. The difficulty was to find `people' who would talk at all. Politics and even nuclear weapons — obviously played little part in their lives. Later, I was to discover that Katarina had no idea what an `SS20' might be, while one woman asked me what the negotiations in Geneva were about; and another, what INF meant. No wonder they feel that the press is hostile. So the next day I returned with my sister and a small tape recorder.

We found Arlene, Katarina and some others sitting on a blanket and reading the Guardian women's page. A story on 'Women in the Van of Peace' had just ap- peared, and they were furious. None of them had been featured in it, but this fact

by itself could not explain their fury. Arlene was good at anger. Later, reminiscing about psychiatrists, she said:

`Then I committed the worst crime of all. I went to the marriage guidance counsellor and I tried to talk about the thing that was troubling me. I was in a rage. The rage I was in was that my husband was taking no active role in terminating my marriage. He wasn't acting it out. He wasn't doing anything. He wasn't talking about anything. He was drinking all the time. He just wasn't available. So I sort of realised, right, that I was going to have to do it myself, right, and I was in this rage. Because the kids were going to stay with me, and it was going to cost him all his money. And I was working. I was making about as much as a woman can make; and I thought: "Why can't it be me that pays like 200 dollars a week?" And I went and I tried to talk about that . . . Oh my God!'

Her rage at the Guardian was of rather a different sort. The Greenham women seen, obsessed by their image in the media. Such a preoccupation would be reasonable if their purpose really seems to be to change themselves. The image that they care about is their own in the eyes of each other. For the Greenham women, as for the Merry Pranksters, a shared experience is the only admissible reality. It must be shared: it can• not be communicated. The Guardian has offended them far more than ever the Daily Mail could, by being sympathetic, and yet `off the bus'. Such a position suggests the real existence of a world outside the camp — a prospect far more threatening than neutron bombs could be.

Their sublime incuriosity about the out- side world went very deep indeed. Katarina talked with wonder about some soldiers she had met: `They said all the soldiers who went out to the Falklands were prepared to die. I was shocked, because I thought: "How could they undervalue themselves so much? How could they undervalue their lives?" They have the right to life, and to a good life, and to be able to fulfil themselves; but they have such a low opinion of themselves that they are prepared to sacrifice themselves in that way. I just feel that's very sad.'

Later, we drove her to a camp outside Porton Down. 'I think what they're doing to the animals here is even worse than what they're going to do at Greenham', she remarked as we drove up. A sign on the roadside announced 'Women for Peace and Animal Liberation' beside two faded caravans and a line of tents. A woman nam- ed Marion, alone in the camp, sat watching two kittens playing in the shade. If Arlene is easily imagined running her version of the Stritch Service, Marion had something of Tony Last about her: driven by a humourless, compulsive decency into the wilderness and squalor. The scents of wildflowers, and of Animal Liberator, blended richly, 'What a pity,' Katarina said, 'that these marvellous camps should have to be across the road from such horri- ble places.'