COMMON GROUND
by David Fairhall
I. B. Tauris, £18.99; 224pp

IN THE SUMMER OF 1982, IN A restaurant in a wooden shack in a forest outside Leningrad at the height of the Cold War, a young Englishwoman stepped up to the bar where a listless muzak was playing and handed over a tape of early Elvis Presley.

The first track was Hound Dog: “The effect on the assembled diners was electrifying. Everything stopped, all eating, all conversation, then tables and chairs were pushed aside and as one body the diners threw themselves into frenzied dancing. They boogied wildly through Blue Suede Shoes, Jailhouse Rock, Don’t be Cruel, till suddenly, in mid track, the tape was switched off and replaced by safe Soviet muzak. Shrugging their shoulders, the dancers returned to their tables.”

The young woman and her two companions had travelled to the USSR to promote the idea that, as no one on either side really wanted to go to war, the Iron Curtain was a case of Emperor’s new clothes. The visit was an act of extraordinary optimism and courage: peace campaigners were generally believed by the West to be Communist sympathisers and by the East to be in the pay of the CIA. Today, it would be like rocking up to a Hezbollah stronghold and over a cup of mint tea suggesting that all this bombing was really very silly when all the average person on both sides wanted was to live in peace with their neighbours.

The road to Russia began in the spring of 1981 with four women sitting round a kitchen table in a Welsh farmhouse. The host was Ann Pettit, owner of the Elvis tape, and they were meeting to discuss her plan to stage a march from Cardiff to Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest at the imminent arrival of US cruise and Pershing missiles at the military base there. The plan was modest: the march, involving perhaps 50 women, would be the protest, then they would all go home again.

Instead, the decade-long Greenham Common Peace Camp would become perhaps the most iconic, certainly the most enduring, symbol of anti-war sentiment that the world had seen.

The women had six small children between them, very little money and no official support from CND or anyone else. But they were intelligent, well informed about East-West politics and angry: “The Cold War,” writes Pettit in her memoir, “consisted of two ruling powers, each of whom believed the other was possessed by such insane malevolence as to be on the brink of armed invasion, an attack which could only be deterred by the possession of enormous quantities of nuclear weapons.”

They called themselves Women for Life on Earth — “because these weapons go on killing silently and invisibly through generations as yet unborn” — and set off from Cardiff on a hot August morning with plentiful supplies of lemonade, biscuits, Elastoplast and sunblock, wearing scarves displaying the figure of a naked woman with a raised, clenched fist. They arrived at the gates of Greenham air base a month later with lengths of chain and padlocks bought at a local ironmongers and a newly-formed plan to chain themselves to the perimeter fence.

When the first women walked up to the gate, the single policeman on duty thought that they were the cleaners. Subsequent reaction was equally and disappointingly humdrum: “The British military regarded us as a practical problem, a health and safety issue,” Pettit recalls, “they showed us where the tap was for water and how to dig latrines and where the manhole was to tip our Elsan buckets of sewage.” In an attempt to drum up media interest, one of the women went to the offices of The Sun: “What can we do to make you take some notice?” she asked a reporter despatched downstairs to see her. “Stay there,” he said.

“What is the point?” Pettit asked a friend, a Catholic priest, in growing frustration at their lack of impact. “It’s a witness,” he told her, “an act of great evil is planned for this place, and it is better to stand before it as a silent witness, than to walk away and pretend not to know.”

There was a march to Hyde Park where Pettit gave an impassioned speech which brought sacks of letters, visitors and offers of support. But it wasn’t until December the following year — when more than 12,000 women linked arms to surround the 9½-mile perimeter fence in a 12-hour vigil — that the world finally took notice. Embrace the Base “ambushed the British psyche” in Pettit’s words:

“It was unique in the history of protest and uniquely effective.”

The following December, 50,000 protesters turned up for a re-run, lighting candles, building fires, singing songs among the brambles and oaks of the English wood that surrounded the base.

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