1968, looking back, by Leslie Wilson

Robert Schediwy

On this day in May 1968, 'Les evenements' were in full swing. Left-wing workers and students together were challenging the stuffy status quo of postwar France; that was all my fifteen year-old self knew, but I was deeply excited. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French student leader, had been evicted from France, but rumours were rife that he would be nipping back across the border. In the Quartier Latin, tear gas was swirling round and students - among them my brother's French penfriend Yvon, were throwing cobble stones at the police, or rather the CRS riot force, and chanting (with some justification) 'CRS, SS!' and 'We are all German Jews' (Nous sommes des Juifs Allemands) because a right wing politician had dismissed Cohn Bendit on the grounds that he was a) German and b) Jewish.

I was supposed to be revising for my O Levels, but spent more time reading novels from the library, slipping them under my duvet (having a German grandfather, I had one, ahead of everyone else) when my parents entered my bedroom to demand if I was working. I was almost sixteen, and in many ways rather young for my age.

I lived in Nottingham, and at the university, there were 'sit-ins' and demonstrations, to the ire of our family friend who was Reader in classics there, a gentle, scholarly man. He took me to watch the award of an honorary degree to JRR Tolkien (I was crazy about Tolkien's work), but nothing could be heard at all because Lord Seebohm was getting an honorary degree that day, and students were demonstrating against his involvement in South Africa. I remember them climbing up to the window and shouting through it. I was disappointed not to hear Tolkien, though I felt vaguely guilty for resenting the demonstration, and also bad that I was inside with the uncool adults while the committed people were outside.

It felt as if the world was changing, and would never be the same again. As if people were standing out against hypocrisy and for freedom, and against war. The Vietnam war was going on, and in America students were burning draft papers; also offering people flowers and saying 'peace, man,' generally in a fume of pot. Hippy fashion, of course, percolated down to us, even such girls at my school as were deeply conservative.

Enoch Powell made his 'rivers of blood' speech, and one of my teachers said he was 'a voice crying in the wilderness.' At tutor time, I got into an argument with another girl, who told me she was racially prejudiced and proud of it; others weighed in against me. I argued against prejudice, with nobody to back me up, and the form tutor accused me of being intolerant and argumentative. I probably was argumentative, and I was certainly intolerant of racism. Teenage girls are sharp-edged; they don't see many shades of grey, in general. I was quite sure my teacher was unfair, and I still am.

That summer, in the heavenly, relaxed time after the exams, I lay in the grass of someone's garden, at a UNA youth group event, alongside a Czech student called Jiri, who'd come to England in the Prague Spring. We all knew that Communism was being transformed in Czechoslovakia, and I somehow expected Jiri to be living in the bliss of a new heaven and a new earth, but he was rather stressed, probably homesick. Something about him was deeply familiar to me, having lived up with people who'd been traumatised by living under dictatorship, though it's only now, looking back, that I can see this. He was very attractive, I seem to remember, with very dark curly hair, long of course, because all boys and young men were growing their hair long. Beards weren't allowed at school; they had to wait for university to grow. John Lennon was the template.

'Hey Jude' came out that year, but the summer, for me, was Yellow Submarine and All You Need is Love, and, of course, still Sergeant Pepper. I sang Joan Baez, my brother was keener on Bob Dylan. We sang 'We Shall Overcome' rather a lot.

Meanwhile, De Gaulle survived a vote of no confidence, and our friend Yvon quit the 'Evenements' when he saw the CRS seize a woman student and bang her head on the pavement. I felt a little disappointed and cast down about that, but now I can see his point of view.

Robert Kennedy, Wikimedia Commons

I have no idea where I was when I heard of John Kennedy's assassination, but I do know exactly where I was when I heard about Robert. I was in the kitchen with my mother; it was a lovely day and the dining table, in the next door room, glowed in the sunlight. My father came in and said: 'Terrible news. They've killed Bobby Kennedy.' He said it was a dreadful day because Kennedy had been 'the great hope of the black man in America.' What I can't remember  is Martin Luther King's assassination, which was arguably a much worse day for black people in the States. Possibly this is, I'm embarrassed to admit, because Robert Kennedy was definitely dishy, as we used to say in those days. He did also seem to stand for anti-racism, for the breaking down of barriers, for liberal values.

But Dubcek and Svoboda were still standing up for Communism with a human face in Prague.
After my O Levels, I was sent off to stay with Yvon's family, the Dufours, in France, who had become close family friends of ours; my dear friend Francoise, who'd also stayed in the family, became my adopted big sister. Having split from her husband, she'd come back with her little girl Jeanne to live with her parents, and she talked to me and entertained me and drove me up to Paris to see the graffiti from the Evenements before they were all washed away. It had all come to an end in the Quartier Latin then. I remember streets of earth where the cobbles had been grubbed up, tidy piles of cobblestones, buses of police and tourists with cameras. It felt rather like the aftermath of Reading festival, and I had an overwhelming sensation of emptiness.
The Dufours drove me down with them to Roaix, in Provence, where my parents were to join us for a camping holiday, in the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the annual French exodus. The campsite was fun: all the young people got together to enjoy themselves. One hot, cicada-noisy night, we danced to a gramophone on an empty threshing floor and the farmer turned up, fired a shot, and drove us away. It was on that holiday that a van arrived and sprayed the trees with pyrethrin (I think, remembering the smell). I don't know what the purpose of this was, but I remember the silence the following night. There were no more cicadas. When later I read Carson's Silent Spring, I remembered that, with deep sadness.

My brother went on a language course in Kiev that year; he was studying German with Russian at Cambridge. On the way back from Kiev, his train had been held up for hours at the frontier while trainloads of tanks went through on the way to Brest-Litovsk. The talks were going on at Bratislava, and there was a bad feeling. The Russians were losing patience.
I remember how the news came through of the Russian invasion. We cried. For me, it felt as if everything was collapsing; there had been a frost that had destroyed the hopes of May. The cicadas had stopped singing, and maybe there was no point in singing 'We shall Overcome' any more. My father said it was the fault of the Czechs, who would have got the freedoms they wanted if they'd only been patient. I was shocked to hear him say so, for earlier in the year he'd been saying quite different things.

One of the tanks that rolled into Prague: Gerritse at Dutch Wikipedia

In the autumn, I went to Germany to spend the first term of the 6th form in a school in Traunstein, Upper Bavaria. I forgot all about politics for a while and just enjoyed the food, the wonderful landscapes, learning to talk Bavarian, and my friendship with Gaby, the girl whose family I stayed in and whose class I was in.
It's fashionable now to say that the 1968 generation became the selfish Thatcherites of the 80s. I know a lot of people my age who are anything but (though I was a very young member of that generation). For me, 1968 lit a flame which has never been extinguished, a belief, in spite of Russian tanks, pesticides, the CRS and De Gaulle, that change is possible, though I guess the year showed me that talk of ground-breaking revolution is often premature.
Twenty years later I was one of 62 peace protestors who got over (in my case round) barricades to mark the outside of the MOD with ash (barbecue briquettes) in an Ash Wednesday protest against nuclear weapons. I already had a criminal record for cutting a strand of the fence at the Burghfield nuclear bomb factory the previous year. I was a regular day visitor at Greenham Common. Unlike my 16 year-old self, I knew exactly what this was about; a life for my children, and every living person on the planet for starters; but Greenham taught us all to 'make the links', showing how inequality and neo-colonialism fuelled war all over the earth. I was committed to non-violence; no cobblestones and Molotov cocktails flying through the air for us peaceniks. But I had no problem with taking a hacksaw blade to the Burghfield fence, or to the courageous campers at Greenham scissoring the fence apart with businesslike bolt cutters.
One gets older; one learns to understand how complex things are. Complexity seems a cause worth campaigning for nowadays, where memes on social media are demonstrating how destructive they can be. Truth is another crucial value, and women's rights, which weren't considered particularly important in the '60s. But for me, 1968 doesn't represent a fixed ideology, rather a year when hope blazed high, a year that made me aware, alive.

STAND UP, WOMEN (AND MEN) MAKE YOUR CHOICE by Leslie Wilson

Here I am, with my dog, on the remnants of what was known as RAF Greenham Common, though, in common with many other nuclear weapons bases in the UK, it was actually the US airforce who lived on the site and operated out of it. It was also the focus of women's protest, and I am proud to have been a very small part of this, as well as protesting against nuclear weapons in other actions and at other places during the 80s.

Below is the badge I'm wearing on the photograph (and as I type this.) If it looks frivolous to you; when you were engaging with the reality of a nuclear war that was apparently considered possible by the governments of the US and Britain, you had to laugh often, or go crazy. At that small, and rather lovely, patch of Berkshire, which is now a nature reserve, DOGS NOT BOMBS has come true, for it's a favourite dog walking area. (Ironically, the residents, some of whom hated the Greenham women for reducing the value of their houses, now have reason to be grateful to those who stayed to the last and fought for the Common to be restored, which must add hundreds of thousands to the value of those houses now.)


The narrative which was given to us then was that with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, nuclear weapons were no longer a problem. Many people asserted that protest had been foolish and pointless, since what had driven the last Soviet Secretary General, Mikhail Gorbachev, to the negotiating table, was the build up of arms which had bankrupted Communist Russia in their attempts to keep up. I have my reasons for disagreeing with this; firstly because (and I may have said this before, but it's worth repeating, I feel) on at least one occasion nuclear war almost broke out due to a false alarm, when the Russians thought they saw Cruise missiles coming at them and were on the point of releasing the SS 20 missiles at Europe when they realised their mistake. I also wonder about the wisdom of bringing another country to its economic knees; and I will say two words in support of this. Vladimir Putin. Finally, I am convinced that our protests did play a role. We made it impossible for anyone to believe that nuclear war could be survived by building the ridiculous shelters the government blueprinted in their Protect and Survive leaflets, and Greenham women told Gorbachev that no progress would be made on arms reduction unless Russia made concessions. There was a great deal of work going on during this period, which went far beyond demonstrations or even direct action at Greenham Common, the tracking of the Cruise missiles when they left the base, and the actions at Salisbury Plain.

Greenham women's action.( Geograph.org.uk)

I admit that I was relieved to take a break from campaigning after 1989. I hoped that the narrative of nuclear disarmament would prove trustworthy. Then a new threat emerged, from terrorism, and new wars were proposed and fought. I marched against the war in Iraq, I sent endless emails to our then Labour MP, who was strongly behind Blair. Just colonial warfare seemed bad enough. There were also myriad other causes needing attention. I was part of Reading Refugee Support Group for a while. In addition, I was getting published, but I have never ceased to be a member of CND,

Now there is a new nuclear threat, and once again an American president, one just as amateurishly belligerent as B-movie actor Ronald Reagan, is suggesting that nuclear weapons could be used, even in Europe. It's been largely forgotten due to the situation with North Korea, but Trump has said 'Europe is large.' Meanwhile, the largest Russian manoevres since the end of the Cold War are about to take place in Belarus, on the edge of NATO territory, and the NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has said that the situation of the world is more dangerous than it has been for a generation.

 Photo Lt Stuart Antrobus, MOD

The Trident missile system (pictured to the right breaking the surface of the sea, presumably without its payload of nuclear murderousness, is deemed crucial to our country's security, and  Jeremy Corbyn is widely criticised for saying he would hesitate to push the nuclear button.
Most people haven't noticed, but recently the UN voted to outlaw nuclear weapons. The abstainers were the nuclear-armed states, of course, and their argument was that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty made such a measure unnecessary.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ', adopted in 1968, aimed 'to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to foster the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of disarmament. The Treaty establishes a safeguards system under the responsibility of the IAEA, which also plays a central role under the Treaty in areas of technology transfer for peaceful purposes. I have lifted this wording from the International Atomic Energy Agency site'. However, at that period and afterwards, and certainly since 1989, the nuclear armed nations have been updating and 'improving' their weaponry. The last disarmament conference ended fruitlessly in 2015.

The Greenham missile silos, though still fenced off, are empty, but others have been filling up. Also, missile defence systems are being proposed. It may sound like a good idea to shoot down any incoming nuclear weapons, but there are two problems here. One is that it makes first use of nuclear weapons seem feasible to anyone possessing the missile defence systems (which will operate from Fylingdales and Menwith Hill). You can annihilate your enemies and they won't be able to get you in return. Or, in a more charitable scenario; if anyone launches an attack against you, you can prevent this. These systems, however, would not protect Europe, but the US, and anyone desirous of attacking the US would first attack the defence systems in the UK. This is, incidentally, why South Koreans living near the proposed defence system sites have been demonstrating against them. The second problem is that they are not reliable, and nuclear overkill still being a reality, probably enough missiles would get through to fry the entire US and make the planet uninhabitable. Because believe me, there is no such thing as a 'limited' nuclear war. Even a strike on North Korea could release enough dust and debris to cause a nuclear winter, and if you're inclined not to believe me, look up the eruption of Mount Tambora and consider what it did to the world's harvests that year. The fear of a nuclear winter (which might go on for years) is based on sound science.

From the outset, when I was a child (and I am now old enough to count as an antique, being well over 50 years old), anti-nuclear campaigners have been regarded as impractical, woolly-headed (well, we were often woolly-hatted, but that was serious pragmatism if you were doing things in the depth of winter)

Bertrand Russell and others. Photo: Tony French.

I think it's time for us to reassert that there is nothing impractical about wanting life on earth to continue, and that waging nuclear war, either in Europe, or the Korean peninsula, is not feasible if this is to happen. Kim Jong-Un has been building up Korea's nuclear weapons in the name of 'deterrence'. The US (and the UK) menace other states with nuclear weapons, and by doing so, can intervene, often in their own interests and with catastrophic results, as with the Iraq war. I know that Kim is a murderer and a horrifically oppressive dictator, but he is in fact trying to achieve a status which our own country seems to regard as indispensable. And in fact, it's worth remembering that North Korea decided to abandon the Non-Proliferation Treaty after Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech, and partly in response to the illegal Iraq war, which has never delivered the positive results Tony Blair and George Bush promised us. 'Broad sunlit uplands' were part of it, or have I got that wrong? The history of the UK does not, if we look at it in objective terms, show us as shining benefactors of the human race.

The narrative we have been fed about our own nuclear weapons (as opposed to irresponsible 'rogue states' is that we are historically right, democracies who defeated Hitler, and that we therefore have a right to possess them, because we will always use them responsibly, only if there is extreme provocation. Perhaps you have been wondering how far this blog is about history. It is. That narrative is the Mutually Assured Destruction story (MAD), and it does have a certain crazed logic, as long as it's adhered to. The trouble is, once you start talking about pre-emptive strikes on any nation, that's the end of MAD, and perhaps the beginning of terminal madness; the 'end of history,' but not as envisioned by Francis Fukuyama.

A generation ago, we learned about what the Greenham women called 'the links.' Nuclear weapons have never existed on their own. They are part of a system of world domination, which has been played out in trade ever since human beings started to colonise. There's a chain of links between the Roman Empire and Trident, between the British theft of India and destruction of its industry to favour Britain (which began even before India was a colony); between post-colonial exploitation of the developing world (as it's called), and the wars and dictatorships that send refugees to our shores; the impoverishment that sends the much-vilified economic migrants. And the wrecking of the environment in the name of 'business'. There's a powerful link between Japan's rewriting of its history books to play down its crimes in World War 2 (which began way before 1939, really, when Japan invaded China in 1931), and the Korean situation. Now Japan is saying it wants nuclear weapons. I was in Hong Kong when the rewriting of the history books started, in the early 80s, and I saw how worried the Hong Kong Chinese were. Many of them remembered what had happened when the Japanese arrived there. 'People died very easily then,' a minicab driver told me.

So what do we do about that? It all seems out of reach, in the hands of Donald Trump and his advisers, the equally scary hands of Kim Jong Un, of Putin, and the super-rich who control international trade.

Well, for a start - as historians and historical novelists, we can tell it how it was in the light of current research, and many History Girls, past and present, have done just that. We can reimagine the past, without respect for pieties or comfortable national and cultural myths. Tanya Landman's BEYOND THE WALL is a shining example, exposing the Roman Empire as the nightmare it was to many subjugated people. And when we've reimagined the past, which is too often used to justify current oppression (think of those who want to glory in the British Empire), we can reimagine the present and the future.

The CND symbol was devised as a gesture of despair, but I think history hasn't ended yet, and it's too soon to despair. Throughout the twentieth century there were 'crazy' people who dared reimagine the world. We wouldn't have the NHS without them, nor would I be able to vote. I was at the launch of Sally Nicholls's marvellous novel of the Suffragette movement THINGS A BRIGHT GIRL CAN DO, in Oxford this month, and Sally spoke movingly of the things the Suffragettes imagined which seemed crazy pipe-dreams, but have come to pass.

Friends, to use the Quaker form of address, let us reimagine the world. Because the end of history, in any shape, is not what we want.


CND WEBSITE
Kate Hudson on the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty

'THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE', SO DARE WE PROTEST? by Leslie Wilson

Minnesota women's march against Donald Trump. Fibonacci Blue, wikimedia

In 1987, I cut a single strand of the wire fence at Burghfield Royal Ordnance Factory, and was arrested and charged with criminal damage. I defended myself on the grounds that Burghfield was manufacturing nuclear weapons and that I was acting to prevent a crime (the defence of necessity, the crime being the possible annihilation of millions of people). This was at a time when the stationing of Cruise missiles on British soil was seen by many as a threat to our survival, escalating the risk of nuclear war (and indeed, accidental nuclear war did once happen.) I was convicted, of course, though Reading magistrates were both respectful and sympathetic.

I wrote about this action in the newsletter of a Christian community we were then part of, the Othona Community, and one member took strong exception to my action, writing a letter attacking me and comparing me to Hitler and Mussolini. I've often wondered what he based that on (he didn't explain) but I think he meant that I was trying to undermine the democratic process by using direct action. I should have been content with the ballot box, and my pointless vote in a safe Tory seat.

I'm on the left, in a paper 'radiation suit.'

I don't feel I was trying to overturn the democratic process, but only to use the law to argue that nuclear weapons were contrary to international law, a belief I still hold. Unlike Hitler or Mussolini, I did not mobilise thousands of thugs to beat up political opponents, or abolish democratic institutions, murder people, or sack them en masse or herd them into concentration camps.

However, I've been thinking about this, because I keep reading on Facebook threads, and hearing from US Presidents on Twitter, the idea that one shouldn't protest at all in a democracy, but should accept that 'we won.' Also that 'you lost.' Of course, a majority of US voters did not choose Trump, but a narrow majority of voters did cast their votes to leave the EU (one of the contexts in which I encounter this assertion). 'The people have chosen,' we're told, though in the case of the EU it doesn't seem to me as clear as it does to the Daily Mail or Theresa May exactly what they chose.


Consider this idea, though, that if the majority have chosen a particular course of action (or President, though that's the electoral college), the others should pipe down and abandon their principles.Should they?
Democracy is the will of the people, this theory states, and opposition is treachery towards the people (which is why the Mail was baying for the High Court judges' blood on the issue of Parliament deciding whether to Brexit or not).

However, democracy means that there is an opposition. In our own country, it's even deemed to be Her Majesty's Opposition. Jeremy Corbyn is not thrown into the Tower, but invited to the Palace and made a Right Honourable. A victory in an election does not give the winning party the right to occupy all the seats in Parliament. Even in autocratic times, monarchs had to get their policies through Parliament, though sometimes they locked the members in till they'd done what was required of them, and of course Parliament was far less representative than it is now.

Radical Whig Charles James Fox; plenty of people wanted to shut him up.

The British constitution (and this IS a historical issue, for it goes back a long way), is based on the idea that whatever choices are made at any one election can be reversed at the next one. Does one therefore abandon one's ideas till there is a chance of another election? Of course not. What we're being told about Brexit is that it's a once for all decision, done and dusted. But that completely contradicts the nature of democracy. Even in the era when the vote was restricted to property-owners, so we really had an oligarchy rather than a democracy, Whigs alternated with Tories, and when one side was in Government, the other side were on the cross-benches, putting their point of view.

Another aspect of democracy is lobbying. Not pure, maybe, but it happens. Interest groups make representations to government. These may be business groups, they may be charities, or professional associations, or campaigning groups. My husband, who is an environmental consultant and Vice President of the Chartered Institute of Wastes Management, regularly goes to Parliament to address a special interest group, which is attended by many MPs across party lines. This is another practice which goes back a long way; and I see mass demonstrations as another form of lobbying, particularly since they are seldom events all of their own, but are usually underpinned by hours of hard work, writing to MPs, leafletting, petitioning (even back in the '80s), programmes of public information through Press and nowadays social media. This was the case with women's suffrage, with the campaign against child prostitution or the compulsory and abusive medical examination of any woman deemed to look like a prostitute, which Josephine Butler campaigned against.

photo: Women's Library

There is nothing about traditional democracy that suggests it's a crime to inform the electorate. Some might think it's necessary for democracy to work properly, particularly when there is a vocal and often misleading tabloid press, funded by big money and, many would argue, dedicated to spread propaganda that suggests the tyranny of the market is the only way to organise society.

Where this rhetoric of 'You are in a minority, so you should shut up,' comes from, is somewhere else, and there are sinister antecedents. Hitler, indeed, and Mussolini, and Stalin, all three of whom would have had me in a camp licketty-split for my mild act of civil disobedience. In Nazi Germany, everyone was told that the people 'das Volk', agreed with Hitler, and anyone who didn't was isolated, made to feel they were mad, demoralised. It's because of this that only those who had established existing networks (Communists, members of the Confessing Church, some Catholics, Quakers ) could achieve any act of resistance. I remember being driven along the motorway towards Berlin, going through the German 'Democratic' Republic, in 1972, and seeing a poster: REFERENDUM ABOUT (I forget what). ALLE SAGEN JA. (Everyone says yes). This was not a simple piece of campaigning or exhortation. It meant: You will say yes, if you know what's good for you. And these referendums were used to silence people, to validate the regime. You are alone, was the message, no-one else will think of dissenting.

LONG LIVE THE NATIONAL FRONT OF DEMOCRATIC GERMANY! photo, German Federal Archive.

Does majoritarianism trump (sorry, definitely a pun, alas) ethics and human rights? If a majority want us to murder people, to exploit other countries and steal their wealth, to lock dissenters up in prison, torture people the security services suspect of terrorism (partly because someone else has given them their name under torture), in the worst case, to annihilate an ethnic group because you hate them, should everyone go along with that? You alone have these crazy humanitarian views, the majority says, everyone else agrees that the Jews should be destroyed. Or the Armenians, or the Tutsis, or the professional classes (in the Cultural Revolution). Or that black kids should be shot down with impunity by whoever wants to, like Trayvon Martin, whose parents, protesting his murder, are pictured here.

Or civilians drenched in napalm and Agent Orange in the Vietnam war. It was Nixon, I think, who coined the term 'the silent majority' to silence protest about THAT.

Shall we follow Hitler and demonise those who stand out and follow their conscience? Do you prefer Adolf Eichmann to Bonhoeffer, the Scholl siblings, Oskar Schindler, Pastor Gruber who helped many Jews get out of Germany, Elisabeth Abegg who hid them in her homes; Maria von Maltzan who did everything she could to save lives, even those of animals who she certified unfit for combat? These people were, officially, criminals.


When I was one of the million plus who marched against the second Iraq war, Tony Blair told us that we shouldn't march because in Iraq there was no right to protest. If you take that statement apart, it says: We are going to war to implement regime change in Iraq. The current regime is wrong, because people aren't allowed to protest there. Nevertheless, it is wrong to protest here. WHAT??

photo: William M. Connolley: Wikimedia

But we don't go to war over human rights, or hardly ever. Instead, in the name of pragmatism and trade, we welcome mass murderers and heads of terror states to our country and the monarch entertains them at Buckingham Palace. Saddam Hussein was put into Iraq by the British and for years he was 'our bastard', so his despotism was OK.

I marched against the Iraq war because I believed the UN inspectors who said there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (the ostensible reason for fighting), because I thought it would destabilise the region and encourage Islamic fundamentalism (it has), because I thought it was about giving the US and the West access to a lot of oil.

Critical though I am of our first-past-the-post electoral system, we have in this country an admirable tradition of free speech and freedom to express our opinions and find out like-minded people and allies. It isn't perfect, of course: we've had the Peterloo Massacre, the despicable clampdown on reformist organisations in the aftermath of the French Revolution and still more disgracefully, we failed to allow our colonies that freedom. Still, imperfect as it is, it has remained a vital thread of British political life up till the present day.


Democracy needs protest, as long as it is peaceful. To shut up if you haven't got what you wanted is the last thing anyone should do in a democracy, unless what you want is to abolish democracy itself.

'No more Hiroshimas' by Lydia Syson

Thirty years ago a new university friend invited me to come and spend Christmas with her family in Hiroshima.  Until I met her, Hiroshima was a word on a banner - an idea, a symbol of something so huge and terrifying and unimaginable that in my nineteen-year-old mind I think it was still a wasteland.  How could the city possibly have been rebuilt? Hiroshima was the cherry tree in Tavistock Square – a ‘never again’ reminder of the worst inhumanity I could conceive and most importantly, a memorial to its victims.  A Cold War child in a left-wing North London household, I had spent my youth marching for CND, passing round petitions, and organising film shows and discussions at school. ‘Enola Gay’ was on the radio and nuclear holocaust at the back of our minds and in our dreams, but we tended to think about dying, not surviving.

Tavistock Square, London
My grandmother, Moira Gaster, helped organise the planting of this tree in 1967
from the seeds of a Hiroshima cherry tree.
The memorial benches opposite are for both my peace activist grandparents.

‘Hiroshima’ seemed untranslatable into bricks and mortar…or as it turned out, concrete and cabbages. In the mid-1980s decorative brassicas were very much in fashion in the window boxes of one of the most modern city I’d ever visited. On my arrival, after a long and memorable Aeroflot flight via Moscow and a journey on a bullet-train, the first thing that struck me was my poor choice of footwear: I’d had no idea I’d have to remove it so often. My winter shoes - slightly Edwardian lace-up boots - took forever to get on and off, and I was shamed by the holes in the heels of nearly every pair of black tights I owned. In those days all the minutiae of everyday Japanese life were thrillingly unfamiliar – the very hot, deep bath, refilled once a week; heated tables and loo seats; wearable duvets; bento boxes, pachinko parlours and meals from slot machines. Meanwhile, although the knowledge of what had happened in Hiroshima hung over me, the city itself at first seemed bland and unexceptional. It was almost disconcerting.

Until my friend took me to the Peace Memorial Park, the open space which had once been the heart of Hiroshima.  Commemorations will be taking place there today as they do every year on the anniversary of the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare, remembering more than 80,000 people killed on the day of the attack, and 140,000-150,000 more who died from radiation poisoning in the years that followed. I saw the skeleton dome of one of the only buildings left standing, still preserved as a ruin. I learned of Sadako and her paper cranes. And I was overwhelmed in the museum, which was smaller then than it is today and offered less context to the whole ghastly war, its ending, and its aftermath. All these years later, it’s hard to write about what I saw and felt there. It seemed, and still seems, unspeakable.

The Genbaku Dome - also known as the 'A' dome -
amidst the devastation in October 1945. Photograph by Shigeo Hayashi

Yet somehow - remarkably - Kathleen Burkinshaw, author of The Last Cherry Blossom, published this week in the US by Sky Pony Press, has managed to put into words the experience of growing up in Hiroshima during the Second World War.

From her mother’s memories, and her own careful research, Kathleen has created an original and compelling novel about a twelve-year-old girl trying to make sense of the gaps between newspaper reports, government propaganda and what she gradually discovers for herself: neighbours going to fight who never come home, the pressures of ritual suicide, what it really means to serve your country.   Meanwhile, as her own household changes, with new marriages for both her aunt and her father, Yuriko also finds disturbing holes in her own family narrative. She is forced to rethink her identity at every level.

Kathleen's mother, Toshiko Ishikawa (1932-2015),
with her Papa, Hisao Ishikawa (1883-1945)
 in her most treasured photograph.

It’s a completely absorbing world. All the details of family relationships, school friendships, everyday life, customs, stories, and ideas about honour and shame are woven in beautifully. When pika don hits – the literal translation is ‘flash boom’ – we understand exactly what it has destroyed. Burkinshaw handles the moment and its aftermath with great sensitivity. The Last Cherry Blossom takes its title from a favourite saying of Yuriko’s Papa, and also evokes the spirit of endurance in Hiroshima, manifested in the blooming of cherry trees in Spring 1946 in soil where scientists had predicted nothing would grow for years. There are some books you read as a child which open your eyes, get under your skin, and stay with you forever. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit had that effect on me. I think The Last Cherry Blossom will prove an enduring novel. I also believe that its young readers will grow up asking more questions about where we are now in terms of nuclear warfare, whether we have learned anything from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and asking themselves how they feel about that.

Kathleen with her mother in 2013 (above)
and with her daughter Sara in Hiroshima (below)

www.lydiasyson.com

GREENHAM COMMON - WOMEN SHOW WHAT THEY CAN DO, by Leslie Wilson

Greenham women gather at the base in 1982.
Photo: Ceridwen

I found out about the Bomb when I was about seven, when my primary school teacher informed us, in a slightly panicky way, that it didn't matter that the Russians had their 'rockets,' as we had our 'rockets' and if they fired theirs at us they might kill all of us, but we would also kill all of them. I failed to find this reassuring, and in any case, it seemed so ghastly that I went home and begged my parents to tell me it wasn't true. 'I'm afraid,' my father said, 'it is.'
For anyone too young to remember these things, from the end of the war onwards, between the end of World War 2 and the end of the 1980s, so-called Communism dominated Russia and Eastern Europe. In fact it was an empire of territories taken over by Soviet Russia after the Second World War; Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, etc, and ruled by state terror. What was called the Iron Curtain was a border which the citizens of these countries were not permitted to cross, and across the Curtain the West and the East looked mistrustfully at each other, armed to the teeth. I have to remember that a child born on the day the Berlin Wall fell is now twenty-two years old. (Oh, dear, that makes me feel old.)
Then there was the Cuban Missile Crisis. 'We're waiting for the Americans to attack Russia with their rockets,' a classmate said, 'and then we'll send our rockets to them, and that will be the end of the world.'

Letter from John F Kennedy to the
Soviet Union's Mr Khruschev about
Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba
Source: Wikimedia Commons

 When my parents rather unwisely took me with them to see 'Dr Strangelove', when I was about twelve, I wouldn't stay in the cinema, I found the film too terrifying. And yet, as I went into my teen years, the balance of terror faded into the background and seemed almost liveable with.
Forward to 1978, when I had just put my first baby back for a sleep after feeding her, and heard someone say on the radio that a nuclear war was inevitable and we would have to learn to cope with one. I thought of my little, helpless sleeping child, and found myself in frightened, angry tears.
I had my second baby in December 1980, by which time the decision to deploy Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe had been taken, and the SS20s, the Soviet equivalent, were being deployed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The policy of a balance of terror (Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD) had been replaced by a new policy: the Cruise missiles could get beneath radar defences and fly undetected to Moscow. This was called 'a limited nuclear war in Europe.' How you could call it limited was hard for some of us to understand, when the firepower of each Cruise missile was equal to ten Hiroshima bombs, and there were sixteen missiles in every convoy.

Endangered species?
Photo: David Wilson

The day after my younger daughter was born, I stared out at the trees outside the John Radcliffe Hospital and saw instead enormous engines of destruction rolling, threatening my children. Within six months the Government's 'Protect and Survive' leaflet had been issued to households. Mrs Thatcher was proclaiming that we must fight the Evil Empire of the East, and telling us that we could survive a nuclear strike by making a Fall-Out Room and hiding in there when the bomb fell. Of course, that would only be useful to those living well away from Ground Zero (the point of impact). 'Better dead than red,' we were told. However, my mother, who had experienced conquest by the Red Army, did not agree. If the Russians scared Mrs Thatcher, she scared me. Badly.

I never worried about telling my kids about sex, but I worried about telling them about the bomb. I tried to keep it from them for as long as possible, but my elder daughter heard things at school, so I had to tell them, though I tried to soften the bad news. Kathy, who was then about six, said: 'Children shouldn't have to hear something like that!' I knew exactly how she felt.
In September 1981, while I and the other people in our village were shoving through doors leaflets called 'The effect of a one-megaton bomb on Carfax,' a group called 'Women for Life on Earth' marched from Cardiff to Greenham Common, where the Cruise missiles were to be stationed. I remember someone telling me that some women had chained themselves to the fence and said they would stay there as long as the Cruise missiles were there. I was, frankly, sceptical.

In 1985, the missiles were already at Greenham, and we moved to live in Berkshire. I was so naïve I didn't realise I was moving into the heart of nuclear country. The initial wave of protest had damped down a bit, but then Chernobyl happened, and I was worrying because the children had walked home with me, in the rain. Human beings keep going in the comfortable hope that the worst won't happen. Chernobyl was an uncomfortable reminder that it sometimes does. And a leaflet for the local peace group came through the door of our new home, and I rang the number on it and joined. I became more and more active in the local CND; doing something helped enormously with the fear. I also took part in two pieces of civil disobedience and was arrested. The first was at the Burghfield nuclear bomb factory near Reading, and was part of the Snowball campaign - you cut a piece of MOD fence and were arrested and then went to court and argued that you had committed a crime to prevent the greater crime of nuclear war.

Being arrested at Burghfield, 1987. The white suits
were meant to be radiation suits. I am on the left. My arresting
officer was quite rough - I saw him later, at another demo,
and pointed out that he hadn't needed to be, and he apologized.

The second was part of a Christian CND peace protest on Ash Wednesday; we were to 'ash' the MOD building in Whitehall in token of repentance, as Catholics have ash put on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent. As it happened, on that day (February 6th, I think, 1988), the MOD decided to stop us, having been ashed the previous year, and surrounded the building with crowd barriers and a line of police. However, monks and nuns grabbed the media attention by leaping over the barriers (I found a weak spot in the defences and nipped in there without having to hurdle). 62 of us were arrested; we made the front pages of most national newspapers, and when I rang up the local papers about it the next day they were delighted. 'Mum in demo charge,' their headline went. Incidentally, being locked up in a cell, and then prosecuted, made me wonder what it must have been like to risk far worse things in Nazi Germany - and that was crucial for my later writing career.
 My actions shocked a lot of people, but others were impressed, because I was so obviously not an extremist, just a local mother-of-two, and it made them think how important the issue was. I must stress that I was taking less risks than others in carrying out these two actions, being self-employed. When I subsequently became co-ordinator for the Burghfield Snowball, I dissuaded several sixth-formers from getting arrested, because of the possible impact on their future careers. I hope they haven't held it against me, but that came back to me when I wrote my story in the DAUGHTERS OF TIME anthology, about the girl who runs away to Greenham.
From about 1986 onwards, I also went regularly to Greenham, for the women were still there, year after year, in spite of evictions, vigilante action, and police brutality. At first, I took them a lot of wood that I'd found piled up at the back of our garden: in fact it wasn't much use for the Greenham fire, and would have been better left to support beneficial organisms in the garden, but the women graciously took it anyway, and my car was used, subsequently, to go and load up more useful wood and bring it to the camp. I was never arrested at Greenham, nor did I take part in big demos there (apart from turning out in the middle of the night to demonstrate against the Cruise convoy when it came in). But every few weeks I got restless and would head off there, bearing vegan food. One night, too, a friend and I went to do a night watch, so that the women could sleep. It was the birthday of one of the women, a very young woman called Lynne, and she got a lot of spray paints for a present. I heard a woman say that one day she got fed up with spraying noble slogans and just painted 'Nerdy, nerdy, noo-noo.' There was a very cold winter and a lot of snow. I used to wonder if I'd find a lot of frozen corpses sitting round a cold fire, but the women survived, thanks to Gore-tex survival bags.
I never took photographs when I went there, but if you want to see some amazing photos of the Cruise convoy as I saw it, and described it in the DAUGHTERS OF TIME story, you can go to http://reportdigital.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/photos-30-years-ago-this-week-cruise-missiles-arrive-greenham-common-womens-peace-camp-and-cruisewatch-todayinhistory-women-cnd/ 
The paint on the launchers, if you scroll down on that site, was quite likely put there by my friend Lynette Edwell, a redoubtable lady from Newbury (she appears, with her permission, at the end of the story) who would put a bin bag full of rubbish in the path of the convoy, which then had to stop to make sure it wasn't an explosive: she would profit by the halt to throw paint. Once, the entire convoy was stopped by a potato in the exhaust pipe of the lead vehicle. The potato was subsequently displayed in the US forces mess, thus showing that they did have a sense of humour!

The missile silos today. Photo: David Wilson

There was conflict at the camp, and abrasiveness too, but for me, and for the Peace Movement as a whole, Greenham was quite vital, a source of energy and insight. It made it impossible for women to be regarded as secondary, because they had demonstrated courage, resourcefulness, surviveability and sheer toughness. If, as Joan Ruddock asserted, the Cruise convoy was never able to melt into the countryside (which was the idea, thus evading a Soviet first strike in times of tension) it was due to the Cruisewatch organisation which the Greenham women participated in and which tracked it on its war-preparation exercises on Salisbury Plain ('they do survival games,' I was told, 'but we're better at it than they are.') Well, I knew they were.They also knew, by watching the base, when it was likely to go out. Of course, in a time of war, the women would have all been interned, but all along the route every time it went out posters and placards went up, thus keeping it in public consciousness.

The women weren't just woolly-hatted idealists keeping the watch outside the base; they were clued-up in international law, in strategic, military, and policy issues. They went to Russia and challenged the 'official' peace groups who wanted to co-opt them as part of their propaganda campaign. They made contact with dissident, real peace groups, and protested if anything happened to them. They fought the issue of the enclosure of the Common tooth and nail, and were vindicated in the end when it was shown that the US occupation was in fact illegal and thus most of the convictions of women for criminal trespass were invalid.
The other crucial thing was that Greenham women 'made the links.' Single-issue campaigning it wasn't, really. We all learned about the military-industrial complex, about the connection between the threat to life on earth, and dispossessed populations in the South Pacific; about the conditions of uranium miners; about sexism in daily life, domestic violence and racism, and the link to the violence of the nuclear stand-off.
And it truly changed my ideas about myself as a woman. It demolished frontiers in my mind, and made it possible to think outrageous things. Ultimately, I believe it made it possible for me really to become a writer.

Decorating the fence 1982
Photo:Ceridwen

 Writing the story about Greenham Common, in DAUGHTERS OF TIME, brought so much back, especially when I wrote the opening, where the young heroine watches the convoy come in as I once stood, confronting the very engines of death whose phantoms had rolled towards the hospital as I stood there with little Jo in my arms. When I'd written it, I realised that it reads like dystopic fiction - but it was real.
The nuclear brinkmanship of the Eighties is often credited with bringing the end of the Cold War, and those people who assert this dismiss anti-nuclear protest as pointless and counter-productive.
However, during that period, there was an episode when the Russians thought they saw the Cruise missiles coming over, and almost launched the SS20s in response. The world escaped by a hairs-breadth. We were incredibly lucky. But to say that the lucky escape validates the policy is like saying that a person who drives their car along a crowded motorway at 130 mph has done the right thing, because they were lucky enough not to get involved in an accident. I still believe that the governments of the time took enormous and criminal risks. I believe all of us were right to protest; and perhaps, without that protest, even more hideous risks might have been taken. I honour and respect the gallant and dedicated women who stayed all those years at Greenham, and am proud that I was able (both figuratively and literally) to help keep the fire burning,

The Common restored, with silos in background. It is now
a nature reserve. Photo: David Wilson.