Tom Lehrer is Still Alive - Joan Lennon

Tom Lehrer in 1960 (wiki commons)

We live in insane times. And the Cold War was an insane time. And so I guess it's not surprising I've been thinking a lot about what it was like growing up during that craziness and now being old in this craziness.

The Berlin Wall did come down, though it was impossible to imagine it ever would. What will be our symbol of a new and better time? Whatever it'll be, we can't stop working towards it.

And meanwhile, please spend some time with the inimitable Tom Lehrer here. I wrote about him back in 2020. He's 96 now, still alive, and still my hero.

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

November 9th, 1989 - Celia Rees

There are a few dates in history when the world turned. June 28th, 1914, when shots fired by Govrilo Princip in Sarajevo, set off a train of events which resulted in the outbreak of the First World War. April 19th, 1775, when the first shot fired on Lexington Green, Massachusetts, sparked the American Revolution, memorably described by Ralph Waldo Emerson as 'the shot heard around the world'. November 22nd, 1963, when another shot rang out across Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, killing John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States. 9/11/2001 when two Boeing 767 passenger planes flew into the Twin Towers. 

9^th November, 1989 is one of those dates: the day, or rather the night, when the Berlin Wall fell.

 

When these things happen, we immediately recognise their huge significance. Years later, we can say where we were, what we were doing, when we heard the news. In that moment, we can't always see all the ramifications, but we know something very big has happened. The actual causes of the world changing events that follow might be complex, go back years, decades, even centuries, but there is that one thing, one event, which causes the dominoes to fall. 

 

This does not have to be violent, it could be minor, trivial even. As small as the turning of a page...

 

On 9th November, 1989, at 6pm a News Conference took place in East Berlin...

 

'The News Conference was due to start at 6pm promptly, live on East German TV. The usual thing. TV cameras ranged round the back and sides of the small rooms. Reporters in the centre, milling about, taking their red plush tip up seats in front of the East German spokespeople, four of them, ranged behind a long press conference desk which was the same drab mid brown as the wall panelling and raised at the front to hide their papers from view. Muddy green floor to ceiling drapes provided the backdrop. Microphone leads trailed from each station but the only one speaking was Günter Shabowski, the East German unofficial spokesman. Middle aged, thick set with heavy features, grey hair, grey suit, he droned in monotone German  ... They were about an hour in and, so far, pretty routine, nothing much said, nothing new anyway, just the usual water tread, change was coming but not quite yet .... Someone even reached to switch off the set when Schabowski picked up a sheet of paper and read a statement: East Germans would be able to leave the GDR without preconditions at all border crossings with West Germany. Everyone leaned forward. There was a moment of absolute silence, as if they could not quite believe what they had just heard. On the screen, people looked to one another, as if for confirmation, and then the hubbub started. An Italian journalist stood up and asked the question: When is this going to happen? A collective intake of breath as Schabowski shrugged, shuffled thorough his papers and answered: Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis... ist das sofort... unverzüglich - As far as I know… this is immediate… immediately. 

Schabowski frowned and looked over his glasses stunned, perhaps, by what he’d just said. Over the page was the detail: the need to apply for travel permits, present passports for stamping, beginning the next day. The 10th. But he hadn’t read that. 

 

History turns on such small things.'

 

This is an extract from my work in progress, provisionally called the Berlin Birdwatchers but the title is likely to change. It's a contemporary spy novel, but the events go back to that night in Berlin. As a historical novelist, it is my task to take myself back to the past, to see with the eyes of those present, to re-create events as they are happening. 

 

This is how I saw that night in Berlin:

‘Several people nodded, unable to frame words for what was happening. Finally, finally the border was going to open with immediate effect. A hand reached up to change TV channels. The Conference was top of the Evening News. They would be seeing this in East Berlin. Everyone there watched TV from the West. They would come pouring out of their homes and apartments and on to the streets, family, friends, neighbours joining together and heading for their nearest border crossing. The guards would have had no warning. They’d had no orders. They didn’t know what was happening. No-one knew what was happening. But some tides are not for turning. They’d have to let the people through, a few at first, no doubt, then there would be no stopping the growing throng.

From outside, laughter, cheering, shouting. People were already out on the streets, making their way to the neopalladian splendour of the Brandenburg Gate with its four bronze horses pawing the sky. For so long, it had stood in brooding isolation behind a 3.6 metre high line of concrete, separating East and West. It would be attracting Berliners from both sides, like iron filings to a magnet.

‘Come on, let’s go.’ Rob grabbed her hand. ‘We can’t miss this.’

Outside, people were leaving their offices and apartment blocks, coming out of the shops, bars and cafes, joining from every side street and alleyway, all going towards the Brandenburg Gate. And then - there it was.

The Wall.

No guards, no barriers, warning signs rendered meaningless, the crowd was right against it looking up at people standing on the top. East Berliners. Many hands reached to help them down and into the West, welcoming them with Sekt, schnapps and beer. The crowd was laughing, cheering, dancing, many were crying. Perfect strangers kissed and parted in wild celebration. West Berliners were clambering on each other shoulders to be hauled up to join their brothers and sisters. The Wall, hated and feared for so long had suddenly become just a strip of graffiti strewn concrete. People straddled the top, beating at it, chipping away with tools they brought for that purpose. A man wielded a pickaxe. All along the wall, hammer and sickle was giving way to hammer and chisel.’

The rest, as they say, is history…

This is my last post for The History Girls. I was a founder member and, over the years, I’ve made many friends among this group of extraordinarily gifted women. I’m still amazed at the range and depth of their knowledge and their generosity in sharing this with our readers. So, my thanks to my fellow bloggers and of course to Mary Hoffman, who has kept us all going. I am, and will always be, proud to have been a History Girl! 

A section of the Berlin Wall. Imperial War Museum, London 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

XTwitter: @CeliaRees
Instagram: @celiarees1

Journeys with Miss Graham - Celia Rees

Every book is a journey. A journey from first idea to publication with all the adventures, challenges, pitfalls and complications that an actual journey can entail. Even after a book has been published, its journey is not over. It is out in the world, beyond the author's control, subject to the vagaries of the market, the judgement of readers and critics, transitioning from hardback to paperback with a new cover and in this case a new title. Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, which I have blogged about here and here , is now Miss Graham's War.

When a book is published, it does not necessarily leave you. Miss Graham's War was eight years in the writing, a continual presence which comes back in glimpses and flashbacks. 

In the stasis of Covid, with travel impossible, I thought of the journeys taken by the eponymous Miss Graham and the journeys I had taken to follow her. It isn't completely necessary to visit the places that you are writing about, of course. The internet is a great resource, full of images and virtual tours. I find Trip Advisor particularly useful. There can't be anywhere on the planet that doesn't have an accompanying video or photomontage thoughtfully uploaded by a helpful traveller but, for me, research trips are important, giving travelling a clear purpose, sharpening awareness and observation. Research is an adventure in itself. It creates it's own stories and spying and writing have much in common: tracking your characters, their movements, where they go, who they meet. 

 Miss Graham's journey begins in London. My research began with scouting locations. I went on spy walks with my daughter, Catrin.  We went to the squares near Paddington Station to find Dori's house. It was now a particular house in a particular square. Then the journey is back through time to London in the war.

Dori's house was close to Paddington Station. One side was a great yawning cavity, the buildings flanking the gap showered with beams wedged against the walls. Dori's row was more or less intact, although some of the houses were boarded, either unsafe or waiting for their owners to return.

Miss Graham's War

From Dori's square we went to Baker Street to find SOE Headquarters. The building has kept its anonymity and is now offices above a Holland & Barratt. At the bottom of Baker Street, is a porticoed building which was also rumoured to be used by SOE. It was perfect. Not only that but just down the road was a spy shop selling surveillance equipment. Synchronicity. Always a good sign when researching. 

From London, Miss Graham goes to Northern Germany to her job with the Control Commission. She went by steam train from Liverpool Street Station to Harwich, then across to the Hook of Holland, on through Holland and into Germany, finally arriving in Hamburg. 

 I couldn't take that same journey, but I could map it in the Miss Graham's Notebook. For every book I keep a journal, just as one might when going on a real journey. It is a record of the progress of the book from first ideas to completion. 

Hamburg Station 1946

When she arrived in Hamburg, the station would have looked like this. Hamburg had been devastated by some of the most concentrated Allied bombing of the war. I flew to Hamburg and, of course, the city has healed but the church of St Nickolai has been left as it was, as a memorial, much like the cathedral in Coventry, Miss Graham's home city. She had seen devastation before, but not on the scale that confronted her in Hamburg. This is where fiction and life merge. Miss Graham is based on my aunt who took the same journey. Her story was where the book began. These and some of the photographs  she sent back to the family to show them what Germany was like in 1946. 

From Hamburg, her journey took her to Lübeck, the Hanseatic port on the Baltic where she was stationed. Lübeck had much in common with Coventry, both smallish, compact, medieval cities, both laid waste by bombing. Lübeck by the R.A.F on Palm Sunday, 1943; Coventry by the Luftwaffe on the evening of November 14th, 1940. Both city centres were devastated, both had cathedrals and churches destroyed.

When I arrived in Lübeck there were very few reminders of the destruction wrought on the city. The Marienkirche had been re-built, its iconic copper clad towers restored. Much of Lübeck's historic centre had been painstakingly re-developed, although a swathe of modern buildings through the centre indicated where the worst of the destruction had been. 

Marienkirche, Lübeck, Palm Sunday, 1943

Marienkirche now

 

Holsten Gate, Lübeck 

Miss Graham's journey did not end at Lübeck, she went to Berlin. I followed her there. Again, the city had been restored, re-built and was utterly changed from the city she found in 1946. 

The destruction wasn't necessarily worse than Hamburg or any other city. It was just bigger, more spread out, going on for mile after mile. 

Miss Graham's War

Berlin 1945 from the air

Brandenburg Gate 2013

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 1946

Berlin had suffered doubly, not only from Allied bombing, but from Russian shelling. It would continue to be scarred by the division of the city into Allied and Russian Zones which would eventually become East and West Berlin, divided by a wall with acres of no man's land on either side. The Wall was an extension and expression of the Iron Curtain, the division right across Germany and on through Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. 

The Iron Curtain started on the Baltic coast, only a few miles from Lübeck. A museum close to its starting point commemorates the division of a nation and a continent. A collection of concrete posts and rusting barbed wire fences, shows the border's evolution from a simple stringing of barbed wire between wooden posts and ending with three or more wire barriers, guarded by regular turrets,  the gaps between them sewn by mines. A chilling reminder of the development of the Cold War and the growth of the distrust between east and west. 

The land was the same on both sides. Undulating country, fields dotted with cattle ... The Green Border began on the Baltic. Lübeck was only a couple of miles away from it. An arbitrary line marked with sagging strands of barbed wire strung between rough-hewn poles from the forest. It followed the contours of the land, an inexorable progress up hill and down dale, through farmyards, railway stations, even houses, all the way to Czechoslovakia. The Great Divide had begun. The line had been drawn. A visible border for an invisible war. 

Miss Graham's War

I couldn't have written that if I hadn't been to that place. 

We can't travel back in time but we can go to the places we are researching. You will always see something, learn something that adds to the book, sometimes in profound ways. In the Marienkirche in Lübeck, the great bells that fell from the tower in that night of destruction are still there, melted and embedded into the stone floor. 

Marienkirche, Cross of Nails  

The bells in the Marienkirche, Lübeck

Close by, in an alcove, which still bears the signs of fierce destruction is a Cross of Nails sent from Coventry Cathedral to a sister city which had suffered just as cruelly. 

It seemed to me that in comparing Germany then to Germany now, I was witnessing a miracle of recovery and renewal, not just from the appalling and utter destruction of the Second World War, but the further bitterness and scarring of a Germany divided. 

I chose to start Miss Graham's War, not in 1946 but on the 10th November, 1989 and the falling of the Berlin Wall, a reminder of just how far and fast we have come on the road to redemption and reconciliation. 

Part of the Berlin Wall in the grounds of the Imperial War Museum

Celia Rees

www, celiarees.com

@celiarees1

@CeliaRees
Miss Graham's War, HarperCollins,  paperback publication, June 10th 2021

Tom Lehrer and the Cold War by Joan Lennon

Watch this, recorded in September 1967.  Does it bring back memories, or is it something new?

We Will All Go Together

Or how about this one, recorded at the same time:

So Long, Mom (A Song For World War 3)

I've been thinking about the Cold War a lot lately.  Joan Haig and I are writing a non-fiction book on 17 speeches from Abraham Lincoln to Greta Thunberg, aimed at  8-12 year-olds and called Talking History: 150 Years of Speeches and Speakers (due out from Templar in July 2021).  I've been working on a chapter on Rene Cassin and another on Yuri Gagarin and Sally Ride.  So I've been trying to find ways to present the Cold War to primary school and first year secondary school pupils in a way that makes sense.  Sadly, I realise Tom Lehrer isn't exactly the way to do that.  But it brought him back to mind - that sardonic humour - the piano playing - the voice - the smile - those eyes -

Tom Lehrer, who is 92 now, was a ferociously talented mathematician, entering Harvard aged 15 and going on to teach political science and mathematics at MIT and University of California - where he also taught a course in musical theatre.  He is alleged to have invented the Jello Shot.  He started out producing and hand selling his own records, a process of which he said, "Lacking exposure in the media, my songs spread slowly. Like herpes, rather than ebola."  He performed; he wrote; he composed; he recorded; he produced work for television comedies and academic mathematical journals; and he spoke with brilliant intelligence to a world gone crazy-stupid.

I grew up in the Cold War.  I was taught to Duck and Cover in school.  The possibility that the world might end in a nuclear holocaust was an ongoing reality.  And those are perhaps the things that made Lehrer's dark satire so vividly one of the voices of the time.  It would be interesting to know if others feel the same.  I listened to his songs with my dad; I introduced my children to Lehrer (I let them get to 15 or so first) via Poisoning Pigeons in the Park on YouTube; Joan Haig remembers her father singing Lobachevsky and The Elements around African campfires; Isaac Asimov heard Lehrer in a nightclub and quotes some of his lyrics in his autobiography.  Is he new to you, or do you have memories of your own of when you heard Tom Lehrer first?  

And, as a dark little theme song for our own times, I leave you with Lehrer's 1997 recording of I Got It from Agnes -

 

Miss Graham's Cold War Cook Book by Celia Rees

It was a very long time coming but it is here at last! Yesterday was publication day! I must confess to thinking that the day would never come. The book was in my mind when I joined the History Girls in June 2011.  I had always written Children's and Young Adult fiction but I knew that this book would be an adult novel. This would be a departure for me and and a challenge and I welcomed the chance to join a group of fellow writers who wrote historical fiction for all ages, including adults. I could not have asked for a more supportive group. Over the years, I've always been able to rely on a sympathetic ear through the book's vicissitudes and I have to thank History Girls, past and present, for their help, encouragement, and their generosity in reading and commenting on the finished book. 

I could have stopped writing at any point, not even started, turned back to YA, the writing world I know, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone. Neither could I change it, introduce some young characters, turn it in to a YA title. I knew it had to be an adult book. It had been brewing away in my mind for years. 

It began with the chance find of an old cookery book among my mother's effects. 

The book was a mystery in itself. I'd never seen it before. When, I opened it, I found clippings and cuttings from newspapers and magazines, some dating back to the war, and handwritten recipes - I recognised my mother's, my aunt's and what I took to be my grandmother's writing. As far as I knew, these were the only written connection between these three women. I had found no letters. I put the book aside. I knew there was something I wanted to write about there but I had no idea what it might be. 

Years later, I was with my daughter in the Espionage Gallery of the Imperial War Museum. I read on a wall panel that after the war, the British Zone in Northern Germany had been a hotbed of spying. One of us said, 'Perhaps Aunty Nancy was a spy!'. We both laughed. My Headmistress maiden Aunt a spy? How ridiculous was that? But then again, it was perfectly possible... 

She'd been in Germany directly after the war, working as an Education Officer for the Control Commission, the civilian branch of the occupying forces,  tasked with bringing some kind of order to the post war chaos. She'd been stationed in Lübeck, practically on the border with the Russian Zone. She had spent the war at home, teaching in Coventry and looking after my grandmother. Then, as soon as the war was over and much to the consternation of the family, she'd upped sticks and gone to Germany. She didn't come back until the mid 1950s. I remembered her coming back bringing presents for everyone, Benson & Hedges cigarettes for my mother, a carved bear for my brother and a stuffed monkey for me. I remembered other things about her. She'd led a bit of a hidden life. She was a fluent German speaker and had had a relationship with a German boy before the war. She'd also spent a lot of time 'jaunting about Europe' according to my mother, accompanying her her cousin who was rumoured to have been involved in something 'hush hush' during the war.      

My Aunty Nancy

 

I had been her executor, one of the reasons I knew there had been no letters. I'd kept some things that related to her time in Germany. She had sent photographs of ruined cities and sunken ships in bombed harbours; a shocking addition to the family album. I found more in a German chocolate box. 

I'd also kept her passports, so I knew when she had entered and left Germany.

 

Among the photographs were holiday snaps of Bavarian villages, ox carts, two women walking along a street festooned with swastikas and a photograph of a young man in a cricket sweater. Could that be her friend Karl? 

I knew enough about life to create the skeleton of a story. If she had been a spy, then who would she have been working for and why? What would she be finding out? If she was going to be sending messages via recipes, to whom would she be sending? I needed to know more about post war Germany and what was going on there. As for the coded messages and the recipes, it would make sense for the exchange to be between women. 

The more I found out, the more possible it became. There were, indeed, women involved in post war work in Germany. Vera Atkins, ex SOE, working with War Crimes, trying to find her missing agents.

Vera Atkins

Krystyna Skarbek

I already knew about the women who had worked for SOE during the war. I had read ex History Girl Clare Mulley's excellent biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, The Spy Who Loved. Suddenly a real plot was forming, new characters arriving and Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook was born. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Follow me on Twitter @CeliaRees

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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.

Berlin mon Amour

In 1973, I was an English-language assistant in Solingen, in north Germany, which was in the industrial state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. That state had more places for English-language assistants than any other in Germany, and was also at that time dirty, unglamorous and polluted. Consequently, almost all of the people who ended up there - me included - had asked to be placed somewhere else.
But Nordrhein-Westfalen actually felt sorry for us, or maybe wanted to encourage people to apply there, so they gave us all a free trip to Berlin in the March of the school year. It almost made Solingen worthwhile.
We drove, in our coach, up to the border crossing at Helmstedt-Marienborn, and were on the motorway corridor to Berlin. I remember flat fields still tilled with horse-drawn ploughs, watchtowers, and bridges slung with huge GDR slogans; then it grew dark and we were roaring into the night, into emptiness, it seemed. We stopped halfway at the sole service station; it felt like a place that existed only as an island in darkness, a no-man's land place, glaringly lit, divorced from any hinterland - which it was, of course. Somewhere along the way an East German police car appeared and waved our coach down, to fine our driver for spending too long in the outside lane. Maybe it had, but we were all very indignant about it, seeing it as harassment, and did a whip-round for the fine.
I remember the transmission tower at the crossing into West Berlin, and more watchtowers. I remember driving into the city and coming into the brightly, tackily-lit Kurfürstendamm, then West Berlin's major shopping street. We stayed in one of the hotels that were just huge apartments, which had once belonged to wealthy people, maybe Jews, and went out onto streets where tourists walked past whores who exposed shivering bare legs to the icy winds that sweep the wide streets of the city in the cold months of the year.
I had no camera, but bought postcards and kept scraps, so I have a few little bits of Ostalgie in the scrapbook I made then, like a sachet of East German sugar. I see from the scrapbook that we went to see Kleist's 'The Prince of Homburg,' and that we went to the Opera, though I can't remember what we saw. We went to the big art gallery, which was in Dahlem at that time, and I saw Nefertiti in the Pergamon Museum in the East.

But it was the sense of history that amazed me; and Berlin is still a city where the leaves of history lie about in the streets like an untidy autumn. It was inconceivable to me then that one day I'd stand in a reunified city and look back at that first visit as another of those leaves of history, any more than I could really conceive of being over fifty. But I found there the visible and obvious relics of the Third Reich, whose traces had been tidied away in the Wirtschaftswundery Federal Republic which had been Germany for me, up till that week. There were bullet marks still on the buildings - actually, they're still not hard to find, but then the buildings were dirty, and, in the East, often ruinous, as if I'd found myself suddenly in 1946. The Lutheran Cathedral in the city centre was open to visitors but you couldn't go into the main part of the building because it was dangerous. Rubble lay all over the floor, as if in the immediate aftermath of a bombing raid. In the West, of course, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church tower stood at the top of the Kurfürstendamm, blackened and ruined by the air-raid I was to describe years later in Saving Rafael. But there had been much rebuilding there. Money was poured into West Berlin.
They took us to the Olympiastadion, with its Fascist brutalism, where Hitler had watched the Games in 1936 - and raged when Jesse Owens beat his own Aryan star - and probably still more because Lutz Long behaved like a sportsman. We were taken to the shed at Plötzensee where the 1944 conspirators were hanged with piano wire, and I felt as if their horror and anguish had stayed in that place, chilling the air.




Then there was the Wall. It ran through Berlin, separating husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and family from each other. I had a Great- Aunt Hedwig and a Great-Uncle Martin, still alive then, who I never knew because they were on the wrong side of that frontier. With its sensors, its floodlights, and its patrolling armed guards, it was deadly. Due to the odd shape of the divided city, the Underground went through Eastern stations where you couldn't get out, and on each one there stood a guard with a big gun, ready to shoot anyone who might penetrate down there and try to jump onto a Western train. There were platforms set up on the Western side for people to climb and wave to their relatives, and of course the tourists used them, especially since their use had declined somewhat since Willi Brandt had negotiated visiting rights with the GDR government - to the scandal of right-wing German politicians. The minute you got up there, a police car or truck would spot you, and you'd feel the armed guards' binoculars trained on you. It felt hideously uncomfortable. It was meant to be so.



I stood looking over the death strip and tried to imagine it away; imagine a city where you could move freely from one part to another. It was a dream hard to believe in then, a dream that could make you cry.


As well as our conducted tour into the East, of course we went there independently, not through the privileged vehicular crossing point of Checkpoint Charlie, but through the pedestrian frontier at Friedrichstrasse station. You got your passport taken away from you, then you sat on hard rows of seats in a huge hall with the number they'd given you instead. I didn't think I'd hear my number called out, and was scared I'd be there forever. At last I was called in, stared at, required to state why I was not wearing glasses as in the photograph - I was wearing contact lenses - and finally released, having exchanged the obligatory six D-marks for Ost-marks. (Eastern Marks)Actually, though less high-tech, it was quite like going through airport security nowadays, but I wasn't used to that kind of thing then.
Mitte (City Centre) was gaunt and bleak in those days. High walls of grimed brick and sandstone; apparently empty streets and the feeling that somebody was watching you. I'm sure they were. In reaction, we started to sing 'On Ilkley Moor Bart'at' and skipping across the Alexanderplatz. Maybe there's some film of that still extant in a Stasi archive. I had the worst meal I've ever had in my life (including school dinners) in the café underneath the Television Tower. The only people you saw were scuttling along in a dreadful hurry, if they weren't queueing outside shops with merchandise scattered sparsely along the shelves. It was hard to find anything to spend our Ost-marks on.
I also went to see my great-uncle Erich and his wife, Tante Else, in their flat in the working-class district of Wedding - a name that has nothing to do with getting married. They gave me coffee and cakes and I saw their tiled stove, which Erich insisted on keeping on in preference to central heating. The tiled stove lives on in the pages of Saving Rafael, but the area stayed in my mind till I wrote Last Train from Kummersdorf - even though in the end I made Effi, my heroine, live in Prenzlauer Berg.
In many ways, it was like the time I first went to demonstrate, at two in the morning, against Cruise Missile convoys coming back into Greenham Common. There was the reality of the Cold War, visible and suddenly undeniable. And also the reality of the war itself, which was the precursor to my young life, and which had carved its traces into my mother and my grandparents (and into my father, but it took longer for that to come home to me). It was a growing-up, a removal of the security blanket.
What strikes me now is the incredible care with which I made the scrapbook. That wasn't at all like me. I was slapdash and casual in those days. It was almost as if my unconscious mind drove me to keep that record, because one day - and even then I knew I was going to be a writer - I would need it.