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

Tales of the Bard - Shakespeare and the History Girls by Charlotte Wightwick

Today is the 400-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (and the 452nd anniversary of his birth.) 

To mark the occasion, we’ve been blogging about The Bard all month, but today we thought we’d bring you a round-up of some of our best and worst Shakespearean experiences – from ketchup-based blood and being trapped in purgatory to stunning sets and intimate ‘before they were famous’ moments.

There’s also the opportunity to see how well you know our History Girls, with our Shakespearean quiz. 

William Shakespeare, 1564- 1616. Image courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Almost all of us have some memories of Shakespeare – whether from tortuous experiences at school or inspirational moments which will never leave us. The History Girls are no exception to this rule.

When asked about her best memories, Tanya Landman says of Shakespeare’s continued ability to engage with modern audiences that she and her then 11-year-old son “came out buzzing” from the RSC/Baxter Theatre’s 2009 production of The Tempest:

“It was visually stunning, with amazing Zulu and Xhosa imagery and giant puppets… It was his first Shakespeare and a real gift to both of us – a production that really opened your eyes and made you think about colonialism and its after effects.”

Gillian Polack agrees that Shakespeare’s plays, when well produced, remain hugely relevant to today’s audiences and speaks with passion about an experimental production of Hamlet in Melbourne, nearly 30 years ago:

“They only allowed 100 people to watch, and we were in two tiers of seats in the round, so none of us were very far from the performance. The intimacy and the acting style and the bareness of the acting space (few props, no set) changed the way I saw Shakespeare: by losing the physical distancing, the play also lost the cultural distancing… Later, when the same players did the same production on a traditional stage, it was far more ordinary.”

Gillian’s experience shows that the staging of a production is all-important, and other HGs agree when thinking about their favourite experiences. For example, Adele Geras talks about the power of a production she saw in the early 1960s:

“The set, which I recall as if it were yesterday, was a hexagonal sand pit which took up the entire stage area. The actors...have faded from my memory though I remember being completely transfixed by everything that was unfolding before my eyes. What I do remember in vivid detail was that set: the sand changed and shifted as the actors walked through it, fighting, talking, embracing. It was quite wonderful.”

 Or again, Lydia Syson says of her favourite production that:

“The patterning of the final dance has particularly stayed in my memory: a formal grid-formation in which dancers brushed past each other and exchanged lingering glances. Disorder had been re-ordered to create something entirely new and wonderful.”

Other HGs highlight the importance of lead actors when thinking about their favourite moments, for example Leslie Wilson says of Judi Dench in Measure for Measure in Nottingham in the 1960s:

“Dench's Isabella, hard, slightly repellent, still moved me intensely when she found herself blackmailed by Angelo; I wanted to sympathise with her, as a victim of male sexual exploitation, yet couldn't totally, which I feel was completely right for Isabella, and her personality and physicality filled the auditorium. It is a problem play, and the problems weren't bucked in the slightest.”

Other performances which left their impressions include Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet who “somehow managed to speak the verse as if he was just having an ordinary conversation - while not losing the poetry of it.” (Sue Purkiss) or Tom Hiddlestone in a ‘raw’ Coriolanus (Liz Fremantle).

But not all Shakespearean experiences are as inspirational. By far and away the play that most of the HGs had seen poor productions of was Macbeth: the opportunities for over-acting, lingering ghosts and gallons of fake blood are, it appears, endless. Both Lydia Syson and Tanya Landman saw Peter O’Toole’s ‘laughably bad’ version at the Old Vic, which has gone down in theatre history. Lydia says:

“The titters of disbelief at Macbeth began almost as soon as O’Toole staggered and swaggered onto stage, spitting and lisping. I think he must have been drunk. As the blood began to pour, the laughter shockingly swelled. Nobody could quite believe it when Banquo’s ‘ghost’ actually came on stage and sat down at the table, apparently drenched in ketchup. As he shook his gory locks, the sound of an ambulance could be heard most distinctly from Waterloo Road.”

Celia Rees also had a poor experience with

 “An avant garde “experimental’ Macbeth ...I realised it was a mistake as soon as the play started but we were in the Studio Theatre and I was in the middle of a packed row. No discreet way of escaping. There was no interval, so I had to stay for the whole thing. Theatre can be magical but it can also be a special sort of purgatory.”

However Sarah Gristwood declines to point a finger at modern productions, suggesting instead for her idea of a worst production:

“practically anything from the eighteenth century, when an actor advanced to the front of the stage, took a stance with one arm upraised, and bellowed.”

And for her best?

“I'm going to choose to believe the theory, launched by Nicholas Rowe in that same early eighteenth century, that Shakespeare himself appeared as the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. That, or the version of Hamlet performed in 1607 on board the merchant ship Red Dragon, becalmed off the coast of Africa in 1607, for an audience of four tribal chiefs.”

 Now, surely there’s a novel in that…

The Globe, London. Image courtesy of Gillian Polack

SHAKESEPARE AND HISTORY GIRLS QUIZ

1) Which History Girl interviewed both Kenneth Branagh and Clare Danes whilst working as a journalist?

2) Who ‘can’t abide the Bard’ (but likes Polanski’s film version of Macbeth because of its handsome lead actor?)

3) Which History Girl was inspired by the Shakespeare’s History Plays and became obsessed by the Plantagenets as a result?

4) Who was inspired by a production of Troilus and Cressida and went on to write a novel about Troy?

5) Which two of the History Girls admit to leaving poor performances at the interval?

The Minack Theatre, Cornwall. Image courtesy of Charlotte Wightwick

Quiz answers:

1) Sarah Gristwood

2) Elizabeth Chadwick 

3) Mary Hoffman

4) Adele Geras

5) Elizabeth Fremantle and Mary Hoffman

The Wise Woman and her Cow by Tanya Landman

I’m signing off as a regular monthly contributor for the History Girls so this is my last post for a while. I want to finish by thanking the very brilliant Mary Hoffman for letting me climb on board in the first place.  I have LOVED the ride.  History Girls – it has been a real pleasure and privilege to be one of your number.  You are – and will always be - an inspiration.

So… how to end? 

I ought to write something significant, I thought.  I should give a profound insight into the importance of understanding our history.  Talk about how the past impacts on the present and how it shapes the future. 

And then there’s the focus on Shakespeare this month. Maybe I should offer a startling insight into how his plays have shaped my own, and countless other lives?

But so many people have written so eloquently on these subjects there’s not much I can add.

So - in honour of the very many exceedingly wise women I have the joy of knowing - I’m going to finish with a story about a wise woman and her cow.   It seems apt.

There was once a farmer who had three sons.

When the farmer died he left instructions that the farm was to be divided between the three of them.  The oldest son was to have half of everything, the middle son was to have a third and the youngest was to have a ninth.

They divided the house and the land but when it came to dividing the herd of seventeen cattle they were stuck.  No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t work out how to do it.

In the end, they went to visit the wise woman of the village to ask for help.

She laughed and said, “You’re wearing your brains out on a problem that would take a woman two minutes to solve!  I’ll tell you what.  Here’s my cow.  She’s old and lame but I’m going to give her to you.”

So they took the cow back home and added it to the herd.  And when they came to divide it, the task was much easier.  The oldest son (who had half the cows) took nine of them.  The middle son (who had a third) took away six.  And the youngest (who had a ninth) took two.

And when they’d done that they discovered there was a cow left over.

Which they took back to the wise woman right away.

Making It Up As I Go Along.... by Tanya Landman

When I was first asked to do Creative Writing sessions in schools I was terrified. Being a writer didn’t automatically mean I could teach other people to do it!   I dreaded being ‘found out’: that someone would demand to know what I thought I was doing, standing there in front of a class.  But I soon discovered that I have a real passion for unlocking children’s natural talent for telling stories.

I’ve done it for over ten years now, and increasingly I find when I go into a class the pupils are very tense about the prospect of actually writing anything down.  They worry so much about getting their spelling or punctuation right it’s in danger of crippling their creativity.  So my emphasis is on generating ideas. Sometimes we just brainstorm as a class because after all, writing starts in the head long before it ends up the page. I’ve done whole Murder Mystery sessions where the children don’t write a word – but by the end they’ve plotted and imagined an epic crime thriller.

When it comes to inventing historical fiction one of the most useful triggers I’ve found is the real life story of a brass cup that was kept in a shoebox under the bed of a pensioner who lived in Taunton.

I remember reading an item in the local newspaper about it and wondering if it might intrigue the group of students I was working with that day.  I ripped the photograph out to take with me,  but not the article that went with it.

Because I’m a storyteller I daresay I embellished the truth a bit when I told the class the story. Improvising furiously I began with telling them about a rag and bone man who went around Somerset with a horse and cart collecting scrap metal.  He found a strange looking brass cup in a job lot of junk and gave it to his grandson, John.  The boy’s father had been killed in the war, so he liked to give John little treasures from time to time. 

John wasn’t all that impressed by it. In fact, he used to put the cup on the garden fence and use it for target practice with his air rifle.  When he grew up the cup was slung in a box and stored in the loft.  It didn’t see the light of day for sixty years.   

When John decided to move out of the family home into sheltered accommodation the house needed to be cleared out.  He was sorting through the rubbish in the attic when found the old brass cup. 

Everything else in the box was tarnished and discoloured with age.  But the brass cup looked the same as it always had. 

John realised there’s only one metal that doesn’t tarnish with age…

As those words left my mouth a few hushed whispers of ‘gold!’  rippled around the class.  They were gripped.

The cup did indeed turn out to be made of gold. In fact it was so pure and so soft that the marks made by the air rifle pellets all those years ago could be smoothed out with the back of a spoon.   When it was sent to experts the cup turned out to be a Persian treasure that was 2,400 years old and valued at £500,000.

After that it was easy to get the students wondering about the cup and its history. Who might have made it in the first place?  Who for?  A king or queen?  A warrior?  A priest?  Why?  Was it a reward?  A gift?  A wedding present?  Did it have some kind of ritual or magical purpose?

From there we started to imagine all the different people who might have owned it through its long history.  It was made before Jesus Christ was even born.  Britain was in the Iron Age. The Roman Empire was at its peak.  That cup had passed from hand to hand to hand for more than two thousand years before it finally ended up in an attic in Taunton.

After that I got the students to pick their favourite period in history.   (They all had one that had sparked their imagination at some point in their school career.)  They then had to imagine a character who had come into contact with the cup – either they had been given it, or found it, or stolen it.  What did they do with it afterwards?  Something that valuable would have been life changing.  How did they part with it? Sell it? Lose it? Throw it away?

By the end of the session we had thirty different stories from thirty different periods of history – from the creator of the cup in the Middle East, through ancient Rome all the way to the Second World War.  Thirty stories that could then be put together into one ‘volume’ telling the cup’s story.

Being a visiting author is so much easier than being a teacher: I get all the pleasure, and none of the paperwork.