Canvey Island (18 page)

Further down the street I could hear a barbecue in full swing and everyone singing along to Spandau Ballet's ‘True'. I couldn't understand how people could be so unconcerned.

When I came to bed Martin turned out the light and we lay for a while in the darkness without touching each other.

Then I heard his voice. ‘I don't want you to go …'

‘I know.'

‘But it's not much of a marriage if I try and make you stay.'

I took his hand. ‘I do love you,' I said. ‘You do know that, don't you?'

I felt for the side of his face and began to stroke it. People talk about love going stale and of marriages becoming sexually lazy, but just because we knew how to please each other didn't mean our love-making was any the less exciting. It was tender and familiar, and I think we were gentler than when we had begun our life together. We were aware this separation would not be so much a test as a sign of confidence that we could love each other despite absence.

As I turned away from Martin to sleep, my body on its side but my hand stretching back to touch his, I thought how strange it was that in the past men had left home for war: now women were leaving for peace.

Claire had a bit of a goodbye party and we came down to see her off. That was a bit of a shock. The house was a tip with all the washing and the toys and there was nowhere to get your Hoover round. It had that warm smell of old milk that you get in those family homes where you can't be sure anything is ever really clean.

I had managed to ignore the Mods and Rockers in the sixties, and to smile as kindly as I could at the long hair and glitter of the seventies, but some of those women were eye-popping. They had either shaved the sides of their head or dyed their hair purple and they wore those boiler suits that made them all look as if they were plumbers. Some of them had bright stripy knitwear – alpaca, I think it was, with bits of twig in it, quite rough to the touch. Not much chance of finding a single man between the lot of them, I'd have thought. And hardly any of them were wearing make-up, not even lipstick. I always have to have my lipstick. It helps me concentrate.

At the kitchen table, eating aubergine lasagne or some other Italian muck, Claire was entertaining her new friends: Gail, Pasha and Franny. I think they were the ones who told her that make-up was a sign of masculine domination. Honestly. They were about as exciting as a box of billiard balls.

It was the little girl I felt sorry for, always watching her parents, not sure what any of those women were doing in her home. With a hippy you knew where you were, but with this lot you felt anything could happen. God forbid that any of them would ever want to live near me.

Claire told me I should think about joining them. ‘You are joking,' I said, but I could see that she was either testing me or making fun. She had that ambiguous tone clever people always adopt, half-joking, half-serious, and you're supposed to guess which one they mean. If you think they're joking they say they were being serious. If you take them seriously they say that they were joking. You can't win.

‘Well, Violet,' Claire said, using my full name to make me listen, ‘it's quite simple. Are you on the side of death or are you on the side of life? Because that's the only decision you have to make.'

‘Well, Claire,' I replied, ‘I don't think you can achieve world peace by going camping.'

‘And so are you going to do anything about it, Violet? Anything at all?'

‘I've been in enough wars,' I said. Her tone of voice was starting to give me the pip. If you ask me, the world was messed up enough as it was without that lot trying to sort it out.

Before Greenham we went on our family holiday to Dorset and it rained all the time. We dressed in bright-blue cagoules and tried to pretend we preferred wet weather. We'd given Lucy a camera and she took photographs of everything: not only the views and the boats but Coke cans, bits of rope in the road, Martin shaving, the food on her plate in a restaurant, even her own knee. Strangers were commandeered to take snapshots of the three of us together. We took a trip to Lyme Regis and walked on the Cobb, not talking about Greenham at all, and watched various girls with hooded coats trying to look like the French Lieutenant's Woman each time a wave came over.

You could see we were going our separate ways on the return journey by looking in the boot of our clapped-out Volvo: a suitcase for Martin returning to Brighton, a rucksack and camping gear for the intrepid mother and daughter. I packed clothes that didn't need any maintenance, candles, tins of food, matches, a camping kettle and a couple of sleeping bags. I took lavatory paper and, in a moment of vanity, I threw in some moisturiser and a bit of lipstick. Vi would have been proud of me.

‘You're quiet,' said Martin, as we left Newbury.

‘I don't know what to think,' I said. ‘But I feel my life's about to change.'

‘As long as I can still recognise you when you both come back.'

‘We're not going for that long,' I said.

‘Be home by Christmas then?' said Martin.

‘Don't …'

It was Hiroshima Day, 6th August 1983, and there were Stop the Arms Race marches from all over the country. As we neared the base we could see processions of women with banners making their way towards the main gate.

We parked on a verge and Martin asked if I wanted him to stay and put up the tent but I didn't want to look dependent in front of the other women. I could hear one of them with a loudhailer: ‘This gate is a women-only area. Please respect this and follow it.'

Martin smiled. ‘I suppose I can take a hint.'

I put on the rucksack and made sure Lucy had hers. Then we stood together by the side of the car. Martin hesitated, and for a moment I wanted to say, ‘No, it's all right, I'll come home.'

‘I am proud of you,' he said. ‘And I'll try to be as brave as you. As both of you.'

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘Lucy. Give your father a hug.'

She clasped him to her and he picked her up and swung her round. ‘Look after your mother, darling.'

‘Don't make her dizzy.'

Then Martin kissed me on the lips, but briefly. We watched him drive off, his hand out of the window, waving back but concentrating on the road ahead.

‘How long are you staying?' a woman asked. She had cropped grey hair and wore dungarees over a yellow T-shirt.

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘As long as it takes.'

‘Not just the weekend then?'

‘Oh more, far more than that.'

‘We get a lot of tourists. Some of them even ask where the Ladies' is.'

‘No, no, no,' I said. ‘We're staying.'

Then she turned to my daughter. ‘And what is your name?' she asked.

‘LUCY.'

‘Well, Lucy, my name is Joyce. I'll get you a peace bracelet. Would you like that? Then we can make some paper doves. I bet you're good at making things.'

The light was falling but the common was still warm from the heat of the day. There were fireflies in the haze and I could hear women singing in the distance.

Don't want to cause no sorrow
Don't want to cause no pain
I'm only gonna cause what I have to cause
Until this land is free of shame
Till this land is free of shame
.

I couldn't wait until morning.

Back at home I shopped for single servings of ready-made food and I didn't care even if they were meat or fish. I filled my trolley with ocean pie, beef casserole, steaks and fish fingers. It wasn't cooking so much as heating, but each time the aroma of warm food made me think of family life and reminded me of its absence. Sometimes in the evenings I found myself staring at Lucy's pink plastic hairbrush in the bathroom, at her first winter shoes, or at Claire's jewellery by the side of the bed. She had left her engagement ring behind, saying that it gave her eczema and, besides, she didn't want to lose it at Greenham. It was hard to remember what it looked like on her finger.

I wondered what kind of world my wife was trying to defend and what kind of England we were both attempting to save. I remembered my geography teacher at school in Canvey holding up a piece of chalk and telling us that it was a symbol of everything we needed to know about our country. ‘If you study the history of this substance,' he had said, ‘this simple piece of chalk, you will know how this land became separated from the continent, allowing the Channel to fill; you will appreciate the white cliffs of Dover, and the glory of Beachy Head; you will know why beautiful horses are carved on the downs and you will discover how pure England can be when it wants to be.'

I had forgotten the racism, but the image had made me think about the ground beneath my feet and the nature of chalk; how the backbone of England was porous and crumbling, that I lived in an osteoporotic country, bent over itself and its history. In the car I
listened to a clergyman on the radio saying that if nuclear war brought the world to an end then it would bring us closer to Judgment Day and that time when we shall all, at last, see the face of God. I couldn't imagine Claire's father being so reckless with his faith.

I was working on a project to preserve the Norfolk coast from further erosion. Each week I drove up through the familiar geology of England towards the downs, following the variations of outline and contour, the confusion of sea, sky and horizon.

Men in fluorescent jackets over white T-shirts and shorts were walking up and down the hard shoulder spiking rubbish from the roadside trees, picking up shards of polythene bags, nappies and polystyrene cups. I could see sofas and mattresses left in the straggle of woodland. This was the England of abandonment, of tipping in country lanes and cars dumped in rivers. I remembered my first experience of contempt for the landscape: a rusted sky-blue Cortina, its front lights missing and its hubcaps gone, rammed into the stagnant summer waters of the Colne.

As I neared Canvey I could smell methane and burning rubbish from the council tip. A summer shower fell on the windscreen. I turned on the wipers but they only blurred my visibility with the smear of half-dead insects. Their rhythm reminded me of being rocked, of my mother's voice:

It's raining, it's raining,
There's pepper in the box,
And all the little ladies
Are picking up their frocks
.

Once into Norfolk I took first to the back roads and then the coastal route. I could almost feel the tarmac pressing down on soil and scrub, tracing the memory of hollow ways and ley lines, following the rural England I was trying to preserve: grass meadows flowering with comfrey and hemp-agrimony, sedge and milk-parsley fringing the river banks.

I stayed in a pub and worked in an office in Cromer where I
continued to study wave and tidal processes. I gathered samples from the cliff face, recorded the geological differences from Sheringham all the way down to Great Yarmouth, and measured the absorbency of the coastline: how much water it could retain, and how much it could repel.

There were heavy rains and high tides throughout September and there had already been small slips and random cliff falls. Soon there would be a much greater collapse but none of us could predict where that might be or how much it might take with it.

It was a Saturday, on Halcyon Beach, and a hint of blue sky had tempted families on to the sand to enjoy the last of summer. The sun broke through high clouds, illuminating the virulent green of the rising sea. By the afternoon the clouds began to move swiftly across the horizon, darkening against the last of the light, rising into a grey bank of shadow.

The gulls and waders disappeared, leaving the sky to itself. It was as if a stage was being cleared for some long-planned realignment between earth and sea. Only after the first high rolls of thunder did people begin to pick up their possessions and hurry back to the car park, dropping their newspapers, holding beach mats and towels against their faces. By then the sands on which they ran had taken on a metallic sheen, the seaweed dulled by cloud.

At the beach café the white plastic chairs that hadn't blown over were stacked in haste. All over the bay people were racing against the oncoming storm and the speed of the tide. Children were crying ‘Daddy, carry me' and ‘Mum, Mum, wait for me' as their parents tried to be authoritative without appearing afraid.

I saw a family to the south, sheltering at the back of the bay, anticipating the storm but failing to understand the pace of the tide or the danger of landslip. I came down from the car park, shouting at them to get out, away from the cliff, but my cries were against the wind.

I ran towards them, gesturing that they should come out from the cove but they waved back jauntily, as if I was a friend on his way to share a picnic.

As I ran the sand became heavier underfoot. The rain kept switching direction in the wind and the spray was all around me. Now I could make out the family: a couple with two children, a boy of seven or eight, and a girl of three or four. Their windbreak had already blown over and they were trying to keep the rest of their possessions together in a narrow hollow.

If I reached them in time they could still wade to safety. But when they began to hear my shouts they made cancelling gestures with their arms, telling me everything was fine and I should go back. They even pointed up to the cliff above them, suggesting they could climb up there if things got difficult, but I knew that any foothold would crumble and that their children would never manage the ascent.

‘Get out,' I yelled. ‘Come on. Start running.'

The father could not understand the danger they were in. ‘It's all right, mate,' he called back. ‘We're OK here.'

‘You're not. The cliff could go …'

‘We can climb up it …'

‘Didn't you hear me? You've got to get away from it.'