Camp Albion.

I went recently to see Camp Albion at the Watermill Theatre in my hometown.  It’s a play about the Newbury Bypass road protests of the ‘90s, that bitterly divided our town. It’s beautifully written, researched & realised by Danielle Pearson and directed equally well by Georgie Staight. The imagined story is movingly told with grace and humour, and the actors utterly convincing. Hannah Brown, Kate Russell-Smith and Joe Swift played Cassie, Foxglove Sue and Dylan so well, I will keep those characters close to my heart. You see, they were all a bit me, or people I knew.  Like several in the audience I suspect, I recognised so much, because I was one of the protestors – and one of the ‘locals’.

I’ve written about that time and what it spurred me on to do, several times over the years – most thoroughly in my book, On Gallows Down. And, as I write this in a record-smashing heatwave, when we’re losing wildlife in an ever-accelerating blur, it feels as urgent now – more so, or course – than it did 26 years ago. And it really was urgent then. On one level (though it’s surprising how quickly this becomes a ‘normal’ state) I’ve lived in a bubble of panic, frustration and anger since. Though, it has to be said, I am also a naturally, cheerfully optimistic ‘Pollyanna.’ I hate confrontation and tend towards co-operation, appeal, humour and compromise. I irritate myself sometimes; but it’s a survival tool, too.

Mostly, I’ve lived with the wounded sense of not having done enough – for nature, for the planet, for the burgeoning sense of an unequal world. I was galvanised – radicalised even; but what did I do with all that? And yet, in that tiny, deeply familiar theatre, I saw, was vindicated and understood. Something good and cathartic happened. My Mum, daughters and husband (who I met during the latter part of the protests, bringing him along on a very unusual and, as it happens, chaotic, early date) saw too.

What really came across was the human story from different sides: the nuances of contradiction and compromise, anger and hilarity, peace and violence, humility, belief, and the tragedies and heroics of the situation we found ourselves in. The hardship, agency and grief.

I walked into Rack Marsh afterwards, outside the theatre (that was right next to the route of the Bypass) and stood, the meadowsweet as high as my head, remembering how we’d fought for that very place with everything we had. With wile, guile and understanding, with passion, fury and energy; with respect and knowledge from our ‘ancestors’ such as the Greenham Women – and from each other.

I went home after the performance, and with some encouragement, dug out my old folder of yellowed clippings, leaflets and letters. With something of a shock, I saw that I had done a lot. I’d pushed myself as far as I could go. I discovered an archive of buried memories. The local Newbury Weekly News paper was an enormous broadsheet, for starters, but here were hand drawn posters, rallies & trespasses, impromptu gigs, peaceful, direct action, ‘Cruise’ watch and telephone tree alert systems, adapted from our Greenham Women. There were typed instructions ‘For Nic, just in case,’ and minutes of meetings where ‘alternative’ names were used and the first ten minutes included a ‘check-the-room-for-bugs and surveillance’ drill. There were months of national newspaper coverage cuttings that I’d witnessed. Been at. Done.

I was directionless for a long time after. A little lost. The ground beneath me had quite literally gone.

To see it all as a set on a stage, in that place, shifted something. I reached back through time to a young woman in her twenties to say, ‘you did okay. You’ll be okay. But you’ll need to dust yourself off, because there is so much more to be done.’