Blast From the Past (11 page)

Polly’s little life seemed suddenly small and depressing. Poky would have been a good word for it, or dingy. She felt embarrassed, which was really rather unjust because if anyone in that room had reason to feel embarrassed it was Jack, and yet Polly knew that it was she who was going red.

Hurriedly she began to tidy up. Polly was a dropper of things and a leaver around of other things. She did not tidy up as she went along, she tidied up once every seven days on a strict routine and she was already nine days into the current cycle. There were knickers and tights on the floor, a dirty plate and various mugs by the bed, and magazines and books everywhere. Polly felt that at least the intimate clothing had to be hidden away; also anything that had mould growing on it, particularly if the two were one and the same thing.

As Jack watched Polly scurrying about, stooping to pick up her knickers and bras, he could not help but remember Polly as a young girl, searching for her underwear in hotel rooms and the backs of cars. Once she had not been able to find the elusive garment at all
and
they had risked going down to dinner, not only in fear of being seen together but also in the wicked knowledge that Polly was naked beneath her little denim skirt. What a wonderful meal that had been. Jack had kicked off his shoe beneath the table and as they ate his bare foot had lain between Polly’s legs. In the long years since that glorious meal Jack had relived it in his memory a thousand times. He doubted that he had ever had a happier moment. Certainly not in a motel restaurant, anyway.

‘Bet you didn’t think things would look as shitty as this,’ Polly said, stuffing dirty clothes into the clean clothes drawer.

As he watched her moving about Jack knew that it was as he had feared. That he was still in love with her.

‘No, I didn’t. I thought it would be much more shitty than this.’

Jack could see that virtually everything Polly owned was on view. Her furniture, her clothes, all of her stuff. It didn’t seem to him that she had changed very much either. There were her souvenir mugs from the 1984 miners’ strike. A poster advertising a concert at Wembley Stadium to celebrate the release of Nelson Mandela. One of those plastic flowers that dance when music comes on (but only if the battery hasn’t been dead for five and a half years, which in this case it had). A poster of Daniel Ortega proclaiming ‘Nicaragua must survive’, a poster of Garfield the cartoon cat proclaiming that he hated mornings. A clipframed front page of the
London Evening Standard
from the day Margaret
Thatcher
resigned (Jack, like many Americans, could not understand how the Brits had ever let that one happen; anyone could see that she was the best thing they had had in years – it was like after the war, when they dropped Churchill). Polly had lots of books. A couple of IKEA ‘first home’ easy chairs, a rape alarm, a small TV. Thirty or forty loose CDs and forty or fifty empty CD boxes.

Everything was as Jack might have imagined it. The only thing that surprised him was how little Polly owned. You would have been lucky to get two thousand dollars for the entire contents of the room. Not a lot for a woman of thirty-four. Or was it thirty-five? Not a very impressive accumulation for a whole half-lifetime.

Polly glanced up from her tidying. She knew what he was thinking. ‘Not very impressive, is it?’

Polly still could not quite believe how spectacularly she had managed to screw up her life. Just how unlucky could a girl get? And why did it have to be her?

No reason, of course. Some people are fortunate in life and love, some are not, and you can never tell how the chips will fall. At school nobody would have looked at Polly and thought, she’ll end up one of the lonely ones. She’ll be the one who screws things up. She had been bright and attractive in every way. She might easily have made a great success of her personal life had fate favoured her, but it had not.

How cruel to reflect upon the wrong turns and unsought circumstances of an unlucky life. When Polly
and
her friends had sat laughing in the pub together at the age of seventeen it would not have been possible to look at them and say, ‘Second from the left with the rum and Coke, she’s going to have problems.’ It would not have been possible to predict that Polly, who seemed so strong and assured, was very soon going to fall head over heels in love and then get devastatingly dumped. That she would then spend years drifting unsatisfactorily from brief affair to brief affair before suddenly towards the end of her twenties being seized by a sudden desperate fear of being alone. That Polly of all people would be the one to get caught up with a married man (separated, waiting for divorce) who would lie to her, cheat on her and eventually leave Polly for the ex-wife whom he had previously left for Polly.

Every golden generation, every fresh-faced group of friends, must statistically contain those who will fall prey to the sad clichés of life. The things they never thought would or could happen to them. Divorce, alcoholism, illness, failure. Those were things that happened to one’s parents’ generation. To adults who no longer had their whole lives before them. It comes as a shock when the truth dawns that every young person is just an older person waiting to happen, and it happens a lot sooner than anyone ever thinks.

20

AT THE END
of the summer, after Jack had left Polly, she decided to stay on at Greenham. Her parents did everything they could to persuade her to come home and go back to school but she was adamant. Her A-levels could wait, she explained, there was a planet to be saved. Polly told Mr and Mrs Slade that she had things to do, she had made great friends amongst her compatriots at the peace camp and was halfway through the construction of a ten-foot-high puppet of a She-God called Wooma, with which Polly and her friends intended to parade through Newbury. Of course, Polly did not tell her parents that she had spent the summer having a passionate fling with a man twice her age and that now he was gone her heart was utterly broken. She did not tell them that her whole being ached with sadness and that sometimes she thought she would actually go mad. She just told them about Wooma and that she was not coming home yet.

In fact Polly never did go home. Instead she moved permanently into the camp, living in a caravan with an old granny called Madge. Madge had been widowed the previous spring and had decided that she wanted to
do
something useful with the rest of her life, so she had bought a little caravan and moved to Greenham to save the world. Madge was a good companion and Polly loved her, but she was obsessed with bowels, particularly Polly’s. She would enquire earnestly about the state of Polly’s stools, reminding her always to be sure to inspect what she had produced before shovelling on the soil. Madge never tired of assuring Polly that regular, punctual movements were the secret of longevity and constantly made bran muffins of such copious fibrousness that they could have prised open the buttocks of a concrete elephant.

Polly kept in touch with her parents via postcards and the occasional photograph. It was through the latter that Mr and Mrs Slade kept up with the changes in Polly’s appearance, which was drifting from rather stylish anarcho-punk to depressing ‘who gives a fuck?’ hippy grunge. Mrs Slade wondered how Polly washed her hair now that it was all in great shaggy dreadlocks with beads sewn into them and the terrible answer was, of course, that she didn’t. Mr Slade worried that food might get stuck in Polly’s new lip ring and rot there. He’d read somewhere that decaying meat was carcinogenic, then he remembered that Polly was a vegetarian and felt better. Neither of Polly’s parents liked the tattoo she had had done on her shoulder, depicting the female gender symbol with a clenched fist in the centre of it. Unfortunately the tattoo had been rather inexpertly applied by a stoned goth at the Glastonbury festival, and the fist looked
like
a penis, which was hardly a feminist symbol.

The Greenham camp was a bit like the Foreign Legion for Polly, a place to nurse a lost soul. She was relatively content there, apart, of course, from her aching heart and Madge going on at her all the time about her far too infrequent evacuations. Camp life was tolerable but, then again, if you consider yourself worthless and don’t care whether you live or you die, which was how Polly felt, pretty much anything is tolerable.

Some aspects of Greenham life Polly never got used to. Even in her numbed state of mind all the singing and the holding hands could get a bit wearing. The peace women were so anxious not to emulate the aggressive posturing of the male of the species that sometimes they ended up just looking a bit wet. Sometimes at night, when the women were having their lentils, the British squaddies would pile back from the pub all pissed up and chanting, ‘Lesby, lesby, lesbiANS.’ When that happened Polly always longed to lob a ladleful of hot roughage at them and inform them that they were a bunch of brainless no-dicks, but that sort of behaviour was not how things were done. The camp was there to stop aggression, after all, not to fuel it, so instead the huddled women would confront the baying young men with their impenetrable female energy, constructing a forcefield of love and calm through which the soldiers occasionally urinated.

Polly was not very good at this type of mystical feminism. She was more for the give as good as you get
school
of protest. Madge often tried to explain that this was
exactly
the type of attitude that had started the arms race in the first place, but Polly remained restive and unconvinced.

Try as she might, she never could truly welcome her periods as an old friend. She simply could not regard the monthly stomach cramps as a small price to pay for the privilege of celebrating the timeless mystery of her menstrual cycle. Being as one with the rhythms of the moon was of very little comfort to Polly when she had a hot water bottle clamped to her stomach. It turned out that she wasn’t very good at puppet-making either. The She-God Wooma’s head had fallen off on its first outing, nearly killing a baby outside Boots in the Newbury shopping precinct. Nor did Polly have any children’s paintings to pin to the perimeter wires, or peace poems and haiku to send to the prime minister. Above all, apart from the mass protests and camp invasions in which Polly always played an enthusiastic part, life at Greenham could be very very boring. It was all right for the lesbians – they had something to do of a night – but for Polly the hours of darkness were long and lonely, and she would lie there shivering, listening to Madge snoring, trying not to think about Jack and wondering what she was doing with her life. Certainly she was saving the world, but was that enough?

After about a year Polly was ready for a break, and the miners’ strike in 1984 gave her the opportunity to move on. The whole of alternative society had been galvanized by the confrontation between Mrs Thatcher
and
the miners. The prime minister seemed finally to have found an enemy worthy of her metal, and everybody wanted to be a part of what was confidently expected to be her defeat. Polly decided to leave Greenham for a while in order to carry a fundraising bucket for the NUM.

She went to stay with friends in Yorkshire, where she signed on the dole and offered her services at a miners’ support group. There she took up with a middle-aged communist shop steward called Derek. He was a nice man but the relationship did not last long; despite both of their being politically on the far left, they were incompatible. This was, of course, inevitable, given that one of the hallmarks of the far left in those days was that almost everybody on it was politically incompatible with almost everybody else. The factionization was surreal. Groups would split and split again until individual members were in danger of being rendered schizophrenic. It made for an incredible array of radical newspapers. On the steps of every Student Union and on every picket line one could buy
The Socialist This, The New Left That
and
The International God Knows What
… Sadly, most of these papers were read exclusively by the people who printed and sold them.

And the only thing that all the disparate factions had in common was that they all hated each other. What is more they hated each other with a venom and a passion that they could never feel for the Tories. The Tories were just misguided products of an inherently corrupt system. Other Lefties were the anti-Christ.

Polly and Derek fell out over a point of sexual politics. He objected to her wishing to stand on the front line at the secondary pickets, which were becoming more and more violent as frustrations grew on both sides.

‘Look, Poll,’ Derek said. ‘When me an’t lads are stood standing at dock gates, tryin’ t’stop foreign bastard scab coal comin’ in, and Maggie’s boot boys in blue are tryin’ t’kick six types of shit out of us we do not need to be worrying about protectin’ our womenfolk.’

Derek, like most of the miners, still believed firmly that there was men’s work and there was women’s work. It was, in fact, to be the last year that men like Derek would believe such a thing, because within a very short time virtually every coalmine in Britain would be closed, the men would be out of work and the women would become the principal earners in the home.

At the time, though, Derek definitely believed that women were the gentler sex. Faced with such positively Neanderthal sexism, Polly scarcely knew where to start.

‘But … you … For God’s sake …!’ Polly could feel her eyes beginning to water with frustration.

‘Well, there’s no need t’cry about it, love,’ said Derek, and there their relationship ended.

The miners’ strike finally collapsed in January 1985. Polly was alone and with no clear sense of purpose. Like Bono at about the same time, she still hadn’t found what she was looking for. She thought about moving to London where yet another once mighty union, this time
the
print workers’, was preparing to dash itself against the walls of Castle Thatcher in a futile attempt to maintain their old working practices. In the end, however, she couldn’t face it. Even the peace dirges of Greenham seemed preferable to endlessly chanting, ‘Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!’ and ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go,’ when clearly no one was going anywhere. So Polly returned to the camp to await the delivery of the cruise missiles.