Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp

Monica Sjöö

Narrator: On the 12^th and 13^th of December 1982 I returned to Greenham, travelling by coach with some women from Fishguard, to take part in the enormous 30,000 strong women’s exorcism of the US base. Women encircled the entire barbed-wire perimeter fence, holding hands, planting live candles all around it, spinning wollen spiders’ webs over the seven gates, placing images and clothing of beloved children on the fence, weaving a woman-and-life-vibrating embrace around this ugly and repulsive monstrosity. I will never forget the beauty and mystery of the candles burning all along the fence in the twilight, which created images like one finds at an ancient shrine…with women singing, moaning, keening and humming all around…On the next day, December 13^th, which marks the festival in Sweden of the Queen of Light, Lucia, we placed our bodies in front of the gates, trying to prevent vehicles and personnel from either entering or leaving the base. We got flung in the mud and dragged off again and again as vehicles forced their way through us inch by inch.  All the while the women kept singing *You Can’t Kill the Spirit’. It felt so very strange in the evening of that day hitching back by the old road to Bristol and passing Silbury Mound as it loomed out of the shadows and the gathering dusk.