Blast from the Past

10

“Don’t freak out,” his voice said. “It’s Jack. Jack Kent.”

Polly was freaking out. She stood shaking in her nightshirt, staring at the answerphone machine as it delivered a voice into her life that she had not heard for more than sixteen years.

She had met him in a roadside restaurant on the A34. She was seventeen and a committed political activist. What is more, she had been a committed political activist in a way that only a seventeen-year-old can be. More committed, more political and more active than any committed political activist had ever been before her, or so she thought. She would have made the secret love child of Leon Trotsky and Margaret Thatcher look like an uncommitted, apolitical layabout.

Polly described herself as a feminist, a socialist and an anarchist, which of course made her an extremely dull conversationalist. Smalltalk becomes wearisome when no two sentences can be negotiated without the words “fascist”, “Thatcher” and “capitalist conspiracy” being crowbarred into them. So when Polly had announced her intention of joining the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common her parents had secretly been extremely pleased.

“It’s only for the summer,” Polly assured them, under the impression that they would be devastated.

“Yes, dear, that’s fine,” her parents said.

“It’s just something I feel I have to do,” Polly continued. “You see, white male eurocentric hegemony has developed a culture of violence, which…”

Polly’s parents’ eyes glazed over as she spoke at length about the socio-political development of her commitment to the anarcho-feminist peace movement. They had very much preferred it when she had been obsessed with Abba.

The problem with idealism in the young is that, like sex, they think that they are the first people to have thought of it. Polly’s parents were lifelong liberals and would have assured anybody who cared to listen that they were very much against the world being destroyed by nuclear war. Yet their daughter bunched them in with Reagan and Ghengis Khan and seemed to feel that it was her duty to convert them from the warmongering ways of all previous generations.

“Did you know that the US defence budget for just one day would feed the whole Third World for a year?” Polly would tell them at breakfast over her fourth bowl of muesli, “and what are we doing about it?”

By “we” Polly’s parents knew that really she meant them and the truth was that, apart from maintaining a standing order to Oxfam, they were not doing very much.

Therefore, although they were certainly going to miss their beloved daughter, it was none the less going to be rather a relief to be able to enjoy breakfast again without feeling that by doing so they were shoring up the Pentagon and murdering African babies.

And of course Mr and Mrs Slade were very proud of their daughter. They admired her moral zeal. Other kids were going off grapepicking in France or working in supermarkets to pay off the hire purchase on their motorbikes, or having it off in Ibiza. Their daughter was saving the planet from complete annihilation. Mr and Mrs Slade felt that if she could do that and complete the prescribed reading for her A-level year then she would have spent a useful summer.

And, of course, one thing they did not have to worry about now was boys. Polly was a headstrong girl and between the ages of fourteen and sixteen had alarmed her parents by bringing any number of extremely off-putting young thugs home for tea. Scrumpy-swilling, long-haired bumpkins who kept falling off their mopeds; snarling rude boys in sixteen-hole Doc Martens; cocky New Romantics who wore far too much make-up – and, for a brief, distressing period, a green-haired lad who called himself Johnny Motherfucker and claimed to have eaten a live pigeon. Mercifully, since Polly had discovered politics there had been fewer of these horrible youths hanging about the place, although Mr and Mrs Slade lived in fear that on some rally or other their daughter would get involved with an anarcho-squatter peacenik punk with a tattooed penis and rings through his scrotum.

There would be no risk of such disasters at Greenham Common. The Greenham Peace Camp was separatist, women only. Men were not allowed to stay overnight. Mr and Mrs Slade thought it all sounded splendid. Summer camping, with plenty of time for reading, in the company of serious and idealistic women, struck them as a very good idea indeed. Of course the first mass evictions and the sight of their daughter on the news being carried away by policemen was rather a shock, but still, better a bobby manhandling her than some dreadful yob who rode a motorbike and washed his jeans in urine.