Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

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.

That was what she told herself, anyway, but the fact that for the first month after her return she scrutinized every American face that came or left the camp suggested that Polly’s heart had not yet healed. Madge could see that Polly was still troubled, but of course she thought the whole problem was lack of roughage.

But it would take more than a high-fibre diet to cure Polly’s pain. Only time would do that and time moved slowly at the Greenham camp that spring for Polly. She had not told Madge about Jack, or any of the women with whom she began again to share her life. They would not have understood. Polly did not understand it herself, except to know that love is blind. Everything Jack stood for Polly truly did despise, and she despised herself for having fallen in love with such a man. What was worse, she despised herself for not having the strength to forget him.

When the missiles finally did arrive, Polly was amongst that briefly celebrated group of women who managed to breach the perimeter fences and carry their protest on to the base itself. Polly’s poor, horrified parents opened their newspaper one morning to discover that she and her comrades had reached the landing runway and had very nearly forced the huge US Air Force transport planes to abort their landings. It was a great propaganda triumph, which in the opinion of the USAF very nearly caused a nuclear disaster. In court Polly pleaded guilty to criminal trespass but stated that she had acted in order to prevent the greater crime of millions of people being vaporized in nuclear explosions. The magistrate declined to accept global geopolitics as mitigating circumstances and Polly was bound over to keep the peace.

“Ha!” said Polly. “Keeping the peace is what I was doing anyway.”

Which she thought was rather a clever thing to say.

Polly was not the only one still grieving for the past. Jack too found himself unable to step out from under the long shadow of their relationship. With Jack, however, the effect was more positive; the memory and continuing presence of Polly in Jack’s heart was to prove a considerable influence on his life and career.

After leaving Greenham Jack spent most of the rest of the eighties stationed in the lovely old German city of Wiesbaden, a part of the vast American military presence that had been camping in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Wiesbaden was the headquarters of the US Army in Europe. Over the years the local German community had grown accustomed to the presence of hordes of young foreign men in their midst and an uneasy relationship had grown up between the military and its host community. Of course, there were tensions and conflicts, but discipline was strict and scandals were rare. Rare but not unknown. One night in a bierkeller in Bad Nauheim, a town a few miles up the autobahn from Wiesbaden, there occurred an incident which the army subsequently quickly tried to forget.

Normally Jack would not have been in a bierkeller at all. He was not much of a pub man. Being extremely ambitious, he tended to reserve his spare time for study or sports. However, on this particular night Jack was ready to relax. He had been out on a week’s field training, a week of camp food and camp beds, during which time he had been cold and wet for twenty-four hours a day. Jack was ready to spend an evening drinking the German winter out of his bones.

Being a little tired of Wiesbaden, he took the army bus to Bad Nauheim, where he very soon fell in with some fellow officers.

“Hey, Jack, come over here and have a beer, you enigmatic bastard,” a captain known as Dipstick shouted as Jack entered the bar. Dipstick was so called because he was a mechanical engineer and also because he liked to talk about how much sex he was getting. He shared an offbase house in Bad Nauheim with another army captain called Rod. Dipstick and Rod were a real couple of good ol’ boys and were already half full of beer. Between them sat a German girl called Helga. Helga was the sort of girl who liked soldiers and in particular getting drunk and having sex with them. Had Helga been a man she would have been called a good ol’ boy too, just like Dipstick and Rod, but because she was a woman it was well known that she was a scrubber.