Welford Action
Part One
This is the first chapter of the Trespassing memoir. It was the night after the botched-bombing of Libya. Welford was the largest bomb storage base in Europe, just eight miles from our camp. The American bombs that had missed their target and killed civilians in Tripoli had been based here. We went to cut the fence and spray paint the rest of the cluster bombs.
It had taken a long time to find the fence into Welford. We’d slogged on for ages in the rain, through thick, muddy fields full of stubble and puddles, miles it seemed from where we’d hidden Rebecca’s Mini on a wet country lane. There was no moon. Crows flapped huge from bare, black trees, making us gasp, then giggle, high on danger under the misty half-moon. Nerves tightly strung, senses tingling.
RAF Welford was operating under red alert. We knew this much from listening to the BBC for days. Two days after the war began, all bases in Europe– probably all bases on earth engaged in this Cold War –were on red alert, with a three-minute warning for all nuclear facilities. Red alert for the war– a small war so far, but burning hotter– and the bombs and the bombers, the men who make the bombs, guard the bombs, drop and maintain the bombs– all on global standby– radar scanning, troops deployed, the planes and the battleships, the guns and the generals, the command headquarters and all the masses of bloodless computers red alerted. Adrenalin pushed us on.
Rebecca and Lorna had been inside Welford five times before, and they’d never been spotted. Each time they snipped their way in to investigate and prowl about, making maps that grew more and more detailed, spying on the security systems, discovering the easiest places to cut the fence, photographing the different types of bombs stored there, and getting the timing of the security patrols. Hogan’s Heroes all the way. Welford was an easy in, we’d reckoned. It should have been simple and fast, unlike Greenham where the peace camp had kept those armies of soldiers and police sharpened and on edge, hunting us ruthlessly with big dogs, mending and guarding that fence day and night, ceaselessly policing at great cost to the public in an effort to control vast and shifting numbers of womyn who they could never quite manage to contain. Those boys were practiced, you had to give them that, though they couldn’t have done it without us.
That night, on the brink of the latest attempt at patriarchal self-destruction, security was real heavy at Welford, and the notion of an easy-in blew away on the dark, stormy winds. We watched from the shadows that held us, armed guards patrolling, squaddies on foot with dogs and machine guns, and scores of vehicles slowly circling the perimeter fence.
We hid for a long time on a steep, mud-sodden slope just below the patrols, shadowed from the span of powerful arc lights that lit the fences. We listened to their radios crackling, the spinning of jeep and truck tires on gravel, and the heavy, booted footsteps. We stared into each-others’ faces, time running with the rain, and I wondered about getting past them all, getting to the bombs we’d come to paint and then getting out again. I wondered about turning right around and hitching back to my sleeping bag at Yellow Gate, but I didn’t wonder out loud.
Finally, seeing a break in the rhythm of surveillance, Rebecca looked at us, nodded, and crept to the fence to cut a circle knee-high with her bolt cutters. The steel blades snapped each small, diamond shaped link in the fence loudly, all sound magnified with the night, like our thudding hearts. We waited again as the next shift of squaddies passed us, then, single file we crawled though that first fence, and Hershe cut the next rough hole, pinging each thick wire quickly, and then we were past the final fence and running. We held our paint pots and spray cans tightly, racing through the shadows, crouching or crawling when we were in the open, sliding on the slippery ground as we pressed across the flattened land towards the bombs, deep inside the base’s perimeter.
In the dark and pissing rain, I felt the enormity of Welford, knew I was running blind, but I trusted in Lorna and Rebecca to know where we were. A woman would hiss, “DOWN!” whenever she saw headlights or heard footsteps or an engine’s whine, and we’d dive and lay hugging the earth as white lights approached, passing us easily– we were totally mud-camouflaged by then.
Crawling, then running at the chance, we sprinted, scrambling up and sliding down the steep, man-made hills flat on our backs, hills we suspected held bunkers, like Greenham’s, that housed nuclear weapons. We neared the cluster-bomb storage area, five womyn, side by side, closer and closer. We pulled ourselves up the last few hills on our hands and knees, sliding flat on our backs and spraying mud. My glasses were streaked and splattered, my hands numb, my broken rib and pulse and brain were pounding. Nothing grew on the land inside the base. The season was anyone’s guess in here. All the earth was scraped raw, or laden with concrete, lights and generators.
At the top of the last hill we stopped, pressed to Welford Action the earth at its crest. The sound of our breathing filled the saturated night. I looked down. I was staring at dark stacks of bombs, piled high in the rain just below us. The mist made faint rainbow circles around the high beams of arc lights. There was an eerie silence.
Jude broke first. “They keep the bombs out there, in the open like that? Always?” She couldn’t believe the sight. I lay there, shocked in the fine rain, feeling Hershe stunned and motionless beside me.
“Yeah. Those are the cluster bombs,” Lorna pointed, indicating the rows and rows of shadowed steel stacks on the west side of the huge field full of bombs.
“Those are the ones they dropped on Libya.” The stacks were 20 feet high. They covered the field, as far as I could see, sinister, absorbing all the light in the world, marching their intent on towards eternity.
“I’ve never seen a bomb before!” “Holy shit.”
More silence.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t hear anything. What did you hear, Hershe?”
“I think I saw a light flash over there,” Hershe pointed.
“Let’s just wait a bit and catch our breath.” I suggested, panting and in pain.
The vision stunned me—all those bombs, thousands of them just lying out there in the rain, rusting. Waiting.
“Goddess! I thought they’d be inside warehouses or bunkers, inside something!” Jude said. We continued to stare, fixated, at the shadowed stacks below us.
“Well then,” Rebecca began, ready to get down to the night’s business, trying to pull us three naïve Americans into a functioning group, “Shall we split up or hang together?”
“How about two groups?” Hershe suggested, “That way we can get more space covered and no one has to be alone.”
“I don’t want to be alone down there,” Jude muttered, still awestruck at the sight.
“O.K., consensus?” We all nodded. Rebecca continued organizing. “If either group gets caught, the others can carry on painting, get out when they can. The keys to my car are under the front left tire, and whoever’s not been nicked can drive round to meet the others at the north side. Where we cut that hole. Remember? Can we all find that hole? Alright?” Rebecca was ready to head down the hill.
“Wanna be my buddies?” Hershe asked Jude and me.
“Sure thing, sister.” No way I’d ever find that freaking hole.
My breath was a bit easier now and I could feel myself getting ready, consciousness shifting to the action at hand. The Americans had killed innocent womyn and children with those bombs two days ago. We were here to file an official protest in resistance, to cast our vote in the most direct way we knew how, or to count coup. I felt all three as possible motivations every time.
We slid down the last hill, creeping from shadow to shadow as the spray cans rattled in our coat pockets and we tried to keep them still. Stacks of bombs loomed higher and higher as we approached out of the gloomy mists. At last, we stood, staring up at them, great towering mountains of metal and megatonnage. Rebecca and Lorna nipped round the corner and disappeared. The three of us stood, silent and rooted to the ground, looking at the steel hills of offense they called defense, knowing the misery, poisoning, and poverty they cause.
“It’s like a fucking penile fortress!” Jude broke the spell, and then we were painting, fast and quietly, just the familiar sound of muffled rattling as we shook the cans, covering the cartoon-like green metal cylinders with red words and symbols. I sprayed “MURDERERS” and “TERRORISTS!” and “BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!”, and moved on as the crimson paint slid down the rain-slick sides and dripped, lower and lower, covering the pyramid slopes. Painting and moving on quickly down the stacks, noticing as I went that the bombs were about the size of the kids they blow to pieces.
We’d graffitied both sides of six rows, and Hershe had run out of spray paint and begun to brush messages onto the asphalt runway opposite the bombs from a tin of orange paint she’d carried. I moved over Welford Action to join her, when suddenly, a harsh male voice split the night and our courage wide open.
“Hold it right there!” We froze where we stood.
“Put your hands up!”
In reflex, all together and wordlessly, we zipped round the corner of the nearest stack, hiding between the neatly filed piles of bomb hills. Moving slowly, the soldier tracked us by ear through the darkness, through those steep canyons of green metal dripping in wet red paint. We moved when he moved, listening on the other side of the wet, dripping row. I glimpsed him briefly, in the arc lights, rounding the corner, as we all turned together, one mechanism, eerily attached.
He was young, Black, American by his uniform, and he held a gun, a huge gun, raised in hunting position. What the hell are we doing?! I thought, the paint sticky on my hands, my ribs aching like a knife was planted there. We’ll never get out of here! I fought the rising panic. I heard dogs barking closer, more male voices approaching.
“Come out and put your hands up!” he commanded again.
And then Jude popped up and shouted near my ear where I squatted between her and Hershe—“Don’t shoot! We’re Greenham womyn!”
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