In March 1982, thirty thousand women joined hands around the perimeter fence of an RAF base at Greenham Common, Berkshire, in protest against nuclear weaponry. I was one of them. In fact I was in the local newspaper, a smudged newsprint smile on top of patched dungarees. We shall overcome: four-year-old Laura Langrishe pictured at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp with her mother, Wendy. I keep a framed copy of it on my desk; my father still has the yellowing original on his. Next to it, there’s another photograph taken later that week, a white-bordered snapshot, not the original this time – that went the same way as Kit’s first map – but a reprint from a negative. In the photograph, I’m outside a tent, wrapped in my mother’s skinny arms. She’s wearing a paisley headscarf and hooped earrings and there’s a hand-rolled cigarette tucked behind her left ear. We are both laughing, matching dimples high on our right cheeks. She was killed by a drunk-driver four weeks later, three stripes deep on a zebra crossing, on the way to pick me up from nursery school.
My dad, Steve, talked, still talks, about Wendy all the time; death pickled her in perfection, so my early years seem idyllic. I would like to remember her shortcomings, but that’s never been an option. This is something I didn’t realise until embarrassingly recently. I’ve asked Dad what they rowed about and he says, nothing really, we had the same outlook on life. Maybe it was perfect, in those early days. Maybe time would have had her grounding me, policing my wardrobe and friends, disapproving of the music I listened to and the books I read or failed to read. I do know that Wendy carried the newborn me everywhere in a sling decades before this was fashionable, and that I learned to speak by naming the wild flowers on our nature walks. Dad talks fondly of the biscuit-baking and potato-printing we did together at the kitchen table in our rented Croydon flat. I wish I could remember just one of these occasions and trust it as a true memory rather than an internalised legend, but there are just associations and triggers. A witch-cackle laugh; the smell of rolling tobacco and Timotei shampoo. There’s only one memory I’m sure is mine, and that’s of her doing my hair, whispering that it was too lovely to cut, of brushing it and plaiting it, and I remember purring like a kitten. I certainly didn’t get this memory from Dad, who tortured me with years of tangled ponytails yanked high and lopsided in rubber bands. I never asked him if this was true in case it turns out not to be, but I shared the memory with Kit our second evening together, through noisy helpless tears. That night, he brushed out my hair one hundred times before bed.
I might not have learned the practicalities of motherhood from Wendy but there is something of her in me; I feel it, behind my ribs. I like to think of it as all the love she never got to give me. A vacuum should be weightless but I stagger under the burden of it, and I won’t feel complete until I pass it on. Adele, with kind but clumsy intentions, says she has enough love for two grandmothers. She certainly has enough wool. Her job suits her, a rag-bag of fabric and yarns; there’s nothing to Adele, no opinions on anything outside the home. She and Wendy would have been perfect sitcom warring mothers-in-law.
Wendy was a card-carrying, almost clichéd feminist: as well as camping out at Greenham, she subscribed to Spare Rib, and didn’t wear a bra, although like me, or like me until I had to start messing around with my hormones, she had the figure of a ten-year-old boy and didn’t need to. My dad is more of an accidental feminist. He brought me up with no concessions to gender. He was too busy playing politics to buy me Barbies. He worked as a sub-editor on local papers, then at Fleet Street, and was big in the Trades Union movement throughout my childhood. One early memory I can trust is the terrifying crush at the picket line at Wapping when Dad and his friends came out in support of the striking printers. He got quite a lot of things wrong: I spent my ninth birthday at the Trades Union Congress annual conference, for example. But he got a lot right, too. My parents met playing pool in their polytechnic and when I was ten I begged Dad to teach me how to play. He took me for a Coke and a packet of salt and shake crisps at the Croydon Working Men’s Club. At first, I stood on an upturned Britvic crate to reach the table. By my thirteenth birthday I was as tall as Dad, and could clear the baize in five minutes.
Since he retired, he’s got seriously into party politics. Just before I met Kit, he said, ‘The South is dead,’ and declared that the only hope for the Left was in the north. He swapped the Croydon flat for a two-up two-down in Toxteth, Liverpool, where he campaigns for the TUSC, a hardline party of the working people. His unelectability in a world ruled by the markets only makes me love him all the more. He should be able to get a good view of the eclipse on Friday. The farther north you go, the greater the shadow. In Toxteth there will be about 90 per cent coverage. Although, as most eclipse chasers will tell you, nothing less than totality counts. Partial eclipses are interesting but they don’t give you the shivers. Even 98 per cent coverage is like being nearly pregnant.
We used to go whole weeks without speaking, but Dad rings me most days now, ostensibly for help with a clue in the Guardian Quick Crossword. Kit thinks he completes the whole crossword in five minutes, then singles out the clue that took him the longest to solve and uses it as a pretext to ring me. Kit finds this endearing; I do, too. Dad loves his daily update on the babies, even if it’s just a ‘good’. He melts like butter at the mention of them.
He knows about Jamie’s trial and he knows what happened later but not that the two are connected.
He doesn’t know that the night we escaped with our lives was anything other than a random accident, and he certainly doesn’t know that we’ve been living in fear of a second, successful attack ever since.
He doesn’t know that Beth is the reason behind our name change.