THE A-BOMB

My aunt married late and was widowed young.  Left with three daughters and a country pile, she threw herself into the role of Lady of the manor, a socially demanding part that eventually took its toll. 

Almost ten years older than my father, I regret seeing my aunt only in her slightly dotty middle age.  A fondly remembered era nonetheless, filled with bingo and debutants, poltergeists, village fetes and always piles of dirty plates.

A fierce advocate of the 'Buy British' campaign, she seemed to have an unwavering support for the British car industry, even after it collapsed and owned a small fleet of oddly coloured vehicles, shaped like Quality Streets, that for most of the Seventies, lived in a barn on her driveway. Undeterred by the collapse of Leyland and Rover, she continued to buy only white-goods with stamps of Royal Approval. 

Strangely, she was mad on Dallas, and even once thought she'd found oil on her land that would pay off her debts and make us all rich, like Bobby and JR. In 'the children's room', she banned her three daughters from watching Doctor Who and James Bond films, because she boldly decreed,  'they glamourised permissive behavior  and violence.'  My dear Dad quietly opposed his sister's view, and when the girls came up to visit us in London on their holidays, he took them secretly to long double-bills, like Thunderball and Moonraker, that used to be screened on a loop at a cinema, off Leicester Square.  

In my aunt's country manor, miles away, the rule was mostly being neither seen or heard, while the adults, dressed in dinner-suits and evening-gowns, whispered about spies and double-agents, as the home-help squirted soda in their whisky.

For the younger generation, that I was once proudly part of, my aunt kept her wartime past an official secret and would often send us all out into the garden on a fruitless hunt to find Grandfather's lost wedding ring, if any of us dared to ask.  Bound by old fashioned codes and honor, she remained stoically tight-lipped and mysterious.  As if someone was always standing behind her shoulder, listening at her ear.

She met me once at Newbury station, in an awful yellow Austin Marina that would trick and cheat her, the way all her cars did. Dressed in a silk headscarf and green wax-jacket, she wore a string of pearls over a frumpy tweed dress that she matched with muddied Wellington's. Her earrings and broach were heirlooms from other aunts, sweet little old ladies, my aunt would never become. Tall amongst her peers, she took my luggage like a cargo-hand and threw it into the boot with her shopping. 

"Before we go back and see your cousins."  She told me as she drove away.  "There's something I want to show you.  I promise, it won't take long,"

She didn't ask me about my train journey, or enquire about school, instead she spoke of  'dreadful women', by what I understood from the playground, were ladies who slept with themselves.  She didn't hold back when we got to airfield and I saw the long stretches of high wire and the swathes of protestors, clinging to the fence like bunting-flags fluttering in the wind.

"Dykes!"  She shouted from the driver's window.  "Lesbians!" My aunt screamed in a shrill high voice, I'd never heard before.

This was my first sight of  Greenham Common. A protest led by thousands of women, I'd seen only from a distance on the Nine O'Clock news. My parents read The Guardian and watched foreign films. I'd stenciled the logo of the CND onto my sports-bag and even met Desmond Tutu, who'd been a special-guest at my school's carol service in my first year.  I was on the women's side, wasn't I?  Against the Bomb, against America, against Thatcher, against men? 

"Dykes."  My aunt repeated, beeping her horn in mad and majestic ecstasy.  "Lezzers!!" 

Sadly, I think they were just too far away to hear us, at least on that occasion. The next time I came down was the summer.  My aunt had brought a new megaphone, with a sticker I peeled off in her car before she noticed it, that said it was Made in Japan.