How The Bomb changed me

This talk by Caroline Westgate was arranged by Quaker Peace & Social Witness and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) as part of the “After the Bomb Dropped: How Hiroshima and Nagasaki Suffered” exhibition at Friends House. Caroline was talking alongside the chair of CND Kate Hudson. Caroline is a member of Northumbria Area Meeting.

The Hiroshima Exhibition was at Friends House on 2 August 2010

How The Bomb changed me

I have been asked to talk about how The Bomb changed me. Once upon a time I was a nice, quiet, law-abiding person, but then I discovered the peace movement. So now… well, I'll let you decide.
 
The story begins more than fifty years ago, when I went to art school to train as a potter. The Iron Curtain was in place across Europe and the cold war divided east from west crudely, brutally, and apparently for all time.

In those days, we were encouraged to believe that the atomic bombs which had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, on balance, a good thing, because they had hastened the end of the war. When Britain's own atomic weapon was developed, another delusion was fostered, that possessing the bomb would admit us to the big league.

In the 1950s we tested our bomb above ground, in Australia and in the South Pacific. Some of the people of the region were badly affected by the tests, as were some of our own servicemen who had been made to witness them and became ill as a result. Any objections were dismissed as of little consequence, and the testing went on.

I was very aware of the effects of nuclear  fallout, partly because of what I knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and partly because I had read about a couple named Steel who came from Malvern, the town in Worcestershire where I lived. These two people had bought an ocean-going yacht and announced that they planned to sail it to the South Pacific, right into the test zone. They would allow themselves to become contaminated by the  fallout from the tests, and then return to the UK to die of radiation sickness, thus demonstrating the ghastly fate of civilians in the event of a nuclear war.

Protests against the bomb had already begun. In my last year at school the first Aldermaston march had been in the news. I persuaded my boyfriend to come with me on the second one, which was held at Easter 1959. It wasn't difficult to get him to come along – he'd been radicalised by his two years' national service and was not inclined to take the military's word for anything.

We enjoyed ourselves among the mixed-bag of marchers. There were some famous people at the front, there were scientists, and religious leaders like Canon Collins. Labour Party members and trade unionists were much in evidence. The Quakers were there of course, and so were academics, journalists, writers, actors and musicians. I even met one of my former school teachers.

At the end of the march the two of us stood on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields and looked at the massive crowd. Thousands of people completely filled all the streets radiating out from Trafalgar Square. I thought, “They will have to listen to us now”.

Indeed, not long afterwards, atmospheric testing was abandoned. I thought, “Tick: job done!” Of course we still had nuclear bombs, but surely, they would never actually be used, would they...?

I married the boyfriend and we had two daughters. Apart from the Cuba missile crisis, which briefly frightened us rigid, we forgot all about nuclear war. We set up home in Hexham in Northumberland, and got on with being parents and building our professional lives.

Fast-forward now to 1980, by which time our daughters were teenagers. Our third child was born, a boy this time. He arrived when Ronald Reagan's brand of strident militarism was on the rise, enthusiastically endorsed by Margaret Thatcher. Suddenly the papers were full of articles about a new nuclear missile, called Cruise.

Gradually it bore in on me that Cruise was different. It was designed to break the stalemate of mutually assured destruction. It was designed to be actually used. It was a first-strike weapon, capable of hitting Soviet missiles in their silos and destroying them before they could be launched. Cruise would be under the control of the Americans, and deployed from American bases here in the UK and elsewhere in western Europe. Somewhere in the bunkers of Washington and Whitehall, people were planning to fight a nuclear war.

It had been twenty years since I had given the bomb a thought. Now I found that I couldn't get it out of my mind. I would look down at my new baby and in my imagination I would see the skin blistering and peeling off his head, as if he were a victim of Hiroshima. A horrible loop of images went round and round in my head and I couldn't rid myself of it.

Things were looking serious. The government had built a series of Sub-Regional Seats of Government in the provinces. We had one of them in our town. When nuclear war-time came, the Westminster parliament would split up and be dispersed to these secure radiation-proof structures. The rest of us were on our own. We were supposed to follow the instructions in a scary booklet which had already been distributed to all households. It was called Protect and survive and it told us how, in the event of a nuclear war, we could make a  fallout shelter from three doors which we would erect as a lean-to inside our own homes.
We would have plenty of time to perform this feat of DIY because it was anticipated that there would be a three-week “period of tension” which would conveniently precede the nuclear conflict. Evidently it was assumed that some sort of rulebook existed, which both sides would play by. We ordinary people were to retreat into our home-made shelters with some candles, tinned food, toys to keep the children amused, and a bucket of sand for a toilet. There we would wait obediently until the government told us it was safe to come out. The preparations were plainly ludicrous, yet we were supposed to take them seriously. I looked at my children and a dreadful terror gripped me, which I simply could not ignore.

It is hard now to connect with the overwhelming, obsessional fear which I experienced at that time. I couldn't feel even the tiniest scrap of optimism that my children might live to become adults. My confidence in our future had been destroyed and I was engulfed by a feeling of total powerlessness. It was so bleak a prospect that I found it impossible even to broach it as a topic of conversation among my friends. As far as I could tell in my isolation, nobody else seemed to share this dark perspective.

The tipping-point came when, flailing around looking for someone, somewhere, who might not think I was completely crazy, I took the decision to go to a Quaker meeting for the first time. It was a huge step for me to take, given that I had scarcely been inside a place of worship since leaving school. I knew very little about Quakers apart from the fact that they were pacifists, but that was why I thought they might understand my fears. Shaking with nerves, I walked in one Sunday. The silence of the meeting enveloped me, and I knew I had come to the right place.

Not long afterwards, our local paper ran a story about some people who had formed a group to learn how to look after themselves in the event of a nuclear attack. The article was headed “Villagers are ready for a nuclear war”. It was illustrated by a picture of the local vicar wearing a gas cape and full breathing apparatus. The text described how the group was meeting fortnightly to hone their survival skills. For example, after the bomb had dropped, if they saw a cow staggering around obviously suffering from radiation sickness, was it safe to slaughter it and eat it? If they caught a frog which had been exposed to  fallout, could they eat that? The answer to both, incidentally, was “yes” as long as they rinsed the meat first. Sadly they weren't able to advise where they could get uncontaminated water from.

While it is true that I now feel distanced from the the awful fear I felt when I first realised that plans to wage a nuclear war really existed, I can all too readily connect with the emotion which replaced that fear, because it is an emotion which is with me still: a perpetually smouldering anger, more or less under control, coupled with an utter determination to refuse absolutely to co-operate in thought, word or deed, with the insane idea of risking the destruction of the planet in the cause of defending Western democracy.
Appalled at the dangerous nonsense represented by the village survival group, I wrote a letter to the local paper. It said that I believed that the only way to survive a nuclear war was not to have one in the first place. They printed it under a huge headline that ran right across the page: “Disarmament is the only way”. A flurry of correspondence followed, and I realised I wasn't the only person who thought nuclear war was a bad idea. We got together, and arranged a meeting. It was packed out. People stood in the hall outside listening through the open door. Northumbrians for Peace was born.

We affiliated to CND and for almost twenty years we sustained a well-argued and creative protest against the madness of plans for nuclear war. We did the sort of things which hundreds of groups like ours did, as they sprang up spontaneously all over the country. We showed The War Game, the film which had been banned by the BBC. We published a newsletter, ran regular public meetings, and demonstrated in the street. The Government-approved  fallout shelter, which we constructed in the market place, was a particularly successful stunt. We bought a caravan and fitted it out so it was part mobile exhibition, part veggie-burger stall. We organised petitions, met MPs and councillors, and lobbied Parliament. We got ourselves in the papers and on local radio. Once we were on Woman's Hour.

We campaigned at the local army barracks where nuclear convoys pulled in overnight on their long journey ferrying nuclear warheads between Faslane and Aldermaston. And we went to Greenham, of course. In those days, a postcard in the paper-shop window announcing that on such-and-such a day there would be a bus to Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp would result in my phone ringing off the hook with people wanting to book a seat.

With some women I had met at Greenham I went to the old Soviet Union on a mission which we described as “DIY Détente”. We booked ourselves on a standard Intourist holiday, and then simply ignored the organised sightseeing visits. Instead, we wandered around Leningrad and Moscow on our own, contriving meetings with ordinary Russian people. We discovered that – surprise, surprise – they didn't want nuclear war either.

Later, when the focus of the campaign shifted from Cruise to Trident, I started going to Faslane. I once spent a week cooking vegan food for 150 peace-campers, on an open fire, in day after day of driving rain. Campaigning became a way of life. As well as being active within my CND group I also worked for a number of years with the Northern Friends Peace Board, a group which attracts the more radical/activist type of Quaker. I acquired a whole new set of skills, and made a whole new circle of amazing and inspiring friends. Alongside my family, these friends are the most precious people in my life. They are defiant, fearless, totally reliable, funny, creative – and no government double-speak will ever get past their phoney-detectors. Should any of them say that they need me, I would drop everything and go. Hardly surprising therefore that it was with some of them that I eventually came to break the law.

I have been arrested five times now, and it isn't a big deal. My experience is that white, middle-class women don't get sent to prison unless they are far more persistent than I have ever managed to be. At first it seemed a big step to take an action knowing that it would result in arrest, but I have to say that apart from the undoubted financial pain of being quite heavily fined, I have not experienced any adverse consequences from my criminal activities. My family still loves me, all my friends still speak to me, I have been allowed to enter America, and though my enhanced CRB check came back listing my convictions, I am nevertheless officially permitted by the authorities to help run our Quaker meeting's Sunday school.

At the moment I am not planning any law-breaking, but I would not be able to promise that I would never see the inside of a police cell again. I am retired from paid work now and enjoying helping to organise The Hexham Debates, a largely Quaker-led project which we set up as a response to the government's decision to renew Trident. We run a programme of talks by nationally known speakers who – to our surprise and gratification – are prepared to travel to a dot on the map called Hexham to speak on the theme “War, Peace and Democracy”.

The third series of The Hexham Debates has just concluded and we are planning a fourth. In our small market town close by Hadrian's Wall, that fine monument to obsolete militarism, the debates regularly attract audiences of over 100, and we have clocked up 250. We have published a book of the talks in the first series, and are preparing to issue recordings of the others as CDs and audio files.

We appear to have uncovered a seam of radicalism, fuelled by a residual anger about the illegal war in Iraq as well as by the decision to renew Trident, and we have been very encouraged by the broadly based nature of support for this project. The topics we have chosen to explore encompass related issues of peace and justice. Our speakers have looked at climate change, perceptions of Islam, competition over resources, radical economic theories, and a variety of contemporary examples of the abuse of power.

From that perspective, nuclear weapons in general – and Trident in particular – appear as an aspect of the problems which our speakers have examined. It doesn't even begin to represent a solution to any of them.
I can't see an end to the struggle I embarked on all those years ago. But neither do I see myself deciding that I've had enough of protesting now and I'll just let it go. After all, there is hardly a shortage of topics to be concerned about. The spiders' webs, which we wove in wool into the Greenham fence all those years ago, symbolise both the interconnectedness of the issues and our links to each other in the struggle.

My Quaker meeting each Sunday morning renews my focus and my determination. It is a great source of strength to me. You will know that Quakers meet in silence and have no set form of service, though anyone may speak if they feel so moved. We believe that we can all have direct experience of God for ourselves. In meeting for worship, unmediated by priest or clergy, we seek to make contact with “that of God” within ourselves, that precious spark which our experience tells us also lies in everyone else.

Quakerism does not require its members to adhere to a creed or sign up to any particular dogma. We take the responsibility of finding our own “leadings” as we put it. And we each try to support one another's seeking and endeavour.

But the Quaker meeting does more than just support. An individual Friend's leading is tested and – if it is a true leading and not just a notion – Friends will confirm it. This discipline of sharing our insights in what we call a “gathered meeting” is also a check against over-reaction and over-statement, which can weaken the message.

Since their earliest beginnings, Friends have stood out against the accepted order of the day, and initially they were severely penalised for that. They were able to withstand that hostile pressure because they were sure of the foundation of their leadings.

When I first walked nervously into a Quaker meeting thirty years ago I was in the grip of something very powerful, something which I simply could not ignore, something which was pushing me right out of my comfort zone. Gradually I came to call whatever it was that was doing the pushing by the name of God.
Fifty years ago, when I went on that Aldermaston march, I wouldn't have called myself a pacifist, but I do now. Pacifism lies at the core of what I try to do. In 1660, early Quakers made a declaration to King Charles II, and I still find inspiration in that ringing statement which “utterly denies all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever”.

The declaration goes on to say that "the spirit... by which we are guided is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil, and again to move unto it." That for me spells it out very clearly: killing is a sin. It follows, doesn't it, that nuclear weapons, which would destroy all forms of life, are particularly sinful. There is no argument truly grounded in either religious ethics or compassionate humanism which could justify them.

This exhibition illustrates the appalling destructive power of those early atomic bombs. We have to remind ourselves that today's nuclear weapons are infinitely worse. On a scale which we can scarcely imagine, they threaten the indiscriminate and permanent devastation of the whole of creation.

Nuclear weapons symbolise for me pride and arrogance and utter, wicked folly. To claim that they represent “a minimum deterrent” or “an insurance policy against a future threat” is intellectually threadbare as well as morally bankrupt. It is clear to me that nothing could ever justify even possessing nuclear weapons, let alone using them. For me, there simply isn't a get-out clause. So – perhaps I'll see you at the next blockade...?

Caroline Westgate
August 2010