On Friday 10 June 2016 Richard DeDomenici will disseminate 99 helium-filled red balloons to an audience before inviting them to sing with him the Cold War pop hit 99 Red Balloons while inhaling helium from the aforementioned 99 red balloons.

This work originated from a residency curated by Helen Cole at New Greenham Arts in Berkshire, site of the American nuclear airbase which housed 96 nuclear missiles in the 1980s, and a resulting women's peace camp, attended by a young Richard and his mother.

To offer some context for us, Richard recorded this candid conversation with his mother Jessica, where they reminisce about their time at Greenham.

We’re driving from Watford to London to visit my Grandmother who’s 96 today. When I mention I’m performing in Skopje, my mum tells me about the time she helped close down their street to traffic, so children could pay in it:

Jessica: ...I don't know if it had been done anywhere else, but it was a radical new idea, we had students from all over the world come to study it, and there was a young man called called Elio from Skopje, and I got along really well with him. I must have been between ten and twelve, and he was in his early twenties, so he'd be 70 by now. But I don't know his second name, otherwise I'd say try and contact him.

Richard: How did you first get involved in the Women's Peace Camp at Greenham Common?

Jessica: Do you remember Elaine?

Richard: Yes!

Jessica: Elaine was very good friends with Bruce Kent. I think at that time he was the chairperson.. chairman of CND, and he was having a lot of pressure put on him by the Catholic church.

Richard: His church was right opposite her flat, right?

Jessica: Yes, and that's where you would have visited them when you were a baby.

Richard: Yes, with their dog Buddy.

Jessica: Buddy!

Richard: BUDDDYYY!

Jessica: Yeah. I was aware of what was going on at Greenham. I wanted to go there, but I didn't know how. I didn't really know many political people in Watford.

Richard: Hmm.

Jessica: And Elaine was going to go down. And it was one of the days where we were going to try to block the gates, so they couldn't build the silos.

Richard: So this is before the missiles had arrived!

Jessica: Yes! So we went down there, and this was the first time we were staying overnight. And that's how I met Marilyn who wrote that wonderful song..

Jessica and Richard (singing): We are women, we are strong..

Jessica: It's very Greenham.

Jessica (singing again): And we're fighting for our lives, hand in hand with the men, who work the nation's mines...

Richard: That's the one!

Jessica: I've got in on a record if you ever want to hear it. But we had this wonderful square marquee, at one of the gates on the southern side of Greenham, and we met Marilyn, and she had a double survival bag, and so I slept the night beside her, and it was the most wonderful cosy night.

Richard: Wow.

Jessica: And we all sort of shared everything we had, everybody brought out a bit of something. And the next morning we were told that the workers came in at one of the gates on the north side. So we walked around the perimeter, and that when I met Addie, from Watford.

Richard: Addie!

Jessica: We were about a mile from the gate we were going to blockade, and Addie came up to me and said 'do your children go to Central Primary School?' and I said 'Yes!' and she said 'So do mine!' and I said 'how do we not know each other!?' It was wonderful, and Addie knew all the Watford crowd, you know Dawn and Betty, and Mike and Judy..

Richard: What was their daughter called?

Jessica: I'll think of it in a minute.

Richard: I mainly remember playing with her daughter. I don’t know how many times I went to Greenham. Two or three maybe?

Jessica: Oh no, I think you came four or five times.

Richard: Maybe I did.

Jessica: Once I got involved with the Watford group, who were coming down almost every weekend, we were given basic non-violent direct action techniques - how to go floppy when the police grabbed us. We had a coach on the big blockades, when we ringed the fence. Other days we just went down in cars and camper vans. But that day was a big blockade, and I've got a photograph in one of my books of us all sitting down in the road.

Richard: I've seen that picture.





Richard: Is that where you learned the rolling over each other thing?

Jessica: Well that was later. It wasn’t really a non-violent direct-action technique, it was more a technique to get us used to touching each other’s bodies without being physically intrusive. So we all laid down like little cigars in a box, and then one of us would roll over the top.

Richard: Is that because many of you had been in abusive relationships, and weren’t comfortable with being touched?

Jessica: I’m not sure, I think it was a way of breaking down the barriers between us, because most of us were strangers to each other. I think it was a bonding exercise more than anything else.

And to be truthful we were wonderful friends for the time, we really were.

And I mean, when I left your father, I went to stay with Heather in Wippendale Road. And if it hadn't have been for her, I don't know where I would have gone..

Richard: Hmm.

Jessica: Hmm. It’s strange how you lose touch with people.

Richard: Well, technologically there’s never been a better time to find people!

Jessica: That’s true.

Jessica: Some men came down and they’d say ‘WHY AREN’T MEN ALLOWED HERE?’ Even though they said they were on our side, they didn't grasp the whole concept of it being a women-only thing. But Bruce was lovely, he’d come down with Mars Bars and little treats. One of our group stayed on there. She built her own little bender. And she started a relationship with a woman from there who, basically, used to beat her up!’

Richard: Oh no.

Jessica: Yeah!

Richard: Well domestic violence can happen in all relationships.

Jessica: Yeah.

Richard: This is a very bad road surface!

Jessica: It’s always been a terrible road surface.

Richard: I’ve never seen it this bad! It’s like a war zone.

Jessica: So they lived there, in an abusive relationship. And that was an eye opener for me because you’ve got a joint cause that you’re working towards..

Richard: You’re feminists.

Jessica: You’re feminists, and yet one of you beats the other one up.

Richard: Well, there’s no such thing as Utopia.

Jessica: It’s depressing though.

Richard: Maybe it was the stress of living on the edge of a nuclear missile site.

Jessica: That’s no excuse.

Richard: So in total you must have gone down about 20 times?

Jessica: I think so. The day that we all went and broke through the fence and got onto the runway, do you remember that there were cowslips growing everywhere?

Richard: I don’t really know what cowslips are.

Jessica: They’re quite lovely. They have there little delicate pale yellow bells. My mother used to tell me about the cowslips that used to grow in Wales when she was a little girl, and I had never seen cowslips, and I got onto the runway, and the cowslips were so thick, it was like a yellow carpet.

Richard: Wow. Did you know the Greenham runway was an emergency landing strip for the Space Shuttle?

Jessica: I think you told me that.

Richard: It was never used as such.

Jessica: Oh my god, look at these they’ve built Richard!

[Richard and Jessica regard some nearly complete luxury flats being built on a former playing field.]

Richard: They went up quick..

Jessica: It was just really ironic that the only place I’d seen cowslips was behind this bloody horrible great ugly fence.

Richard: Well nature thrives in military bases where no one’s allowed.

Jessica: Absolutely.

Richard: Especially slightly radioactive ones, maybe that helped..

Jessica: Well they didn’t glow, so far as I know. But you came dancing on the runway with me..

Richard: We may have damaged some of the cowslips..

Jessica: No we didn’t, we were very careful!

Richard: Were the police careful not to trample the cowslips?

Jessica: I really don’t know. They were completely.. they didn’t know what the hell was going on, because there were so many of us.

Richard: Were they abusive in their behaviour?

Jessica: There was a girl called Rachel I think, who was very active, she went to a nuclear site in Italy, and the Italian police had deliberately broken her arm. She’d got it mended, it had healed, and she was back on the fence again, and literally the policemen deliberately knelt on her arm.

Richard: The same arm?

Jessica: And broke it again.

Richard: Do you think they had intel from the Italian police?

Jessica: They knew. They knew exactly.

Richard: God.

Jessica: Most of the time the police were like headless chickens. They couldn’t cope with the amount of women, they couldn't cope with the fact that we weren’t violent.

Richard: They hadn’t been trained for that.

Jessica: No. I mean, they’d grab you and swing you round quite violently, but I was never punched.

Richard: That was part of it’s success wasn't it?

Jessica: Yes!

Richard: Had it been a mixed camp they would have gone in a bit stronger.

Jessica: Absolutely.

Richard: It confused them a bit.

Jessica: They were completely pole-axed by it.

Richard: I feel the element of confusion is important in protest. It gives you a few extra seconds..

Jessica: Yeah. On the days that we made a ring around the whole fence there were 40 to 50,000 women there, and we had our little song sheets..

Richard and Jessica (singing together):

(verse)
Hey you generals in the military,
What you want that atom bomb for?
We got enough bombs to kill us all ten times,
Still  you keep on asking for more.

(Chorus)
Take those toooooys,
Away from the boooooys..

Richard: Sounds a bit similar to ‘I’m in heaaaaaven..’

Jessica: It’s very similar isn't it!

Richard: I think that might have been plagiarised from Dexy’s Midnight Runners..

Jessica: What others were there..

Richard: I thought that song was very unfair.

Jessica: Why?

Richard: Take the toys away from the boys..

Jessica: Well yeah..

Richard: But I was in the minority, and soon realised that it was a metaphor. So you were going there until they decided to take the missiles away, or..

Jessica: They built the silos, they bought the missiles in, I think what stopped me going regularly was the break up of the marriage.

Richard: Yes.

Jessica: I had very little money. No form of transport. Yeah.

Richard: But eventually the missiles left Greenham Common.

Jessica: Absolutely. What was that lovely man’s name? You’d be drawing, and I know he had to calm you down a lot because you were worried that I’d get arrested and stuff. I’m sorry I put you through it!

Richard: No! It was good! It was for a good cause!

Jessica: Fiona Bruce was at Greenham!

Richard: What a world.

Jessica: What a wonderful world.

Richard: Well that’s raised my opinion of Fiona Bruce.

Jessica: Thank you for your wonderful charity darling.

Richard: That’s not Fiona Bruce we’re referring to..

Jessica: No, I’m talking about the git in the car. What would it have hurt for him to let the cars out?

Richard: Well that’s the difference between communism and capitalism for you.

Jessica: Hahaha. And I think if it wasn't for places like Greenham, and all the anti-nuclear movements in Europe, I don’t think Glasnost would have happened. I think Gorbachev had the savvy to pick up on the..

Richard: The Wind of Change!

Jessica: We made people aware.

Richard starts whistling The Scorpions..

Richard DeDomenici performs his ten-minute long cabaret piece about Greenham, 99 Red Balloons on Friday June 10th at 10pm, as part of the Beyond Bloodlines Festival at the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone.

And if anyone knows a 70 year old man called Elio from Skopje, do tell him to get in touch.

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