In living memory: Mapping the landscape of Greenham and Crookham Commons

Foreword

Catriona H Jardine Brown (1971–2010) carried out this study for her dissertation for the MA in Cultural Memory at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (IGRS), University of London. She joined in 2006 as a part-time student, having a parallel career as a teacher and practising artist. Indeed, her dissertation grew out of an art project, ‘In Living Memory’, which Catriona undertook in 2008 with elderly residents of the Greenham and Crookham Common area. Despite having to take time out from her studies through illness, she graduated with a well-deserved distinction in 2009, her dissertation receiving one of the highest marks awarded on the degree. The examiners considered it outstanding and eminently worthy of publication. Sadly, Catriona was unable to submit it in the form of a journal article herself before her untimely death. We have thus prepared it on her behalf and in her memory. Catriona was an enthusiastic, lively and brilliant young woman, who enriched the MA and the IGRS, and whose talents and character are greatly missed.

Eleanor Chiari (University College London) and Gill Rye (IGRS)

A place is particular, a tapestry of woven contexts: Enduring and ephemeral, local and global, related and unrelated, now and then, past and future … Every place has ongoing stories, recognized, concealed, and lost. Some take longer to tell than others, some are short; some have an ending, others are open, still unfolding. (Whiston Spirn, 1998: 160)

Prologue

When we are unfamiliar with a place, we can turn to maps to guide us and so, before I began talking to local inhabitants about Greenham and Crookham Commons in West Berkshire, UK, I consulted a map of West Berkshire to give me a sense of the space involved. Its aerial perspective revealed a piece of common land lying south-east of the market town of Newbury, just north of the county boundary with Hampshire, demarcated by the river Enborne running along its bottom edge and with the Kennet and Avon Canal sitting a bit further to its north. Aware that other people’s memories of the area might precede the publication date of my map, I particularly noted the details that were most likely to have been long-standing features in the landscape. However, it became clear early on in my discussions with those who knew the Commons well that they remembered the place differently. Compass bearings were inconsequential and neither waterway was recalled. In order to map the space I was told: ‘You’d have to start at Greenham School.’

Introduction

In 2008 I undertook a ‘reminiscence project’ with a group of elderly residents, most of whom grew up near or on Greenham and Crookham Commons. The project was commissioned by the Corn Exchange in Newbury and New Greenham Arts as part of a wider community arts ‘Peace through Participation’ initiative and funded by The National Lottery ‘Awards For All’. The brief was to identify and work with a group of ‘elderly people who do not have direct access to the arts’, record their ‘memories and stories’ about the Commons and present these in the form of a ‘sound exhibition’. Research on Newbury’s local amenities for the elderly led me to base the project at Fairclose Day Centre, a thriving establishment run by the charity Age Concern (now Age UK). I recruited participants by distributing flyers and chatting about the project to diners in the centre’s canteen. The project began with four enthusiastic individuals meeting one afternoon a week. The group’s number gradually grew so that, after two months, 12 people had taken part, either to contribute their memories or just to listen to those of others. The fact that there was only one man amongst them is perhaps a reflection of the higher mortality rates for octogenarian males compared to their female counterparts. Group memory work can be problematic for oral histories because of the issue of more dominant individuals talking over others and imposing their agenda on the material being discussed. The recording sessions were therefore carefully managed to ensure that all those who wanted to take part were heard. My voice is present as interlocutor in the collection but, for the most part, the group’s memory work found its own direction and narrative rhythm.

Twenty-six pairs of reminiscences were selected from the five or so hours of recorded material to form the sound exhibition. These 26 tracks were representative of the main themes covered by the group and were compiled, with the help of sound artist Neil C. Smith onto a compact disc with a total running time of 40 minutes and entitled In Living Memory (Jardine Brown, 2008). They were not arranged in any specific order, but designed to be played in a random sequence. Installed in New Greenham Arts, an art centre occupying buildings on the Common’s decommissioned airbase, the design of the exhibition was such that visitors encountered the work whilst seated between two loudspeakers, hearing each of the paired reminiscences play alternately, from the right and then from the left. In this way, they were literally placed in the middle of the group’s exchange, evoking a sense of immediacy.

At times amusing and at others poignant, this oral history collection recalls lives lived in and around the Commons from the early 20th century up to the present day. As the project took shape, I began to realize that a kind of virtual cartography was taking place, in that the landscape of Greenham and Crookham Commons was being ‘mapped’ through the memories and stories of the group. When we navigate a space from the past or, rather, when we remember a space in the present, we create a ‘cognitive map’, which, according to Roger Downs and David Stea, ‘allows us to generate mental images and models of the environment, which are present again’ (Downs and Stea, 1977: 7). Cognitive mapping is the memory of the practice of space. It is, as they explain: ‘an activity that we engage in rather than an object that we have’ (Downs and Stea, 1977: 6); a stepping inside of the picture frame to inhabit the space from within and, unlike paper maps, it is neither static nor a singularly spatial representation. It offers another way to know a landscape and one that acknowledges the perpetual reworking of both place and memory over time. My use of the word ‘landscape’ here and elsewhere in this article moves beyond its art historical meaning of being something purely visual – a view to be admired from a distance – to, rather, what the anthropologist Barbara Bender refers to as ‘intimate encounters’ (Bender, 2007[2002]: 135). The interviews recount the practice of the Commons space and ‘on being in rather than looking at the landscape’ (Bender, 1998: 6). They also recount the practice of a space that is subject to change. ‘Landscapes’, explains Bender, ‘can never stay still – feelings and engagement with place and landscape are always in the making. Nor can they be situated only in the present, for they contain and are referenced on what has gone before’ (2007: 136). As a collection of memories about a particular place over time, the interviews present a rich primary material for further study of how they map the landscape of Greenham and Crookham Commons.

Greenham and Crookham Commons cover over 1000 acres of plateau heathland. They therefore present a vast space for the interviewees to map. ‘Spaciousness’, writes Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘is closely associated with the sense of being free. Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act’ (Tuan, 2007[1977]: 52). The Commons were remembered as providing ‘enough room’ for inhabitants to move as though solitary travellers within the space. ‘You’d walk miles across Crookham Common’, recalls one interviewee, ‘and you wouldn’t see another soul. But you would see an ice-cream man, pedalling along’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 3.1). There is a strange logic to this memory, in which at one moment the landscape is all but deserted and the next, ‘another soul’ appears, as if out of nowhere. Such an encounter seems contrary to the very spaciousness of the space, and yet as the geographer Doreen Massey explains: ‘what space gives us is simultaneous heterogeneity; it holds out the possibility of surprise; it is the condition of the social in the widest sense, and the delight and the challenge of that’ (Massey, 2008[2005]: 105). However deserted the Commons appeared, the space held the potential for a surprising ‘encounter with the unforeseen’; an ‘accidental neighbour’ (Massey, 2008[2005]: 112); or an ice-cream salesman. Such encounters demanded social interaction and a negotiation of space, and it was this ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2008[2005]: 141) that marked places of harmony or disharmony on cognitive maps. Massey’s theories run largely concurrent with those of the French scholar Michel de Certeau and, in each of their discussions of ‘chance’ encounters, they refer to something called ‘labyrinthine’ ‘clarity’ or ‘intelligence’ (De Certeau 1988: 90; Massey, 2008[2005]: 112). The term derives from the architecture of the Situationists, who sought to transpose ‘a mixture of order and accident’ in their spatial design (Massey, 2008[2005]: 112). As a particular experience of space, the concept of ‘labyrinthine clarity’ cogently expresses how Greenham and Crookham Commons were encountered and remembered in the oral histories. It also helps to differentiate between the experience of using conventional maps, on which everything is made visible, and cognitive maps that make room for the unexpected.

When cognitive maps are narrated and become what De Certeau calls ‘spatial stories’ (1988: 155), it is their encounters with space that determine its limits and place co-ordinates. They have the ability to transform how the space is remembered over time. Encountering a newcomer, for example, may be remembered as a confrontational place of exchange, but over time may become a less distinct mapping co-ordinate, as relations ease and the space is shared more harmoniously. ‘If space is … a simultaneity of stories so far’, Massey explains, ‘then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space. Their character will be a product of these intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them. And, too, of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the specificity of place’ (Massey, 2008[2005]: 130).

In my analysis of the In Living Memory interviews, I look at how encounters of Greenham and Crookham Commons contribute to the ‘specificity’ of the place in living memory. The article is in three sections in which the recordings map the space from three different perspectives. In the first section, I consider how they map encounters inside the bounds of the Commons, looking at practice and their narrative as part of common land inheritance and as determinants of how the space is negotiated in daily lives. The next section examines how the recordings map encounters with outsiders who came to the Commons during the Second World War, looking at the different power-relations at work in sharing space with others and how the space is renegotiated at this time. In the third section, I look at how the space is mapped through encounters outside its bounds in which historical master narratives come into play and a sense of nostalgia pervades the interviews. The analysis of the collection follows a roughly chronological sequence beginning with memories of Greenham and Crookham Commons at the turn of the 20th century up to the present day. However, this does not preclude discussion of the temporal shifts that occur in the memories themselves, in which time appears as no more stable than place co-ordinates on cognitive maps. It is an underlying theme of inquiry weaving through the three sections and leads on to the conclusion, which considers how the collection of oral history maps Greenham and Crookham Commons beyond their bounds and those of living memory. In considering memories of ‘being in’ space, human agency as much as the landscape itself, is under scrutiny. My theoretical framework therefore treads a path between the two sub-disciplines of Human Geography and Cultural Memory. Transcripts of selected interview extracts are provided in the body of the article but, for a more nuanced interpolation, I refer readers to the In Living Memory recordings (Jardine Brown, 2008). Colloquialisms are retained, exclamation marks are used for emphasis and a dotted line indicates the rhythm of group dialogue. Each track of the recording has two parts with a two second separation, indicated on the transcript with ‘* *’ and referenced accordingly. When encountered, they provide co-ordinates from which to plot our analytical journey through the oral histories and they thereby serve as points of labyrinthine clarity.

Inside

Inside the bounds of Greenham and Crookham Commons, space was mapped through the stories of others and through practices and place, each providing co-ordinates with which to navigate its limits. The interviews drew from a narrative repository that is intimately tied to land use across generations and, in considering them more closely, I aim to establish how time is mapped in the space and how its bounds are not fixed but movable limits:

* *

(Jardine Brown, 2008: 13)

In recounting the lives of their parents and grandparents, the interviewees map the landscape back to the Victorian era. But, as narratives of lives lived on common land, they also recall an earlier time, because the land is a part of the English countryside that signifies an ancient practice of space dating back to the reign of King John in the 13th century. Those properties that stand within or back onto a common’s boundary that has not already been enclosed have varying rights of pannage, common in the soil, turbary and estovers tied into their deeds (Fairhall, 2006: 131). ¹ Greenham and Crookham Commons therefore served as a free local resource for their inhabitants, who could graze animals and fowl, take gravel, cut turf and collect firewood, and, being ‘a long way’ from the nearest town of Newbury, the inhabitants were relatively self-sufficient by necessity. The interviewees recall ‘Fry’s Bakery’ and ‘Miss Bew’s’ shop where provisions could be bought (Jardine Brown, 2008: 18.1), but most other food was either grown, foraged or reared. ‘You didn’t buy potatoes’, they remember, as ‘you grew enough to last the family for the year’, and hedgerow bounty such as blackberries, raspberries and sloes were gathered seasonally (Jardine Brown, 2008: 24.1). Rearing livestock for their meat inevitably involved killing the animals and commoners are remembered undertaking this task themselves. Viewed by another as an ‘horrendous’ scene, Mary’s tone is strangely matter-of-fact as she describes her grandparent’s dispatching of the pig. It is as though she is retelling someone else’s story; a family story with a comical twist in its tail. Her admission that she knows what a ‘pig sticker’ looked like, ‘cause it was still in the cottage when we moved in’, all but confirms that she did not witness the drama first-hand. ‘The unity of place in the life stories of rural inhabitants’, writes Daniela Koleva, ‘blurs the time-borders between generations and between the episodes of the life of a single individual, imports stability and determines the cyclical character of a person’s narrative’ (Koleva, 2004[2000]: 65). When stories are handed down through the generations, they become part of a family’s collective memory. Many of the informants draw from this narrative inheritance. Some require careful listening to hear the layers of authorship, but others, like Monica recounting her father’s memory of Pound Cottages, openly acknowledge their narrative source. The practice of having ‘a milch cow’ may have stopped, but ‘stability’ in daily lives across the generations is implied in the journey that Mary’s Grandma took across the Commons. It is highly probable that it was a Thursday when she made her way to town with the pig on her back, as Thursday is remembered by everyone as ‘pig and paper day’. The name dates back to 1805, when local farmers would bring their crops and animals to market in the town and the local newspaper was circulated. The fact that both the name and day are still in currency reflects a certain continuity in the rhythm of the inhabitants’ lives.

While recording the oral histories of a Bulgarian community, Koleva also found that living with ‘the same trees, same river, same hills’ from day to day ‘makes all temporal borders fluid and rhythmical. The succession of generations in that local, spatially limited world appears temporally unlimited’ (Koleva, 2004[2000]: 66). Certain places, like the Volunteer public house, are mentioned repeatedly in the interviews as familiar landmarks. In his book on the Commons, Norman Foster links its origins to the Volunteer Movement in the second half of the 19th century, when ‘some 20000 troops were encamped on Greenham Common’ to carry out military manoeuvres and had, no doubt, been in need of refreshments (Foster, 1988: 40–1). Another landmark known as the Rifle Butts and described in the interviews as ‘a massively high gravel mound’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 22.1) were used by the soldiers for target practice and believed to have been built at the same time. Like Pound Cottages, their names derived from their original purpose and stood as material records of past and present practice of the space, and, as Monica remembers, when put into practice, Commoners’ rights could prove to be a costly business.

As ‘Lords of the Manor’, ‘Tull and Baxendale’ loomed large as authoritative figures, each appearing in turn the profiteer and the philanthropist. Those who attended Greenham School remembered a ‘great big’ map of Greenham Common displayed on their classroom wall and viewed it as a symbol of Mr Baxendale’s proprietorial gaze over the land that they played on ‘at dinnertimes’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 15.2). ‘Maps in school atlases’, writes Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘show nation-states as sharply bounded units. Small-scale maps encourage people to think of their countries as self-sufficient, discrete entities … cartography can clearly be made to serve a political end’ (Tuan, 2007: 178). Although by no means small-scale, the map of the Common would have nevertheless presented ‘discrete’ boundaries to the children’s world outside the school walls. More particularly, it would have drawn their attention to the fact that this space was divided in two by a parish boundary distinguishing Greenham Common, over which Mr Baxandale presided, from Crookham Common, which fell under ‘Old Man Tull’s’ jurisdiction. This may have been indelibly marked on the wall, but no one could locate where this boundary lay in the landscape itself on their cognitive map. It is not remembered as having affected or ‘limited’ their practice of space, which is apposite of De Certeau’s contention that: ‘what the map cuts up, the story cuts across’ (1988: 129). In his reflections on The Practice of Everyday Life, De Certeau suggests that in narrating the practice of space, people’s stories ‘have the function of spatial legislation since they determine rights and divide up lands by “acts” or discourses about actions’ and can contribute to ‘the formation of myths’ that build up around a particular place (De Certeau, 1988: 122).

There is an ancient British custom of ‘beating the bounds’, which once a year ‘required the parish priest to walk around the parish and strike certain markers with a stick’ (Tuan, 2007: 166). In this way, the extent of his pastoral authority was symbolically defined. Although a recently revived practice on the Commons (Cooper, 2001: 14), it is not remembered in the oral histories that ‘determine rights and divide up lands’ in their own account of life on Greenham and Crookham Commons, an account that drew from its own familiar customs to map the space:

* *

(Jardine Brown, 2008: 1)

Unlike the map on their classroom wall, the Commons were physically too large a space to ‘see’ all at once, but Monica remembers the ‘whole common’ being covered in rabbit droppings because she moved about its space, walking to Greenham School everyday and scrabbling for treats from Mr Baxendale, the school’s benefactor. She recounts an experience of being in the landscape and sets its bounds accordingly. Not everyone in the reminiscence group attended Greenham School and yet it provided a definitive point from which they began to map out the rest of the Commons. It was a navigational marker fixed in their childhood recollection of the space.

‘If we think of space as that which allows movement’, writes Tuan, ‘then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’ (Tuan, 2007: 6). As an internalized system of moving within a space, cognitive map co-ordinates are imbued with biographical significance. For instance, ‘home’ is a place that is left and returned to; Mary’s dad ‘walked out’ and then ‘came home’ with five hares. Tuan observes that ‘human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom. In open space one can become intensely aware of place; and in the solitude of a sheltered place the vastness of space beyond acquires a haunting presence’ (Tuan, 2007: 54). ‘Shelter and venture’ can have particular resonance in childhood memories of space, as the school-house is viewed as ‘shelter’ and beyond is viewed as ‘venture’. The Commons are described in the interviews as ‘our playground’, where ‘we used to roam all over the place’ and ‘build dens’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 12.2). Even the coldest winters did not deter the adventurous, who skated on Taffy’s Pond and subsequently received ‘hidings for getting wet through’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 14.1). But when they ‘used to come in all dirty’ from beating out the ‘dreadful fires’ that left ‘acres of burnt black broom and gorse’ on the Commons, they ‘didn’t get told off’, even though they had missed school as a consequence, but ‘got praised for putting the fire out’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 16). ‘From childhood onwards’, Bender explains, ‘people negotiate space and place, learning through being told, through emulation and almost subconscious habit, what is permissible and what is not’ (Bender, 2007[2002]: 136). It is through this ‘negotiation’ that boundaries are metaphorically written into the landscape and remembered. De Certeau reads them as ‘transportable limits’ (De Certeau, 1988: 129) able to be moved through the very act of their narration.

In teaching how to ‘pick up hares’ and then putting them in the pot, at the same time ‘Dad’ and ‘Mum’ were pushing the boundaries of permitted land use. The bagging of game was not a commoner’s right as ‘they belonged to Tull and Baxendale’. But in spite of there being a resident Keeper, poaching is remembered as an everyday activity on the commons (Jardine Brown, 2008: 2). The adeptness with which Mary’s Dad engaged in this activity is surely evidence of its proclivity. Her description is highly evocative as, when he sets out to stalk a hare, he takes on the behaviour of the animal itself. His practice of space is hare-like and, as he mimics the movements of his prey, he becomes one with it.

Intimate encounters with the landscape recur throughout the interviews, creating a literal sense of place. They also infer a sense of belonging in that the Commons are remembered as though owned by the commoners themselves. ‘The rabbits keep it cut for us and it was gorgeous. It was like a lawn’, exclaims Mary, as though it was the lawn of her own garden. ‘Territory is established by the limits of the processes which create it’, writes Anne Whiston Spirn (1998: 119). Paths across the Commons that ‘people that had lived there over the centuries had made’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 6.1) traced movement into its surface, marking space between places, between shelter and venture. Typically experienced on foot or by bicycle and sometimes, like Monica, on hands and knees, ‘an inch deep in rabbit droppings’, such modes of travel served to define the physical limits of the landscape in the lives of its inhabitants and, in the process, the extent of their territory. Whiston Spirn sees both paths and boundaries as ‘performance spaces’ in that they are actively maintained through movement in the landscape: ‘Once a process ceases’, she observes, ‘space becomes a shell of past practices’ (Whiston Spirn, 1998: 119). It is only the memory of these practices on the cognitive map that remain: ‘you can pick up hares’, Mary says, but ‘not now because they’ve gone’.

The parish boundary was unremarkable in the interviews, and yet social boundaries between us and them were not and present another form of spatial legislation. ‘Social distance’, Tuan suggests, ‘may be the inverse of geographical distance’ (Tuan, 2007: 50), in that the inhabitants of the Commons lived side by side and yet could remain socially poles apart. Snobbery between the residents of Greenham and Crookham, in which each thought the other to be beneath them, is recounted and ‘the big houses’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 14.2), where the Lords of the Manor presided, stand as remote worlds within the landscape.

There were two golf courses remembered in our sessions that also served to highlight social distance in the practice of the Commons’ space as players favoured one above the other depending on their standing in the community. The original one, used ‘for nothing’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 25.1) by the Commoners, dated back to 1873, making it one of the first inland golf courses in the UK (Bowness, 1996: 3; Cooper, 2001: 14). The first hole lay opposite the Volunteer public house, but the rest of the course was unmarked. ‘If you got hit with a ball’, one interviewee recalls, ‘you were just unlucky!’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 25.2). The other course lay just to the north of the Commons and was played on by the Lords of the Manor.

The Commons, then, were by no means new to the concept of ‘the other’ when the outbreak of the Second World War brought an influx of foreigners into their midst. However, sharing the space threw up new challenges in the Commoners’ negotiation of its limits, which in turn, created new narratives of spatial legislation.

Outside

Outside events brought others within the bounds of Greenham and Crookham Commons and the space was then mapped through encounters with them. The informants recall new limits being placed in the landscape and I will show how, in remembering different encounters with ‘outsiders’, the difference in their mapping of the space is also marked:

(Jardine Brown, 2008: 5.1)

The recordings recall a road that ran ‘absolutely straight across the Common’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 8.1). Believed to be a remnant of Roman occupation, it proved to be the reason for another, when the British Armed Forces requisitioned Greenham and Crookham Commons to use as an airfield during the Second World War, eventually rerouting the ancient highway along Bury’s Bank to the north. In his study on Greenham Common, David Fairhall notes that, in running ‘roughly east–west’, the road presented a perfect alignment for a runway ‘because of the prevailing westerly winds’ (Fairhall, 2006: 13). Despite the airfield and military manoeuvres, including preparations for ‘D-Day’ taking place (Jardine Brown, 2008: 18.2), these were not fenced off and locals were permitted to move about the landscape, albeit with the odd checkpoint, consisting of a pill-box and an armed guard to negotiate. Both British and American troops became a common sight, but it is the Americans who were remembered most vividly in the accounts of this time, no doubt because their ‘foreignness’ was the most conspicuous in the landscape.

In her discussion of ‘territory’, Whiston Spirn identifies movement within a space as key to defining its bounds and that sometimes this movement is corralled through ‘gateways’ that function as ‘places of passage and exchange’ (1998: 119). De Certeau locates such places at the bounds, where encounters with another world are made possible and a sense of insider and outsider prevails (1988: 126–9). These frontiers of social, cultural and political exchange are as ‘transportable’ as the bounds themselves, in that they are located in the landscape through narratives of practised space. Like the gate on Bury’s Bank Road, they may be a concrete entity in the landscape, but they could also be a more arbitrary frontier such as a town market place. The frontier’s effect on movement was not defined by any physical reality, but by whether it was remembered as having functioned as a place of passage or exclusion when encountered.

‘A distinction that all people recognize is between “us” and “them”’, explains Tuan, ‘we are here; we are this happy breed of men. They are there; they are not fully human and they live in that place. Members within the we-group are close to each other, and they are distant from members of the outside (they) group’ (Tuan, 2007: 50). Viewed from a national perspective, the ‘British troops’ were not foreigners, but they were considered as outsiders to the area and, as such, were not referred to as our troops. Dot did not pay them or their activities on the Commons much attention, ‘right up until’, that is, she came face-to-face with an American. He presented such a startling contrast to her previous encounters in the landscape that he was marked on her cognitive map. This foreign soldier guarded both a literal and cultural gateway at the frontier of Dot’s experience as a local and her utter disbelief is insistent in her narration. The American sentry appears as Tuan’s ‘not fully human’ other; a wild creature from a distant land. But, as De Certeau maintains, meetings at the frontier are a two-way encounter in that both the native and the foreigner may appear as equally strange to one another. ‘This is the paradox of the frontier’, he writes, in which neither subject ‘possesses the frontier that distinguishes them’ (De Certeau, 1988: 127). The American invades Dot’s world but, in marching up and down with a loaded gun, he warily defends the gateway to his own. De Certeau reads the frontier as ‘a middle place, composed of interactions and inter-views’, a ‘sort of void’ through which other worlds are glimpsed (De Certeau, 1988: 127); a borderland between here and there. ‘The gap is there’, confirms Dot in marking the place where another ‘used to be’.

(Jardine Brown, 2008: 19.1)

The convivial frontier ‘of passage and exchange’ that Monica encountered presents a stark contrast to Dot’s frontier. Remembering the commons during wartime serves to highlight the different ages of the oral history participants. Being still of school age, Mary ‘wasn’t really old enough’ to fraternize with the Americans, but Monica who ‘was old enough’ recounts dancing and socializing with them at their base on the Commons. The fact that she had to cycle several miles from her home on the Commons down into Newbury, just to be taken back up there, and then repeated this roundabout route at the end of the night, attests to her determination to meet the foreigners, even if it meant going ‘out’ of her way to do so. The potential for the frontier to essentially ‘bridge the gap’ of its own creation does not escape De Certeau’s attention and neither does this irony. ‘The bridge is ambiguous everywhere’, he declares, because ‘it alternately welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy’ (De Certeau, 1988: 128). In uniting here with there, the bridge at the frontier challenges a sense of their separateness and particularities of place.

Monica’s encounter with outsiders was a harmonious affair, but wartime liaisons were transitory by nature and she remembers the Americans leaving as ‘suddenly one night’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 19.2) as Dot remembered their arrival. The creation of the airfield brought a significant number of ‘foreigners’ to the Commons with whom some bridged the cultural divide, and others marked it out in the remembered landscape. Consequently, a gateway that featured significantly in one person’s memory was forgotten in another’s.

There is an overall sense in the oral histories that the Commons absorbed the influx of newcomers with equanimity, sharing the space with them. New frontiers were written into the landscape and with them came the potential for exchange, but also the potential for exclusion. Gateways that had once been open could also be closed, leaving locals outside asking themselves ‘why’?

(Jardine Brown, 2008: 20.1)

With the war over and the military gone, Mary remembers the landscape ‘was pretty well empty for about a year’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 8.2), an odd way to talk about an inhabited space, perhaps, but a place inevitably feels more spacious after ‘guests’ have left. The whole space was free to be used and modes of transport were changing so that routes previously walked or cycled were now accomplished by motorized means. ‘A tool or machine enlarges a person’s world when he feels it to be a direct extension of his corporeal powers’, Tuan writes. Where using ‘a bicycle enlarges the human sense of space’, he believes that a bus might do the contrary, as the experience of movement itself is more passive. ‘The speed that gives freedom to man causes him to lose a sense of spaciousness’ (Tuan, 2007: 53–4). With each accelerated movement, therefore, the Commons appeared to shrink its bounds and when the military returned to build a larger runway and a perimeter fence around the airfield this became a physical reality.

‘If people have the power to build’, writes Tuan, ‘they also have the power to destroy, and on the whole, it is easier to destroy than to build’ (Tuan, 1991: 693). The construction of the new airbase meant destruction of the Commons landscape and, with it, the inhabitants’ daily lives; washing was ruined as was the habit of hanging it outside to dry and places that had been frequented for generations, such as the Volunteer public house, were pulled down (Jardine Brown, 2008: 17.2). There was strong local protest against the reinstatement of the airfield at the time (Fairhall, 2006:16), which is not dwelt on in any detail in the interviews except to say: ‘there was quite a hoo ha’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 8.1). Time has perhaps played its part in allowing memories to acquire a broader view of a protest that, in hindsight, proved inconsequential in contesting rights to the space; a broader view that framed the ‘local’ within a wider spatial context. ‘We almost got it back’, the interviewees remembered, ‘but then the Cold War came, didn’t it? And the Berlin … barricades and they decided then to put in a big one’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 8.2). The extension of the runway, making it the longest in Europe, was directly related in memories to the spatial politics being worked out in Germany between the Allied Forces and those of the Soviet Union as they vied for power over territory. ‘A relational politics of place’, writes Massey, ‘involves both the inevitable negotiations presented by throwntogetherness and a politics of the terms of openness and closure. But a global sense of places evokes another geography of politics too: that which looks outwards to address the wider spatialities of the relations of their construction’ (Massey, 2008[2005]: 181). The informants remembered the Commons through ‘a global sense of place’, in which Stalin’s blockade of the Allied maintained zones in Berlin in June 1948, and the ‘“iron curtain” descending from the Baltic to the Adriatic’ (Reynolds, 1996: 284), the phrase that Winston Churchill coined, were relational to events taking place at home. The Cold War, they recalled, was the reason why ‘they took the Common from us’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 8.2), as the runway proved too strategic a military resource to relinquish.

The Americans returned, but this time ‘took over, lock, stock and barrel’, and the frontiers ceased to be places of exchange with negotiable limits but entrenched places of potential conflict where the gun-toting foreigners took pot-shots at the locals. ‘Poor Mr Hazel’, one interviewee recalls, ‘got shot at three times, because his house was down in the dip and every time he popped his head out he got shot at’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 20.2). The only way to cross the Commons now was to make a detour down to Knightsbridge; an appropriately named place for passage across the new frontier. The difference between this roundabout journey and the one taken earlier by Monica is that it was not made freely, but by the imposition of the fence and the authority behind it.

The runway and the perimeter fence not only reinscribed the space and its bounds, but also its name. The airbase became known as ‘Greenham Common’, even though it stretched across the parish boundary to incorporate a sizeable area of Crookham Common under its jurisdiction. ‘Naming is power’, declares Tuan, who describes how past explorers often ‘introduced names that embraced larger entities than were clearly recognized by the local inhabitants’ (Tuan, 1991: 688). In renaming the Commons, its new residents emphatically stated their claim to its space and reshaped the territory according to their own needs and desires.

The fence is as conspicuous on the maps of the oral histories as it would have been in the landscape itself. It acts as a temporal marker for when life on the Commons presented farcical situations, as negotiation of its space became ever more convoluted and relational to wider spatial politics outside of its bounds. Some remember air shows ‘in the fifties’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 21.1), which took place in a restricted area inside the airbase’s perimeter, but otherwise the landscape remained impenetrable to those who had previously practised its space. Others, however, had yet to plot the landscape on their cognitive maps and it is to their accounts that we now turn.

Inside-out

The perimeter fence enclosed the space, leaving those who had lived inside out of bounds, and the space was now mapped through encounters outside of its limits. The old interviewees remember the place through master narratives and landscapes of nostalgia and, in looking at them more closely, I will show how time is intimately tied to memory of place:

**

(Jardine Brown, 2008: 26)

Frances and Joan were the only two participants in the project who had not grown up local to the Common and they both came to Newbury after the airbase was already established. However, the fact that they did not encounter the landscape first-hand does not signify in their recollections, as they mapped the space through their encounters with ‘the Greenham Women’ instead. ‘Greenham Women’ is the collective term for those who came to live and protest against nuclear armaments outside the base. The women themselves disapproved of the name, ‘saying there is no such thing as a “Greenham woman”, by which’, Fairhall believes, they meant, ‘there is no single stereotype that represents the thousands of women who came through the camp, or supported it as best they could from a distance’ (Fairhall, 2006: 9). It is through presenting this unified front that the Greenham Women became synonymous with Greenham Common as a global landmark for anti-nuclear protest and the protest’s public face. They became its ‘imago’, encapsulating the place in all its complexity in a snapshot image; a photograph where the details are lost beyond its frame. In The History of Forgetting, Norman Klein gives the example of the two photographs that we have come to ‘see in our mind’s eye’ as the Vietnam war: ‘a general shooting a man in the head and a naked girl running toward the camera after having been napalmed’ (2008[1997]: 4). They are the war’s public memory; ‘the sculpture that stands in the foreground next to negative space … they are the rumour that seems haunted with memory’ (Klein, 2008[1997]: 4). With the landscape obscured from view it was the Greenham Women who came into focus for Frances and Joan as the imago of the space.

It is interesting to note that Joan recalls ‘the Peace Camp women’ arriving in Newbury when she was ‘35’. As a woman of 88 years at the time her interview was recorded, she is perhaps actually remembering the first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) march from London to Aldermaston’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) that took place in the Easter of 1958 (CND, n.d.). This would also explain, as an employee there, her husband’s worried remark on encountering the marchers. The CND protests at Greenham Common did not become a woman-only initiative or a camp outside the airbase gates until 1981. Time has literally collapsed into the space, compressed into an imago that can be ‘so satisfying’, believes Klein, ‘that it keeps us from looking beyond it’ (2008[1997]: 4).

Klein’s reading of imagos as ‘rumour’ ties in with De Certeau’s contention that rumours ‘are always injunctions, initiators and results of a levelling of space, creators of common movements that reinforce an order by adding an activity of making people believe things to that of making people do things. Stories diversify, rumours totalize’ (De Certeau, 1988: 107). Compared to the diverse narratives of space in the other recordings, the landscape here has been ‘levelled’ to the one distinguishing feature of the Greenham Women, providing the co-ordinate on their cognitive map of a standpipe and postage address. The imago in Frances’s memory also takes on some local colour in its criticism of the women’s behaviour, as Fairhall records, residents of Newbury ‘generally regarded the protest as a public nuisance’ (Fairhall, 2006: 114).

One only has to scour the discourse written about the Commons to recognize that the Greenham Women still represent their public face. The recordings drew my attention to the only two books that do not focus on the protesters, although published after their appearance on the scene: Norman Foster’s (1988) book, already mentioned, and Brian Bowness’s The Golf Courses of Newbury and Crookham 1873-1995 (1996). They are both private press publications and presumably not considered of great interest to a large readership. I only mention them because the two accounts of the Greenham Women in the interviews are the only ones mentioning them. Others did not engage with this master narrative discourse of Greenham and Crookham Commons and the Greenham Women did not feature on their cognitive map in any way, shape or form.

‘While “meta” or “master narrative” may help to remind us that narratives can be powerful determinants of experience’, writes Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘in a post-Foucauldian academy, we should be leery of the simple dualistic vision of power that the phrase implies … we should not succumb to the temptation to dichotomize narrative forms into “bad” master texts and “good’ local texts, and then try to ground that distinction in an ahistorical narrative logic’ (Lee Klein, 1995: 297). I am not tempted to dismiss the Greenham Women accounts simply because they hold to a master image of the Commons. They are what was remembered about the place and, as Lee Klein observes, ‘we are living a golden age of global narratives in which universal history is not simply possible, but unavoidable’ (Lee Klein, 1995: 298). However, in noticing the absence of other narratives, I am tempted to read the silence as a protest for ‘local texts’ to be heard. The interviewees who remember the space before the perimeter fence went up chose to remember the landscape as they encountered it then. How they chose to remember it after the perimeter fence came down is another story, and one that brings my examination of the oral histories to a close:

* *

The end of the cold war with Russia brought the eventual closure of the American airbase on Greenham Common and, after much legal wrangling, the perimeter fence came down in 1997. The land was officially decommissioned for military use and its open areas sold for one pound to the local council who set about restoring it to common land. But, as Fairhall explains, ‘in reality the commons were so damaged by half a century of military occupation, overlain by miles of concrete, polluted by thousands of gallons of spilt aviation fuel, the recovery process was always going to be long, complex and expensive. And the remarkable concept eventually devised to manage their restoration reflected that’ (Fairhall, 2006: 168). This ‘remarkable concept’ was to convert the area where the airbase buildings stood into a Business Park and use its rental profits to help finance the restoration of the rest of the space, but one that the interviewees considered as detrimental to its common land status. Deemed by the courts as having been unlawfully extinguished, disputes over commoner’s rights were finally resolved by an Act of Parliament in 2001. This extended surviving rights of common ‘across the combined area known from then on in the singular as “Greenham and Crookham Common”’ (Fairhall, 2006: 175), thus, like the space itself, its name was not entirely restored to its previous form.

The Common was once again open, but the memories of my interviewees remain curiously closed, continuing to map the space as though it were still inaccessible. ‘At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place’, writes Svetlana Boym, ‘but actually’, she explains, ‘it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams’ (Boym, 2001: xv). A time the interviewees recalled, when the Commons were a playground, their bounds were measured by human movement along paths inscribed by previous generations and of greater stability in the rhythm of daily lives. A time also that, for those nearing the end of their life, was less finite and still held the possibility of ‘dreams’. Like Boym, Tuan understands nostalgia to be a product of feeling ‘that the world is changing too rapidly’, but ‘when a person feels that he himself is directing the change and in control of affairs of importance to him, then nostalgia has no place in his life’ (Tuan, 2007: 188). The loss of a sense of control over the space that was felt at the time ‘it was taken over’ was not alleviated by it being given back, and the interviewees express disenfranchisement with the space in the present. Alf and Monica both talk about the cattle that are now allowed to wander on the Common, but neither remembers this happening in the past (Jardine Brown, 2008: 9.1). The landscape no longer resembles their cognitive map. It is an experience that echoes Monica’s recollection of when her ‘Grandma got lost on the Common in the fog’ (Jardine Brown, 2008: 4.2) because the landscape had become unintelligible for her to navigate. ‘Orientation’, write Downs and Stea, ‘refers to the tie between our knowledge of the spatial environment and the environment itself, between cognitive map and real world. We are lost when we are unable to make the necessary link between what we see around us and our cognitive map’ (Downs and Stea, 1977: 53). In feeling lost in the present landscape, Monica and Alf find themselves in the past, remembering the space as it was.

In yearning for ‘the time of our childhood’, nostalgia takes us back to when space was at its most influential in our lives. ‘We are imprinted with the landscape of our early childhood’, declares Whiston Spirn (1998: 5), who believes that it shapes our formative years and our sense of who we are. De Certeau finds the root of both spatial language and practice in childhood, when we learn to negotiate environment in relation to ourselves. ‘To practice space’, he writes, ‘is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood: it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other’ (De Certeau, 1988: 110). In this way, those who grew up on the Commons have embodied its landscape, allowing its very spaciousness to form their sense of movement and physical limitations. According to De Certeau, the Commons would then have informed all future encounters of space as ‘the childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces’ to create its own ‘tours’ of the landscape (De Certeau, 1988: 110). It was the ‘childhood experience’ of spaciousness recounted in the interviews that was sought in the landscapes of the present. I believe that it is this spatial encounter, rather than the place itself that lies at the heart of my interviewees’ nostalgia and is implied in their refusal to engage with Greenham and Crookham Common in the present, but to accept Snelsmore Common in its place.

In researching Common Ground, Fairhall entered into correspondence with Richard Adams, the author of the novel Watership Down, who had also known Greenham and Crookham Commons as a boy. Adams was equally dismissive about the restoration of the landscape, writing: ‘that “so-called restoration” of Greenham Common is no restoration at all: “The whole periphery of what used to be the common is now surrounded with housing and other development. The whole sense of a great, lonely expanse is gone forever”’ (Fairhall, 2006: 173). But to ‘take a walk round’ Snelsmore Common, the interviewees were able to ‘imagine’ when Greenham and Crookham Commons were ‘big open spaces’ that ‘were private in their own way’ and where intimate encounters with the landscape could provide seasonal delights. ‘The object of longing’, writes Boym, ‘is not really a place called home, but this sense of intimacy with the world; it is not the past in general, but that imaginary moment when we had time and didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia’ (Boym, 2001: 251). For those who recall the Common before it was fenced off, their memories are not overpowered by a global sense of space in which Cold War politics and anti-nuclear protesters dominate the scene, but long instead for an ‘intimacy with the world’ of its local space. ‘Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde’, explains Boym, as it ‘is not merely an expression of local longing, but a result of a new understanding of time and space that made the division into “local” and “universal” possible’ (Boym, 2001: xvi). She believes ‘the nostalgic creature has internalised this division, but instead of aspiring for the universal and the progressive he looks backward and yearns for the particular’ (Boym, 2001: 11).

In turning to Snelsmore Common, which lies a few miles to the north of Newbury, the oral histories map Greenham and Crookham Common from outside its bounds, through encounters with another space, and, ironically, replace the original with another. ‘Nostalgia, like irony’, Boym asserts, ‘is not a property of the object itself but a result of an interaction between subjects and objects, between actual landscapes and the landscapes of the mind’ (Boym, 2001: 354). Snelsmore more closely resembles how my informants remember Greenham and Crookham Common on their cognitive maps. It therefore offers them a tangible route back inside the ‘landscapes of the mind’, where the unforeseen could be encountered and plotted to give labyrinthine clarity to their memories.

Conclusion

‘An object or place’, writes Tuan, ‘achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind. Long residence enables us to know a place intimately, yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it from the outside and reflect upon our experience’ (Tuan, 2007: 18). The distance of both time and space enabled the interviewees to gain critical distance in their memories of Greenham and Crookham Common and served to sharpen their sense of its particularities in their mapping of its space. Let us reflect for a moment upon these particularities and how they have been mapped.

‘It is true’, acknowledges De Certeau, ‘that the operations of walking can be traced on … maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But’, he maintains, ‘surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by … the trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten’ (De Certeau, 1988: 97). As a vast landscape, ‘being in’ and moving across the Common was key to how it was remembered and how its limits were inscribed independently of a conventional map. These were marked according to each individual’s practice of space and, for those who grew up on the Common, it was one that formed their intimate sense of spaciousness. The bounds on the cognitive maps were movable limits, subject to change when movement within the space speeded up and new features were encountered. ‘The negotiations of place’, writes Massey, ‘do not create bounded territories but constellations of connections with strands reaching out beyond’ (Massey, 2008[2005]: 187–8). It was encounters with others that marked places of negotiation along routes that continued or stopped in their tracks. Places where coexistence was measured by the freedom to move. The space had been shared with the military in the past, but the perimeter fence brought this practice to an abrupt halt and, in closing off the Common to its inhabitants, the landscape became a place bounded by their memories. Master narratives brought the Greenham Women to mind and created a global sense of space, and unmastered narratives longed for the local landscapes of childhood, identifying more closely on their cognitive maps with another space, rather than the restoration of Greenham and Crookham Common itself.

However, there was one interviewee who was able to relate to the physical space after the fence came down and who plotted her cognitive map differently as a result. Mary recalls her father having left her, her mother and younger brother on the Commons at the outbreak of the Second World War and never coming back. He died while serving in the British navy and was buried in Yokohama, Japan. Mary visited his grave in 2003 and with her she took some earth from beneath an apple tree that he had climbed as a boy. This apple tree still stood in the garden of the house where he had been brought up on the Commons and which had become once again accessible to her when the airfield was decommissioned (Fairhall, 2006: 171). She had wanted to take her father ‘something from England’ and, in scattering the soil over his remains, performed a symbolic act in which the bounds of Greenham and Crookham Commons were extended halfway across the world to bring one of its commoners back inside its limits of memory. Mary’s account maps the Common beyond its bounds, and thereby performs its own act of spatial legislation in its narrative representation of the landscape. ‘The story’, explains De Certeau, ‘does not express a practice. It does not limit itself to telling about a movement. It makes it’ (De Certeau, 1988: 81). Cognitive maps are active representations of space that are continually renegotiated through narrative encounters. They are not ‘surveys of routes’, but the routes themselves, ensuring that ‘a way of being in the world’ is remembered.

The restoration of Greenham and Crookham Common has seen commoners’ rights being exercised in the space once more. There are about 75 commoners on the register whose rights are overseen by a Ranger, ² employed by West Berkshire Council to manage the space and its wildlife habitats. In addition to the Commoners’ livestock, the Council have also introduced Exmoor ponies that are well adapted to survive on the nutrient-poor grazing that the heathland has to offer and, although not a Commoner’s right, birch harvesting for making brooms is permitted at the eastern boundary. The Ranger is also in charge of public access, maintaining routes for visitors to walk around the space, and the Council have published an illustrated map indicating where these are and providing information on the landscape’s ecology and history. The map highlights what remains of the American airbase, where the runway used to be and where the control tower and massive grass covered silos that once housed the nuclear warheads still feature as visible landmarks in the space. As ‘archaeological remains of the Cold War’, the silos have been scheduled by English Heritage as a national monument (Fairhall, 2006: 182), and there are plans to convert the control tower into a Visitor Centre. A ‘Commemorative and Historic Site’ has also been established in memory of the Greenham Women who erected a memorial of stone and steel just south of the industrial park on the Common in 2002 (Fairhall, 2006: 155).

‘There is never a landscape, always many landscapes’, writes Bender, who believes they ‘are not passive, not “out there”, because people create their sense of identity – whether self, or group or nation-state through engaging and re-engaging, appropriating and contesting the sedimented pasts that make up the landscape’ (Bender, 1998: 25). Different memories mark out the Common’s space, constructing different landscapes in the process, each of which forms a layer in its ‘sedimented pasts’. In setting down its memories of the Common, the In Living Memory (Jardine Brown, 2008) collection of oral history constructs its own particular place that, according to Boym, need not be considered as stuck in a nostalgic reverie. ‘Nostalgia’, she declares, ‘is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective. Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future. Consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales’ (Boym, 2001: xvi). As part of Greenham and Crookham Common’s heritage, the interviews contribute a particular perspective to its future as restored common land, a future where venture into the landscape would mean the possibility of intimate encounters with its local space and chance meetings with others, keeping the territory open to negotiation. Such realities would listen to the oral histories and hear their rhythm beating the bounds of Greenham and Crookham Commons, preparing the way for the next chapter in the practice of their space.