[Below, Ruthven reviews On the Perimeter, a nonfiction account of women campaigning against an American cruise missile base in England.]

Caroline Blackwood first visited the Cruise missile protest camps at Greenham Common in March this year. Her curiosity had been aroused by the "loathsome and frightening" adjectives applied to the women peace campaigners in the newspapers. Auberon Waugh had said the women smelt of "fish paste and bad oysters". Other less gifted polemicists had described them as "screaming destructive witches", "sexstarved harpies" or just a "bunch of lesbians". They were accused of being in the pay of Moscow, or of being red spies who lived like dogs and smeared the town of Newbury with excrement.

In her partisan, but far from one-sided, account of the Greenham camps [On the Perimeter], Blackwood relates what she found out through talking both to the women and to their opponents. Nightmarish terrors of nuclear war or accident had driven the protestors to exchange home and family for the cold, the mud, the damp and squalor of the "benders", the home-made tents made from branches and sheets of polythene which are the only dwellings available to the women because tents and caravans have been forbidden by the local council. Here they withstand the harassment of policemen and bailiffs and the sexual taunting of the soldiers, as well as the sheer tedium of maintaining a round-the-clock vigil at the entrance to the base, because "they found it impossible to have faith in the untested theory that deterrents give humanity endless safety". The only relief in this monotonous existence is the occasional visit to the courtroom in Newbury or a spell in Holloway Prison which many regard as a rest camp.

As Blackwood sees it, the protest is a matter of feeling rather than politics. The women's attitude may appear simplistic, but they have a "common sense approach" which stems directly from their daily experience. "It was the protest of all women who have ever looked after children. It gave a black warning that came direct from personal experience. 'If you let children play with dangerous instruments, it won't be very long before there is a hideous accident.'"

In contrast with this down-to-earth view of nuclear matters, Blackwood's account of the childishness of the people defending the base arouses deep misgivings. The soldiers behind the wire keep the women awake at night by shouting obscenities. Once, on leaving the base in a military coach, they bared their bottoms in a gesture that had clearly been rehearsed with parade-ground precision. Even the American children living in the base appear to have been trained to make the "Fuck You" sign as they pass by in the school bus.

Not all of this silliness is on the anti-protestor side. The ideological lesbians cloud the issue by ostentatiously hugging and kissing in the courtroom or at the approach of the TV crews. But, according to Blackwood, all the women arouse a degree of hostility far in excess of any inconvenience they may cause to soldiers, policemen or residents living near the base. Shopkeepers and publicans refuse to serve them; hooligans unexpectedly join forces with the establishment and actualize the verbal insults by smearing the benders with excrement and pig's blood. A huntsman goes berserk in one of the camps, flaying the women with his whip while abandoning his hounds to the oncoming traffic. One of the leaders of RACE—Ratepayers Against Greenham Encampments—leans out of her top-floor window and actually cheers one of the missiles as it leaves the base.

The anti-protestors seem to lose all sense of proportion. For them it is the women's encampments, rather than the base itself that has become an eyesore. It is not the nine miles of fence and barbed wire, the acres of concrete, the hideous hangers and screaming jet aircraft that have desecrated this English common, once the haunt of the Pied Fly-Catcher and Little Ringed Plover, but the handful of sodden and bedraggled women, with their frumpy clothes, their pots of tea and their benders.

Why have these women aroused such irrational furies? Partly, no doubt, it is due to the same mythopoeic power that has made them saints and martyrs for peace groups all over the world. The hysterical response to the women, both by government and local establishments may really be due to underlying fears about nuclear war and the effectiveness of deterrence as a policy. Cassandras, as Blackwood points out, have never been popular. But there also appear to be deeper levels at which the rage of the anti-protestors is aroused. This spontaneous and voluntary association of females, without formal leadership or hierarchy, seems to threaten the soldiers, the local gentry, the bourgeoisie of Newbury and even its hooligans far more than the missiles, although the latter would be a prime target in the event of nuclear war. Can it be that the women are really right in seeing the Bomb and its phallic projectiles as the linch-pin of a system of patriarchal dominance? Caroline Blackwood does not ask such questions, but her absorbing, witty and compassionate narrative leads one to search for answers in this direction.