: Common Ground; Liz Davies on what united thousands of women in the world's longest anti-nuclear protest.

Byline: Liz Davies 

IN 1981 Londoner Ann Pettitt had been living in Wales for just three years with her two small children.It was a peaceful and pleasant existence on a farm, yet there was something nagging her - the knowledge that nuclear weapons were proliferating in Europe, and a feeling that something should be done.

``I remember discussing it with a cow I was milking,'' she says. ``I said to it, `Daisy what are we going to do?' Then I read an article in a magazine about a group of women who had marched from Amsterdam to Paris, and thought `that's what we have to do'.''

Ann had no intention of organising it - her life was busy enough - but she couldn't get it out of her mind. ``Eventually I decided I'd have to do it. We were poor and I asked CND for some money to place adverts in the kind of magazines that ordinary women buy - Cosmopolitan and so on.''

The reaction was positive, and on August 28, 1981, a group of women set off on a 110-mile journey from Cardiff for Greenham Common, where it had been announced that the US Air Force were going to store Cruise Missiles. Their story is told in Cofio'r Comin (Remembering the Common).

One of the protesters was a grandmother from Godre'r Graig, Eunice Stallard, who was to play a large part in the activities of the women once they got to Greenham. They told people why they were marching on the way: few people had heard of Greenham at the time, and they knew they had to make some kind of gesture to bring the enormity of the nuclear threat to people's attention.

It was Eunice who thought of chaining themselves to the fence, like the Suffragettes of old. ``At the beginning we hadn't really thought about how long we'd stay,'' says Eunice. ``But once we'd chained ourselves to the fence we had to change our minds.''

The first few months were hard. Winter came, and with it the cold and wet. Ann didn't feel the protest was getting anywhere. At one point she lost heart and thought that if she herself wasn't willing to put up with the hardship then she couldn't expect anyone else to. She went to persuade a central figures of the protest, the late Helen Jones, who died at Greenham, to give up.

``What are you talking about you silly woman,'' said Helen, and directed Ann to the camp postroom where she found bag upon bag of mail from well wishers, all showing solidarity and admiration. It was enough to make Ann realise that they were not alone, and that the protest should continue.

Christian and pacifist Sin ap Gwynfor had been watching the news, impressed by the reports about the Greenham women. ``I was watching News at 10 one night, and saw those women in the mud and dirt, and felt guilty,'' she says. ``I decided that night that I had to go there. I told my husband, `I'm going to Greenham'.''

Jill Evans, now an MEP but who was a student at the time, organised a bus to go, and Sin was one of the passengers. What they saw when they got there was a shock to the system: so much mud and dirt, so much razor sharp perimeter wire. And the sheer size of the place surprised them - the base is some nine miles long.

A measure of their support came in December 1982, when they decided to Embrace the Base - a circle of women holding hands all round the perimeter. They worked out that they would need 12,000 women to do this, and set up a kind of chain letter which everyone at Greenham sent to their friends, telling them to bring 10 friends each on the day.

They did, and 30,000 people took part, hippies holding hands with fur-coated WI ladies, all singing their anthem: You can't kill the spirit. It was very emotional. Author Manon Rhys, who was there with her friend Gwenno Hywyn, started singing some Welsh carols and noticed a soldier standing inside the fence with his back to them, slowly inching his way towards them. ``We shouted at him, `are you Welsh?' and he nodded his head,'' says Manon. ``We asked him where he was from and without turning round he whispered Brechfa. We asked him to sing, but he shook his head, and said he wasn't allowed to talk to us.''

When the missiles arrived in November 1983, the women were disappointed, but continued to protest at Greenham. It wasn't until March 1991 that the last of the cruise missiles was flown back to the United States after Reagan and Gorbachev had agreed to cut down on their nuclear weapons. The following year the USAF left Greenham and the last of the satellite camps closed.

Cofio'r Comin S4C, Thursday, 8.30pm

CAPTION(S):

HOME COMFORTS... but life was very different for Ann Pettitt, far left, and Eunic Stallard, left, 20 years ago on Greenham Common, above