Ann Pettitt (Ref:12745) talks about the 'Embrace the Base' event of December 1982.

"Embrace the Base I always think of as the kind of zenith, the high spot of the whole Greenham story really, because that was when the original message went thumping round the world. The good that it did was done that day and everything that had gone before seemed to have been entirely necessary to the creation of that day. That was when the message did get through the media and it got through on the mass media in a completely simple, direct way. 

The Peace Camp began in September 1981. It was in May, June, it was in summer of the following year, of 1982, that Barbara Doris went to America and took part in a protest around the Pentagon, where women held hands and encircled the Pentagon and she brought back from America this idea to Greenham. She took the idea back to the women at Greenham and they said "Oh dear, sounds like far too much", and they hummed and ahhed and I think Lyn Jones turned up and had also heard about the same thing and said "Yes lets do it." But it was a very kind of last minute, "Yes Lets do it" decision that was taken sometime around, late on in October. I mean your talking about something to happen on December 12th. Why December 12th, because it was the date of the decision to bring in Cruise Missiles. 

We organised it by chain letter. You simply sent out ten letters, you photocopied them and sent them out. God knows how many copies of these I got and how many copies I sent out. I mean I sent out about 100, loads of other people sent out about 100. That was the day when 30,000 women came. That was the best day of my life, that was brilliant, that was amazing. But what was so exciting was, I just cried, what was so brilliant again was that it was sort a wing and a prayer, you thought, yes, everybody I know in my area is coming, but are they coming from everywhere else? 

We got to Severn Bridge (service station) at Avon Gorge and the car park was absolutely jammed with coaches. That whole car park was full of coaches that had come up from Devon and Cornwall and all over Wales. The whole of the West Country, women, was in these coaches you know. Going down the motorway all these coaches were full of women waving their suffragette coloured ribbons. What was so good about that was that it was in that extraordinary sort of spirit of, it was Embrace the Base, it was overwhelm this place with our good vibe. It was still a kind of very naive, optimistic spirit in a sense. Also you brought a gift. You brought a gift which symbolised the life, how important life was to you. You brought a gift that was important to you and it was a gift to the base to symbolise life. So the whole of the fence was just covered with these, absolutely extraordinary, the whole of the fence covered with things. Again it was this mass of ordinary women and there was a distance between the way that women who considered themselves feminists viewed this. I remember reading in Spare Rib a very tut tutting report of this demonstration about how women had hung pictures of their houses on the fence, you know, "Oh goodness me, revelling in domesticity", or nappies on the fence. One woman had hung her wedding dress on the fence and left it there. She hung her wedding on the fence and walked away and left it. To me, I just sort of walked around with tears streaming down my face looking at these things, you know laughing and crying at the same time. 

I remember Carmen telling me that she saw a whole beautiful dinner service clipped to the fence. A lot of things were just left, they were sacrificed, they were left you know. It was a marvellous day. The whole of that nine mile fence covered with these things, or with flowers, obviously a lot of paintings, a lot of pictures of babies, a lot of embroidery. Women embroidered, started to embroider the fence and sort of use their own arts in this subversive way. Of course embroidery became part of the Greenham theme afterwards and the soldiers would become absurdly enraged by embroidery when women would darn the fence. They'd darn huge areas of it in the following years, you know darning would become something they would do with all multi coloured wool and everything. They darn such enormous areas of it that you couldn't see through it. The military would be sent with scissors to cut through these silly bits of darning and then they'd reappear the next morning. [Interviewer: I wonder what you took Ann?]. I took two sacks of daffodil bulbs from Pembrokeshire and gave them out and people planted them and they still come up every year you see."