THE LAST NIGHT …

“It was a beautiful evening: an evening for cleansing and celebration, drumming and chanting. We sat, radiantly clean and refreshed in the moonlight, sipping herb tea by the remains of the sweat lodge fire.

“Ian and Jennifer, the Quaker couple from Ipswich who had just recently moved into the end of Peace Lane, were the ones who raised the alarm. They had been out in their mini, and had seen the enormous military convoy on the road heading our way. They drove straight back to camp and told everyone up by the gate, and then drove back out again to try and block the back road.

“Then we saw it, all along the horizon to the north, 500 pairs of headlights nose to tail on the back road for as far as the eye could see. Whatever they were going to do to us, it was about to start happening …”

Extract 

By now I was tired. Moving all this gear was heavy work. Memories are more of a blur – disconnected images in no special order. I remember someone saying it was 6 o’clock in the morning. I remember the mist coming down before dawn. I remember cups of tea around the back of Brig’s truck, where david and Sheena’s gear was now on board and Brig’s gas ring was working in a handy corner near the doors. I remember the skool house burning with huge flames as daylight crept upon us, smoke pouring up, groups of tired people sitting around near it, still smoking joints, still more cheerful than sullen. I remember sitting on the front seat of a truck eating an apple, and an army cameraman filming me there: I just glared into the lens. I remember Nicky, Justin and Adrian appearing, and how they’d heard the news in Wales at midnight and had driven through the night to be with us; and later Justin telling me how he’d pushed through the wire to get into the chapel, with a candle lit, singing, before he’d got dragged away. And Tim & Bridie, cheerful as ever, and Adge, grumpy and pissed off, packing his gear and then piling stuff inside the frame of “the best bender I ever had”, and firing the lot. And first light creeping through the mist, with no particular drama. And Mike setting fire to the Food Kitchen: all night it hard stood there alone and untouched; one or two tarps had gone, but removing them all was too much for anyone to do. There’d been a dim little glow coming from inside all night, I think from the fire in the fire place. In the morning the Foof Kitchen was burned; flames snickering up, plastic catching and dripping, then all of a sudden fire and smoke in the biggest conflagration.

Life at Rainbow Fields was never boring, and the last night was the least boring of all …