27 / 76
A seven-year stint in the outreach department
at Bagnor’s Watermill theatre followed, before
some 18 months ago she took the plunge and
became a freelance playwright and theatre
director, which proved a smart move as she
has achieved considerable success.
“I’ve been writing plays to commission ever
since – I’m lucky enough to be very busy
and am hoping it will stay that way. My first
published play,
The Glove Thief
, will be coming
out in the autumn.”
Like those of us who have lived here most of
our lives, Beth has personal experience of
Newbury’s role in the Cold War era and of the
business park that the base became.
She was a young girl when she remembers
driving past the women’s peace camp in the
80s: “As children it was just accepted as a part
of life.”
Then later “My first properly grown-up temp
job, as a student on vacation, was on the
business park, putting labels onto jam jars at
English Provender. I also once had a job during
a gap in acting work where my sole task was
to delete the spam emails coming into the
computers of a publishing company there. I
rather enjoyed that one, though I can’t imagine
I was really worth paying.
“After drama school, I founded a small theatre
company to make touring work on the fringe,
and we were based in the Open Studios office
at New Greenham Arts for a while. I rehearsed
plays in the studios and have gone running
on the common in the summer – it’s generally
been a part of my life for as long as I can
remember.”
But still she needed to do further research to
feed into her writing. “I’ve spent a lot of time in
libraries researching books, something I love
doing because I’m very geeky. I had to read up
about a lot of history, covering about 60 years,
and then discard most of it. I also met with a
few people who had very specific memories
of the common: people who lived or worked
there.”
Along the way she learned some surprising
things. “I knew about the peace protests of
course, but I knew less about the use of the
base during the Second World War – how
crucial Greenham and this area in general was
in preparations for D-Day. The thought of all
those planes taking off in 1944 and then so few
returning haunts me even now.
“I was also fascinated to hear about the
Ugandan Asian refugees who came to
Greenham in the 1970s; I met with one woman
who came over when her family was expelled
from Uganda and her story was incredible.”
And surprisingly a valuable source emerged
close to home – Beth’s grandmother – “an
incredible, indomitable woman” who lived in
Cold Ash until she sadly died a few months ago
at the grand old age of 101.
“About a year ago I was sitting on her sofa
drinking tea and talking about the Greenham
project when she suddenly had a burst of
memory and started talking about how she
used to go to dances on the RAF base during
the Second World War.
“I named the main characters, Peggy and
Frank, after her and my grandfather. For me
they both encapsulated a spirit of proud,
British make-do-and-mend practicality. They
had experienced war first-hand and knew how
terrible it is to be hungry or experience trauma.
She would watch the news and say ‘I don’t hold
with war’.”
The difficulty came in encapsulating all she
learnt into a cohesive dramatic story. “There
are an infinite number of ways to tell any story
and it all comes down to making choices: who
gets a voice, whose viewpoint do we see?
“Sometimes a historical retelling can seem
impersonal – we can care more about one
person than about thousands. So I decided to
channel the whole story through the eyes of
OA
feature
27