“Hang on, Mum, wait a sec.” Lissa puts a hand on her mother’s arm to halt her, then turns back to the road and reaches out her thumb. A man in a Range Rover stops almost immediately. He is pleasant and hearty, and Lissa senses her mother’s silent relief as he drives them up a hill towards the Common, dropping them in a parking lot where Lissa helps her mother down. Sarah walks to the fence, where an old control tower still stands. Lissa wanders over to a board, which tells a little of the history of the Common, of the air base, of the flora and fauna to be found. Greenham Common, it says, restored to lowland Heath.

Past grazing by commoners’ livestock has enabled a rare heath plant life to develop, consisting of heather, gorse, and other acid-loving plants.

The removal of the runways and the erection of fencing allows commoners to once again exercise their grazing rights.

She squints. In the middle distance is a concrete pathway—the old runway—where two girls, young teenagers, stand playing airplanes, their arms out to catch the breeze, their laughter high on the air.

“This way,” Sarah says. The sandy gravel crunches beneath their feet; heather blooms in all directions, starlike white flowers studding the grasses by the path. They walk parallel to the old runway, past a pond, a fire hydrant. Sarah’s head turns this way and that, occasionally nodding to herself, as though things are falling into place. “That was the Blue Gate,” she says, pointing with her stick, “over there.”

Cyclists pass them, families lumbering along together, older men in packs of three or five, wearing their wraparound sunglasses, their helmets. Sarah tut-tuts at them as they shoulder their way over the path. It is warm, getting hotter. Lissa takes water from her bag, offers it to Sarah, who takes it and drinks deeply.

“There,” Sarah says suddenly, her eyes fixed on something behind Lissa. “There they are. The silos. Where the missiles were held.”

Lissa turns. They are huge, grass-covered. They look, she thinks, like nothing so much as burial mounds, the sort where Bronze Age kings would be interred with all their loot. They make their way slowly over the Common towards them. Triple barbed-wire fences still stand in front of them; someone has painted over them in red paint.

Pussy

Cunt

Fuck

You

A sign still stands amid overgrown vegetation—Ministry of Defence.

Sarah rattles the fence with her stick. “Bolt cutters,” she says proudly, “made short work of this.” She smiles. “We always had our bolt cutters on us.” Then she throws her head back and begins to make the most extraordinary noise—a ululation—at once utterly earthed and utterly unearthly. She sees some walkers look up, wondering. When Sarah stops there is silence; she smiles a wicked smile. “It frightened the daylights out of the soldiers,” she says. “They didn’t know what to make of us.”