Not in My Name (part 2)

And I have never understood the true meaning of the phrase ‘motley crew’ until I became a part of the disparate whole that was the march. There were students and children and old people and dogs and a woman in a wheelchair. There were two old women sitting on a bench, both wearing neon vests over their clothes with ‘Not in my name’ emblazoned on them. Obviously too old to walk, they surveyed the crowd with an indulging smile. When someone asked to take a photo of them, one woman smiled even more broadly, “Oh, yes, please do dear – we’re grannies against the war!”

Women’s Institutes against the war. Scout groups against the war. Herefordshire rotary club against the war. I felt as though I had wandered into Philip Larkin’s middle England, and they were all out in London marching for peace, shoulder to shoulder not with warmongers but with radicals and parents and anarchists and labour voters..

Greenpeace you might have expected. But they were still impressive, and oddly beautiful, moving in a great unified body like a flock of birds, with tall high bamboo canes holding aloft white Greenpeace flags which fluttered in the light wind like so many wings.

“Steve…are those flags made of plastic?” I pondered as we got close to them. Steve grinned at me, “Shhhhhh!” he said.

The Liberal Democrats were also out in force. They had branded themselves very well, and were a great stripe of yellow along one side of the Thames when I joined them briefly. Their placards bore the words, ‘Lib Dems say no’ in thick, black letters of conviction.

This entertained me in several ways. The first was the idea that they were therefore all-purpose placards, and could be used to demonstrate against almost anything. (the terrorism bill, top-up fees, you name it) The other was that once you’d read their leaflets, you realised that the placards might more realistically and honestly have said, ‘Lib Dems say maybe’ or ‘Lib Dems say, possibly, but not right now.’

But I am being flippant. They are the closest we’ve got to an anti-war political option, and I do admire them for that.

I couldn’t count the other groups that were there. Villa fans against the war. Stamp collectors against the war. Most entertainingly, one group had placards which said, ‘War- never! Peace – clever! Poetry – Forever! Poets against the war’ They were distributing pamphlets of poetry to those around them.

There was a lot of knitwear around. From the knitwear you’d expect: the rainbow jumpers and lumpy tea-cosy hats worn by the hippies who were banging drums and smoking dope to the bad Christmas jumpers worn by the liberals who’d dressed down for the weekend. At one point, a man in a rainbow jumper with wild hair yelled into his megaphone, “Blair is corrupt and he must go” at which a tall business man who wore a pure wool coat over his suit, and was reading the Independent as he walked along, flicked his eyes up and said quietly and almost jovially to himself, “I quite agree.”

We walked and walked. And walked and walked some more. Often slow, but never crawling, and always moving. I walked from 11.30 until about 5pm. Individual steps became automatic. All other needs were shut out for a day. I realised with a jolt when I got back to firstflat that I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything, or been to a bathroom, for the whole day…. and I’d hardly realised.

We flowed around and into Hyde Park, past a man who held a megaphone and was shouting encouragement at us. The numbers seemed unreal at that stage, and they still are now. He shouted “Two million people!” at us, the police later said ¾ million…. The exact numbers almost became academic. We couldn’t be confined by numbers, there were too many of us for that. We needed our own collective noun. We were a swell of people. We were a feeling of people. We were an expression of distrust, an expression of hope, an expression of impotence and of outrage. We were the physical manifestation of the sheer strength of a nation’s suddenly unified opinion.

It had only been on occasional street corners that I’d turned around, or climbed up onto a rail, or craned my neck to see the people I was marching with. And even in London’s wide streets, I couldn’t really see. I could just see people as far as I looked. It was only in Hyde Park that even the faintest sense of the scale began to register. I knew up until then that we were doing something special, something honest and something important. But it was only in Hyde Park that I started to feel we were patching together something quite historical and significant. Something that transcended the sum of its parts. Something that was more than any of us.

I tried to listen to the speeches, but I was dead on my feet, and chilled to the bone despite wearing gloves all day. We heard Ken Livingstone speak, his voice echoing out to us at the far reaches of the park, and when he got to the end and shouted, “Not in our names!” the cheer spread out from him like ripples in a pond. Like the effects of a disturbance in a smooth sheet of water. Like the political effects from the biggest march in living memory. And I knew that I’d done my bit, and I was allowed to go.

And I knew that I didn’t just walk along the route of that march. The process was not just one of perambulation. I offered something. We all did.

I offered up my presence; my aching feet, my gently blue fingers, my hoarse voice; I offered it all up as you offer up smoke signals to something up there, far away, that you will never see the effects of. It was a message not only to our stricken prime minister, who I cannot truly believe is an evil man, and whose appearance gets more haggard, grey and tired as his words become more certain. I offered my tired feet up to George Bush so far away. I offered it up to a Middle East so riven with hatred and age-old misunderstandings. I offered it up to Iraqi people who will lose their loved ones if we rain bombs down on their innocent heads. I offered it up as a moral sacrifice, to some greater distant idea of right and wrong that felt suddenly very close while the green of Hyde Park was black with massed people. While we all marched together you could reach out and touch morality. You could taste it in the air. It didn’t seem complicated at all. It seemed very true and very simple.

“Well, the thing is,” said Jack’s mother, “will it make any difference? Will it matter that you all went?”
But that’s not the ‘thing’ at all. I just had to do it. Even if the war starts tomorrow. I had to be there, to be counted, even if my eventual stumbling was just one of 750,000, 1 million, 2 million…. Who knows. I went there because even if I had been the only one to turn out, with every step I took across central London, I had a message to beat out with my feet on the cold streets:

Don’t do this on my behalf.
Not because I agree.
Not for me. Not in my name.