Letter from Susan

Thorpewood Police Station Peterborough

4^th November 2000

Dear Friends,

I have just returned from our first court appearance. Monday I will go to Holloway, there is no room there now. The police here say it is filled to the brim! [Eds note - there never was any room which is why we all got confused and Susan is in Brockhill instead!]. Martin went to Bedford. We could briefly see each other today through the duty solicitor. He (Martin) seems to be doing fine. We are both very pleased by the way things are going at the moment. The solicitor had a lot of trouble with us not wanting bail. He thinks he could have gotten us out easily but we didn’t want him to do so. (The conditions were that we would return to court, the prosecution felt we didn’t have enough community here or something and we would not come back. Nothing was said about the "danger" of us going back to Wittering airforce base.) They charged us with "Burglary with the intent to do unlawful damage" a bit strange that since we already admitted to doing "damage" (�30,000 pounds of it!) but not said anything on how we entered the garage (I do not want to write about it just yet, let’s just say that we had a LOT of help from the Holy Spirit).

Once we were in the building (building 18) we saw various vehicles, one of them a lorry as used in the Nuclear Weapons convoy. We first did the more silent work like hanging banners, spraying texts like "Love is the Fulfilment of Law" and "Proclaim Jubilee". Then we started the dismantling with our hammers. There were a lot of tools lying about already as the building was a workshop, so we had plenty of hammers, saws and such. After a while we sat down. We had laid on the floor various books: The "Trident Ploughshares Handbook", "Tactical Trident" by Milan Rai and Hibakusha on the victims of the bombs on Japan. We put folded cranes on the lorry on the places we had hit it (They were folded by my community in Amsterdam). We sat down and prayed and sang Taize songs. I felt very connected to the Ploughshares tradition; I wore a Bread not Bombs T-shirt, had hammered with a hammer used by the ANZUS ploughshares and by Chris Cole in his ploughshares action, we had brought seeds mixed with ashes just as the "Seeds of Hope" women had done and we had the Trident Ploughshares handbook with us.

After a while we went up to an office in the same building. We must have been there for at least 1 1/2 hours already and spent another 30 minutes in this office. And nobody had heard or seen us. We tried the phone but couldn’t really make it work. Then we went back down, opened one of the big bay doors and went outside. We stood in the middle of the four garages looking at the dismantled lorry and prayed that our work might have some effect or impact. We remembered the people we did this for, the thousands of children dying every day of hunger, the homeless in the western world, the refugees living in my house. We went towards the nearest guardhouse with flowers and fair trade chocolate and knocked on the window. A very young and surprised soldier opened the door and took our gifts. "Do you want to go out of the gate now?" he asked. Very tempting offer that was, but we invited him to have a look at the garage first, we were quite proud of it after all, and wanted to share it with him. He called his mate and soon a lot of police vans started coming towards us. They had a good look at our dismantling work, brought some dogs to see if there were more of us and then finally brought us to Thorpewood police station where I slept most of the day.

In the evening we were interviewed by the MOD which only took about 1/2 an hour. I read my statement and answered most questions with "no comment" only affirming that it was Martin and me who disabled the vehicle and that we used the tools the MOD man showed us.

I am already settling in here at the "watchhouse" getting to know the different shifts and officers (the flexible ones and the grumpy ones). The cell is quite comfortable although a bit dirty. The food is horrible and the only vegetarian option is chilli two times a day and beans and potatoes in the mornings all microwaved to death. They expect some demonstrations today to come in here from Huntingdon where they test things on animals. I might get to meet some interesting people!

Today I spent most of my time reading ACTS (The Acts of the Apostles)in my Dutch Bible. The words seem to have a new meaning now... But I do hope I get some other books or even a newspaper. Having this paper to write on is already a great thing though.

I hope you are all well out there. I’ve had some support messages already, the first ones from Angie Zelter and the Oxford Catholic Worker. And Barbara Sunderland came to court today, many thanks for that it was good to see a familiar face. I hope to have a firmer address soon so I can get letters and cards from you all. Prayers can be sent without an address, so if you feel like it, they are very welcome too. That is it for now. Have to try and make use of the flexible shift to get this letter out to you. Please make copies and send it to whoever is interested.

I wish you PAX ET BONUM

Susan, JUBILEE PLOUGHSHARES 2000