There had been an ‘issue’ in our group, so I had to talk face-to-face with someone. We figured out the best chance of us meeting was when he came to Aldermaston for an action camp (against nuclear weapons).
I showed up; he’d volunteered to be a decoy, so we walked around the base, talking about who said what and who did what and why he felt the way he did.
At the main entrance, he said he was going to walk straight in –as a decoy. I joined him – we were both expecting to be stopped and escorted out in minutes.
We walked in.
We carried on walking.
No one stopped us.
There was no one around.
Eventually, we got to the inner perimeter, the serious fence that guards the nuclear weapons research. Finally, someone started shouting for us to stay away from the fence.
We automatically started running towards the fence.
They got my partner. I was half-way up the fence. An MoD cop hung onto my shoe. Above me was a huge roll of razor wire.
I had never dealt with razor wire before. There are loads and loads of super-sharp razors all along the wire, which is in a roll sort of like several stretched-out slinkies one inside the other.
I thought I could squeeze through a gap in the roll, so I did. I shook off my shoe and squeezed carefully through.
There was no way the police could get me. I was now inside a vicious tube of razor wire running around the edge of one of the most secure locations in the UK.
The police were below me on both sides of the fence, shouting that I must not descend into the high-security area.
I descended (carefully) into the high-security area, got arrested, got thrown out (not charged) at midnight. No one else made it into the high-security area that time, so far as I know.
And I was just a decoy!