Rebelling for Life

By Sue Hampton

Rebelling for Life is a collection of poetry, short stories and other prose arising from one grandma's activism for climate and peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TSL Publications
• Release date: Jan 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914245046

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Rebelling For Life

Sue Hampton

Copyright

Published in Great Britain in 2021

By TSL Publications, Rickmansworth

Copyright © 2021

ISBN: 978-1-914245-04-6

The right of Sue Hampton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

Cover: Caroline Pakel

DEDICATION

To my brother, Dave Hampton, the Carbon Coach,

because through decades when my heart would not accept it

he knew and served the truth.

Sue Hampton interviewed by Leslie Tate, October 2020

REBELLING FOR LIFE

How has the climate crisis changed you as a person and as a writer?

It has shaken me to the core, put me on antidepressants and obsessed me. It’s also reinforced the values with which I was brought up, but which I set to one side as an overworked mum and consumer. Now I feel the same love for trees that made my father weep when one of ‘ours’ had to be cut down, and the same connection to the natural world under threat that my busyness had blocked.

For years, as I absorbed the truth about climate, I thought that I could consider my fiction my own particular kind of activism.  That was convenient, because writing is what I love and do best. It made sense because I believed in the power of fiction to effect both personal and societal change, and I haven’t lost faith in that power, but scale makes a difference and eventually I recognised that without a big publisher I’m deluding myself.

In START, written before I realised just how quickly breakdown would be upon us, and what that would mean around the world, Venice goes under, and it’s the alarm the West needs. It was harrowing to write, but much less harrowing than the future as science now foresees it. When I resolved to write exclusively about climate change in my novels and short stories, I had already reached a point where my self-styled keyboard warrior identity could no longer excuse me from physical action. My (then) publishers Magic Oxygen had already rushed out an e-book called THE BIGGEST SPLASH in which four women take direct action to new limits, shocking the few who downloaded it. After speaking at Preston New Road fracking site about the role of stories in the world, I began adapting my own experience with Extinction Rebellion 2018-19 into a novel, which I released chapter by chapter on my website, a few weeks behind real time, under the title FOR LIFE. It’s now an e-book and can be downloaded for a donation to XR. It’s not my story, because it’s populated with fictional characters, but I’ve been in the same locations and shared their experiences. I hoped that by giving readers on the uncommitted outskirts of rebellion an intimate insight into the movement, FOR LIFE would play a very small role in recruitment as well as fundraising. Although the backdrop for the story is largely the April Rebellion on Waterloo Bridge, I wrote postscripts in order to draw on the contexts of my arrest in Trafalgar Square that October, and my involvement in the Climate Vigil which led up to Lent this year [2020] – and, as it turned out, into lockdown.

Creating climate activists is natural for me because I know so many, and rebels bond quickly but deeply. We skip the small for the biggest issue of all and while we don’t all retain the fine detail of the science – personally, emotionally, I can’t – we all know the truth and we’re frightened. We mourn the same loss and we live, to varying degrees, with hope as well as grief, but sometimes that’s harder to believe in.  When I wrote INTACT, I created a character who, like some 70%+ of the UK population, knows there is a problem and is increasingly aware of ways she could make changes in response, but as a partner and mother she’s preoccupied with love on a more intimate scale. I knew I had to do for Mags what is so hard to do in person with others – to wake and shake her, and yes, to an extent break her too. I had to change that theoretical, subsidiary acceptance into the kind of fundamental, pressing and overwhelming understanding beyond knowledge that can’t be unfelt or unknown. But it’s a slow process, as it was for me. Because how I write is almost as important to me as what I write, I’ve been mindful of the danger of polemic and continued to be the kind of author who lets my characters take the lead. They have to seem almost as real to me as the crisis that is a climate and ecological emergency. So here, as in FOR LIFE, there’s a strange intersection between stark, horrifying reality and imaginative belief.

The short answer to how the climate crisis has changed me as a writer is that it’s preoccupied me, made me doubt the value of such indirect activism and brought me to a point where only non-violent civil disobedience is enough – and the least that I, as a privileged white woman in the UK, can do – for those suffering in the Global South, species and habitats at risk and those yet unborn.

As a person, it’s made me terribly sad and utterly determined in equal measure. Having believed I don’t do anger, I’ve found some – towards governments, corporations and much of the media. It’s turned me from a vegetarian to a vegan; I haven’t flown for fourteen years and won’t be patronising any airline again. Bizarrely I have the confidence to address a crowd, without practice or notes – even though I often choose not to speak on a Zoom when the group is small. I’m less self-conscious, though, and feel able to mix with rebels minus make-up! My relatively recent activism, involving occupations, creative protests, arrests, glue-ons and lock-ons, self-representing in court last year and now preparing for another trial, has taken me where I never expected to go: police cells, a meat wagon in handcuffs, the dock – and it was a while before I recovered from the shock. Like my character Em in THE PRISONER, I was Head Girl and top of the class. I’m shy. I stick rigidly to other rules and will take the long route round rather than tread on someone’s grass. So there was a certain amount of stress and trauma to survive but I’m through it now. I’ve been described, after five arrests, as ‘hard-core’, which amuses me as