LOOKING at Jean Kaye, it is hard to believe the grandmother of seven has been arrested endless times.

Jean has even done time in Holloway Prison, sharing a cell with a drug user and another serving time for grievous bodily harm.

The 71-year-old widow from Rose Hill, Oxford, was one of many women who protested against nuclear weapons at Greenham Common in the early 1980s.

Jean was a primary school teacher in Witney when she decided to join the World Development Movement.

"I joined it because I was concerned with Third World countries.

"The peace movement was on the upsurge in the early '80s and I joined the local peace group and then went to Greenham Common.

"I had heard a lot about it and had been wanting to go, so I went with a minibus full of women from Witney and started to go frequently."

Jean started as a supporter for the women who were camping there, taking them food and dry wood for their fires.

"I was a supporter but you were thought of as a Greenham woman if you shared their views. They asked for night watches because vigilantes were trashing their tents. By that point they were all getting evicted four or five times a day and they were exhausted. "I felt very strongly about nuclear weapons and felt the all-women camp was very powerful. I was a feminist up to that point anyway."

Jean then got involved with the Aldermaston Women's Campaign and set up a camp outside the atomic weapons estab- lishment. She added: "I stopped teaching in 1985 but I was not totally free to live at Greenham because I had my disabled mother living with me.

"I still went to Greenham but regularly went to the Aldermaston camp too."

But it wasn't all plain sailing, as Jean recalls.

"I was arrested at Greenham a few times because we used to cut the fence and go inside on the grounds. We knew it was common land but the MoD had taken it over. "We tried to stop the convoys coming out. Some of the police were okay but some were rough with the women. I got arrested quite a lot of times for going inside Greenham. I then got convicted for obstructing a police officer.

"I was asked to move and I wouldn't, so he bunged me in a van! I went to court and got a conditional discharge.

"The trespass I got convicted for was on Salisbury Plain and I got fined and went to Holloway Prison for seven days in 1986.

"Lots of Greenham women got more than that but I only went to prison once. It was very boring. I shared a cell with three other women - one was in there for grievous bodily harm and another for drugs. We actually all got on very well!"

One of Jean's proudest moments while she was heavily into protesting was when she went to the House of Commons in 1991. She said: "We decided to go to the House of Commons in true suffragette style. We managed to get tickets and it was very intimidating but I had a banner wrapped round me which I had put under my jumper.

"When they started talking about the Gulf War, we stood up, got our banners out and started shouting 'War is not the answer, we want peace not war'. We got hustled out."

These days Jean is still campaigning and vows to continue unless her health proves otherwise.

She is a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

"I'm probably one of the older ones from Greenham but age really didn't matter. If people say the protesters were all hippies, that is totally untrue because we must have covered the whole spectrum."

She added: "The only regret I have got is that we have still got nuclear weapons in the country.

"Sometimes I wonder what my neighbours think of me when they see me leaving my house early in the morning with a ladder.

"I use it to look over the fence at Aldermaston to see if there are any convoys!"

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.