My German family came from the East, and I have relations in the East who I don;t know because after the war and the division of Germany, my mother lost touch with them. I had a great-aunt Hedwig Kolodziej - I wonder where her descendants are now? I remember the first time I saw the Wall making an ugly barrier through the Brandenburg Gate. Not a door that could be opened. A barricade, like the bricks that filled the windows of the houses that abutted the border. I so much yearned to go through the Brandenburg Gate and down Unter den Linden just in an ordinary way. In 1972, when I first went to Berlin, you could either go through an Allied checkpoint, or go through Friedrichstrasse station, have your passport taken away and be given a dirty little chit with a number on it. Then you had to listen for your number to be called through a crackly tannoy. You went into a room where the guards stared at you and made you adjust your hair so it was in exactly the same position as it was on the photograph - and finally let you through. It was scary and like going into limbo. It was, of course, meant to be intimidating as this was the checkpoint for citizens of the Federal Republic - who - as I remember - had only just been able to visit the East as a result of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik.

On the west side of the Wall were steps up to platforms where you could look across. These had been built, not for tourists, but for people who wanted to wave to their relations in the days when that was all you could do. I've spoken of my aunt Hedwig, but the Wall divided parents from children, brothers from sisters, in some cases husbands and wives. After Brandt's Ostpolitik, it was at least possible for them to visit one another. I can still remember watching him, on the television, standing up in the Bundestag - the West German parliament - and saying: 'What matters is that we have made human beings's lives easier.' His critics, of course, said any negotiation with the East was a failure, morally wrong. I think Brandt was right. I think, apart from anything else, that the traffic across the frontier helped a younger generation to realise that there was a place where things were different. Of course they idealised it, and of course disillusion was bound to follow. Nothing is perfect.

I've read people like Timothy Garton Ash criticising the peace movement of the '80s for being concerned only to save their own skins and failing to support the demonstrators and dissidents of Eastern Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. CND in the '80s was a grass-roots movement that went far beyond the simple unwillingness to be incinerated in the cause of 'freedom.' For one thing, we didn't think it'd help the peoples of Eastern Europe if they were the battlefield on which a nuclear war was fought - something glibly talked about by Reagan and Thatcher in those days, incredible though it may now seem. For another thing, the peace movement made people see how injustice the world over was linked together, how the military-industrial complex fed dictatorships, and how the idea of 'enemy threats' helped keep people in subjection. When CND people, like Bruce Kent and Joan Ruddock, went to Moscow, they knew exactly how useless the 'official' peace groups were. They tried to get into touch with dissident groups and, in the old Quaker phrase, they 'spoke truth to power', telling the Russians that if they wanted to have peace, really wanted it, they must liberalise. Gorbachev, in the end, took notice .

The rest is history, but on that morning when I found the newspaper and saw the photographs, switched on the television and saw the footage of what had happened the night before, it was the present, and it was simple joy. And it's still a joy to go through the Brandenburg Gate, just stroll through it, where once there was the death-strip and the patrols and the guards staring at you through their binoculars. I wish all the walls that separate people  - in Belfast, in the Middle East - would follow suit. And the walls inside our heads, too, those are the worst.

July 19th

The Wilderness of Childhood

This is a title I've filched from the New York Review of Books, from an article of the same name by Michael Chabon. He talks about the free space he had to play in his childhood, just a sort of park behind his house, and the streets around. It doesn't take much to make a wilderness for children to play in.

I remember Queen Katherine Street in Kendal, where all the children used to ride their bikes - where I, indeed, learned to ride a bike, without being taught by any adults, just by scooting along with one foot on the pavement till I got my balance and could pedal too. There was a back lane that ran up behind our house, where all the kids played again, paved with long limestones with grass growing in between them, and a walled triangle, raised off the ground, which was a flag stand for the Territorial Drill Hall, and sometimes we were chased off it, but most of the time it made a fantastic fort. We played in the canal, which was drained there, so you could hurtle down into its bed, and, when we wanted a real castle, we'd go uphill to Kendal Castle and clamber on the walls.

Nobody ever asked where we were, we came home when we were hungry, and stayed at home if it rained - which was often, of course! I remember sitting in a window at the castle, looking out of the arrow-slit and imagining I was watching for enemies coming across the hills at the back. There was a tower that my brother always climbed into, and when I was older I went up there, too. And when my parents took us to see friends who lived in a converted barn out at Crook, we rambled off over the hills with their Lakeland Terrier. My Dad was in the YMCA and they had an outdoor activity centre at Lakeside, on Windermere, where Phil and I would be given lifejackets and kayaks and we paddled around there. And we kayaked, too, when we went to visit another lot of friends', they'd come up in the world and had a largish country house and two dilapidated Roma caravans, but also a little tarn in front of the house.

We were getting exercise and learning physical competence, clambering in worked-out quarries and up crags, climbing dry-stone walls (in those days, the Lakes weren't as overrun as they are now, and so kids were allowed to do that.) But also, I was getting the kind of experiences that would lay the ground for being a writer later on. Our adventures were very small, but they were big to us, and of course we imagined all the time, we were cowboys and Indians, or we were on the run from witches, or tracking gangsters, and loads of things I've forgotten. When I was away with the other authors last week, we were chatting and all talked about having this kind of childhood.

My kids mainly played in our garden, so I thought, but in fact they used to climb over the fences and into the neighbours' gardens, hiding from the neighbours. The house next door to us was occupied by an old lady who never went into the upper reaches of her garden, so they had free run there - and I'm really glad they had that measure of freedom, though I was more protective than my parents had been. It wasn't so much 'stranger danger' as traffic. Though I have to say that Aynam Road, where I grew up, was a very busy road, the main A6 to Carlisle and all the traffic northwards ran along it. I don't know how much freedom, if any, my grandson will have. And it's sad, because actually the 'stranger danger' is no greater than it ever was. Maybe we should all be getting out of our cars much more and walking or taking buses, so that the kids could play out again.

I've read another superb book,  by an author I should have read ages ago, Siobhan Dowd's A Swift Pure Cry. Now I can't wait to read her other books, too few, unfortunately, since she died recently of cancer. A great shame.

There were two letters in the Guardian about this which I found interesting and disturbing, and both rang uncomfortable bells with me. The first was from a person who had voted for the BNP to give 'a salutory lesson' to the major parties. It did make me wonder how many of the people who voted for Hitler in the run-up to his accession to power really wanted him, and how many were also exercising a protest vote. The trouble is, that if everyone votes for the extremists to give the main parties a shock, you end up with the extremists in power. OK, this was the European parliament, but it wouldn't have been wonderful if Britain had sent a largely BNP contingent there. The other letter was rather naively suggesting that it would do the BNP good to be exposed to political realities. This was an idea that some people had about Hitler. The trouble with extremists is that as soon as they can they start making the political realities.

I was not particularly encouraged by the lineup of 'top historians' in another part of the paper, who were all saying that the BNP aren't a threat, because conditions now were very different from the conditions in Germany when Hitler came to power. Surely historians, of all people, should know that things never happen the same way twice?

What worries me is that even without any extremist parties getting to power, our civil liberties are shrinking in this country - the excuse being crime and terrorism - and we are watched more than anyone else has ever been watched. George Orwell saw it all coming. Only he didn't envisage it happening in the framework of a democracy. And are we going to say, oh well, we're a democracy still, so it's all right?

On a more cheerful note, I have been doing some lovely talks and workshops based around Rafael,  and have so much enjoyed working with school pupils. They are so bright and fun, and often make me laugh. I was asked if I'd been in the Hitler Youth. Answer - no, I may be a grandmother, but I am MUCH too young for that!

Actually, my mother was in the German Girls' League for a while, but she hated it, there was too much standing around for hours so that when some important person flew over they'd be making a swastika shape on the ground. Such disenchantment wasn't uncommon among the young of that period, it all became very dreary and tiresome. Some kids just made excuses not to go, but my mother left, though one of her teachers, who was a Nazi, told her the family would lose their ration book. They didn't.

May 15th