Extra guards were drafted in, only this time it was to protect the peace camp. Katrina laughs at the thought, as we enter the main gate and go to the less-than-sensitively named Cruise Inn Bar in the leisure centre, to buy an ice-cream. Instead, they are claiming squatters' rights.It used to be vigilantes and bailiffs that kept them awake at night. It is now three years since Newbury District Council last tried to evict the women. Instead, the council seems preoccupied with wrangling with the Ministry of Defence about what will happen to the Common. Some of the residents of Newbury and villages around Greenham once chartered a plane to fly over their heads towing the slogan "Girls Go Home".

"Even today," says Sarah, "as the train pulls in there, my stomach goes."Yet things may finally be changing. The women were banned from most shops, pubs and cafes in Newbury, betrayed by their scruffy appearance and the smell of woodsmoke. "They look at us and think: 'You get up and you live in this primitive way Nobody gives a damn how you are Nobody gives a damn that you're out there trying to do this. But the average Briton - or at least the average Middle Englander - remains more interested in the early stereotypes of Greenham "wimmin" than in what they may or may not have achieved politically. You're struggling, you're going to the courts, you're going to prison. I don't want a steady diet of this, thank you.' It's easier to go back into the system and get a career."Katrina, Sarah and the rest may comfort themselves with the thought that their 15-year sacrifice has made Britain a safer place.

Yet it keeps the women of Yellow Gate going even when so many former friends have lost the faith. "They look down the road and see more of this struggle every day," said Sarah. I know it was signed somewhere away in Europe - Gorbachev and Reagan signed things and Mrs Thatcher was silent - but we know that we brought that about."Such self-belief may seem faintly absurd. "Our actions mounted up on each other, and this place shook," says Jean Hutchinson. "Wasn't it strange that Mrs Thatcher, who loved nuclear weapons, never raised a murmur about Cruise being cancelled under the INF? I believe it was because she knew they were not maintainable here - pounds 3 million had to be paid in one year to police the place We defeated them.