VANCOUVER — They are five words that no mother normally wants to hear when she answers the phone: “Hi Mom, I’m in jail.”
But when Alison Henry of Burnaby received a trans-Atlantic phone call Thursday night from her 32-year-old daughter. Victoria, in police custody in an English jail, she said she was the proudest mother in the world.
Hours before Victoria used her only permitted phone call from jail to ring up her mother’s house in Burnaby, she had been arrested by the London Metropolitan Police “on suspicion of aggravated trespass.”
Victoria and five of her fellow members of the Greenpeace climbing team had just spent 15 hours scaling the sheer face of the tallest building in the European Union, the 87-storey Shard skyscraper in downtown London. The endeavour was a Greenpeace protest against oil and gas drilling programs in the Arctic.
“I thought she would be horrified, but she was so proud of me,” said Henry, reached in London this weekend after Greenpeace bailed her out of jail.
Alison Henry said it was the first phone call she had ever received from jail, while allowing that “through their teenage years, both my girls gave me a few hair-raising moments.”
Victoria grew up in south Burnaby, attending Burnaby’s Moscrop Secondary and Purpose Secondary School in New Westminster. A dual Canadian-British citizen, Henry has worked in Greenpeace’s London office for the past four years.
She said she’s proud that Greenpeace also has roots in B.C. The environmental organization had its first meetings in Kitsilano in the early 1970s, as Victoria often tells her U.K. friends.
“It’s that Canadian thing, it’s in our DNA,” she said. “It must be something about Vancouver. It’s just a beautiful place to live. I think it probably does inspire people to think more about the environment.“
The climb began Thursday around 4 a.m. London time, as the six women evaded security guards at the base of the skyscraper and began their ascent using a complex system of ropes and harnesses.
Fifteen hours and 310 vertical metres later, the women reached the summit, where they waved a large flag reading “Save the Arctic,” meant to be visible from Shell’s London headquarters below. Greenpeace opposes the multinational oil and gas corporation’s drilling in the Arctic.
Alison watched the live broadcast on the Greenpeace website, including streaming video from the climbers’ helmet cameras. Victoria said: “We were glad there were no microphones on us because there was a little bit of swearing on the way up, I’m not going to lie.”
The preparation and training for the climb took months, Victoria said, but required absolute secrecy. This meant her partner, Alex, was kept in the dark and learned about it on the news Thursday morning.
Back in Burnaby, Alison was getting ready for work that morning when she saw an email from her sister with the subject line: “What your daughter is up to.” Due to the time difference, by the time Alison opened the email, Victoria was already hundreds of metres above the pavement.
Alison said her two daughters have always had an adventurous streak. There was a large maple tree in their backyard when the girls were growing up, and as kids they spent hours climbing it. When a seven-year-old Victoria would reach the highest branches, Alison said, “The neighbours across the road used to say, ‘Ah, we’re absolutely terrified of seeing Victoria up there in that tree.’ I said, ‘Children have to climb and test their limits.’ ”
On Thursday, 25 years later, Victoria was still testing her limits, 310 metres up.
