Rubbish May Be Shot Here, 1937
by Guy Ware
For the second time this month, we are waiting for an ambulance. Last time, Diana didn't actually say I told you so because she didn't have to. We both knew why I was there, head on the floor, right foot caught between the iron bannisters three steps up the spiral staircase she always said would be the death of me, but wasn't. A couple of cracked ribs: what's that? The doctors say ribs heal themselves. Well, they'd better get a bloody move on if they're not going to be still busted when I'm fed into the flames. Though by then that may be the least of my concerns. (Isn't that right, JJ? You'd know: it's been nine years, now. Nine! Who'd have thought I had it in me?) Meanwhile, I'm confined to the ground floor, to an overstuffed living room with a hospital bed on semi-permanent loan (spoiler: it will not be permanent) from the local Trust and one of those pleather-covered, easy-wipe chairs that tips you up and out like rubble from a dumper truck. All organised by Diana, of course. God bless her, or some such.
If falling down stairs at the ripe old age of ninety-four isn't going to kill me, what is? Being ninety-four, that's what. Or ninety-five, maybe; ninety-six, if God really wants his revenge. (Would he be that petty, JJ? The evidence we have suggests he might.) It's just a matter of time – for all of us, I suppose, however sprightly, if you take a long view. Till then, we soldier on. I mean, you don't. But you know me, JJ – always had a thing for a man in uniform. Thank fuck that's over.
– What's that, Uncle Charlie?
I must have spoken aloud. It's a mistake I've made before. As someone – probably me – once said: will no one rid me of this troublesome niece? Apparently not.
Up that spiral staircase are two bedrooms I'll never see again. There could be a family of Romanians camped out up there, for all I know. Perhaps there should be. Ukrainians. Syrians. Afghans. Eritreans. Anne Frank. The way things are going it may come to that. (You would not believe the way things are going, JJ. They are, as that old fascist Yeats might say, very definitely falling apart.) Someone, anyway, up there, who needs two rooms more than I do, more than Diana does. Because the moment I fell down, she was in there like a rat up a drainpipe, commandeering one – not my old bedroom, she says, the other one, the spare room nobody ever slept in, but where I kept a great many suits from the days when I had suits, and hats, and hand-made shoes. (I really was Peckham's own Imelda Marcos, wasn't I, JJ? How in hell did that ever happen?) Diana bagged it all up for the Hospice shop, made herself a little nest up there, for when she's looking after me, she says, and it gets too late, or she's too tired to go home. Too tired? The woman's no spring chicken. Won't see eighty again, and is honestly no more likely than I am to make it to the end of any given day.
I realise she's actually waiting for a reply. Unbelievable. But if I don't, she'll think the trouble's back again, and dob me in to the paramedics when they finally arrive. One more step in her relentless campaign to drive me out into a home, and take sole possession of the only actual home I've ever known since – since when, JJ? Since Dennett's Road took a direct hit in nineteen-forty-fucking-one, that's when. Although this place was our home, too, in a way, wasn't it, JJ? Before the war, I mean. When it was the Centre, the petri dish for Peckham's own Experiment, and we spent as much time here, us guinea-pigs, as we ever did at our actual home. Don't tell me you don't remember. (You don't: that's what it means to be dead.)
So I say to Diana, now: Sex, Diana. Men. Thank God I don't have to do all that any more. Which is true: it is what I was talking about, albeit not to her, but is still perhaps a bit unfair of me, neither sex nor men being what you'd call Diana's specialist subjects.
– I should think so, too, at your age.
My age, is it, Diana?
When the developers turned this place into flats, they carved it up vertically as well as horizontally. Mine, like those on either side, has two storeys, with curving floor-to-ceiling windows that capture all the light south London has to offer. It would make an ideal artist's studio, I suppose, if the artist could get his canvasses up the spiral staircase, and if it didn't face west. Before it was flats, the upper floor on this side was one long room with a smooth cork floor, where the adults held dances and the kids played whatever we could get away with. Curling was your favourite, JJ, wasn't it? What we called curling. With heavy glass ashtrays we nicked from the canteen downstairs. Do you remember the time Dr Pearse stepped out from behind a pillar just after you'd sent one hurtling down, caught her so hard it knocked her off her feet? We thought we'd be thrown out, but she just sat on her arse for a while, rubbing her ankle while blood soaked through her stocking, suggesting we go down to the gym, or sign out some roller skates, if we needed to let off a little steam. Utter madness, really, the things they let us get away with. All part of the Experiment, they said. All part of working out how families like ours – as if there ever were a family quite like ours, JJ – might grow into mature, healthy, well-adjusted organisms. That's what they said. Organisms. I don't think us Jellicoes were quite what they had in mind.
Come to think of it, the west light never stopped the would-be artists, did it? There were clubs. There were clubs for everything, then, in the Centre. Watercolours, oils. Life drawing – they did that in one of the smaller rooms, with fewer windows. Even so, the older boys – older than us, JJ – tried to climb up outside to see if it was true the models took their clothes off. There was the Art for Spain mob, the only one Dad took any interest in. He got his boss to let him run off the leaflets they made. ¡No Pasaran! Silhouettes of huge fists, all that. After which the art appreciation club persuaded him to do the catalogue for an exhibition that Julian Trevelyan and the Artists International were bringing down from Gateshead. 'Unprofessional Painting', they called it. I met him once, Trevelyan. Did I ever tell you that? Much later, it must have been: 1960-something; '62, maybe? He showed me some of his collage stuff from before the war, bits of newsprint and photos stuck together and painted over. There was one from the Coronation, with cranes and factory chimneys in the background, newspaper photos of the royals all jumbled up with cabbages and pots and pans; a sign saying 'Rubbish May Be Shot Here'. Not quite the ethos of the Experiment, I don't suppose. It wouldn't have been in the show, in any case, because Trevelyan was a pro – and the whole point of the Unprofessional Painters was that they weren't. There was that old guy who painted Cornish harbours on bits of cardboard, but it was mostly genuine amateur stuff by a bunch of miners from some godforsaken pit town north of Newcastle. Apparently, they got together every Monday night and went out to paint the town – not red, I guess: mostly grey, sludge brown, full of coal dust and sleet. I may be making that up. Casting a slur on our Geordie comrades, as Dad called them, before he actually saw the pictures. Which, controversially, were for sale. The Biologists at the Centre were happy to take a membership fee, but weren't generally keen on individual entrepreneurship. That said, I don't suppose they sold a lot. Five pounds for the Cornish guy, two quid for the miners. Proceeds to fight fascism, which – fair enough – but you'd still have to live with it on your wall, and two quid was two quid. A week's wages, Dad said. A six-year-old could do a better job, Dad said. We could do a better job.
You took offence, JJ, remember? Because we were seven at the time, not six. But Tony – Angela's Tony, who happened to be there, even in those days, when Dad was sounding off – Tony, who was a spiv before most people even knew what it meant – Tony took him seriously, at first. We could, he said. For two quid we could knock something up this afternoon, get it on the wall when no one's looking, Bob's your uncle. Forty bob, no less.
I was game, JJ; you weren't. Identical twins, but even then we weren't the same.
– How would we get the money? you said.
– It'll be a laugh, I said. Who cares about the money?
Dad said you had a point. He'd seen the exhibition and they weren't selling anything on the spot. If you wanted a picture – though he couldn't for the life of him see why anybody would – you had to go to the office, find one of the Biologists. They'd take your cash, put a little red spot on the label of the one you wanted. If they wound up selling more paintings than they knew they had, it'd just be another couple of quid for the International Brigade. Which was fine by him, Dad said, but Tony was obviously losing interest.
– It's not about the money, I said.
– No? said Tony.
– It's a challenge.
– Art for art's sake? Dad said. Bourgeois deviationism, he said.
Which even he probably meant as a joke. But which, come to think of it, pretty much summed us up, didn't it, JJ? You'd be the bourgeois; I'd be the deviant.
To Diana, now, I say: Do you remember the Coronation?
– It was only a couple of years ago, Uncle Charlie.
– Not that one.
I don't mean King Charles – who, as far as I'm concerned, got his head chopped off in sixteen-forty-something. I object to there being a king with my name. I mean, I object to there being a king at all, of course, but I've been objecting to that for ninety years, and where has that got us? I meant the Coronation of George VI. Which Diana won't remember, of course. Because Diana was a war baby, and wasn't even born.
– Why do you ask?
A reasonable question, JJ. I must have had some reason. There was a time, not that long ago, when doctors would ask if we knew who the Prime Minister was. I always nailed it: Cameron, Brown, Blair; Major, Thatcher, Callaghan; Wilson, Heath, Wilson. Not because I was ever especially compos mentis, but just because I was interested. But there came a time – round about Liz Truss, I suppose – when they stopped asking. It just wasn't fair, they said. You were probably right to peg it when you did, JJ. You wouldn't believe the bloody shambles it's been since. Fascists marching in the streets; again. Labour being useless. Again. No bloody Communists left to do a thing about it. Look at me. What am I going to do? They won't even let me on a mobility scooter these days. I'm a danger to myself, Diana says. Wishful bloody thinking, you ask me.
So, to keep talking, I tell Diana about the exhibition, even though it'll make her think I'm soft. What do old people do? We tell stories about our childhoods. We say things like: you weren't even born. But I tell her anyway, proving I still can, even though I dare say she's heard it a thousand times before. It's one of those family stories – you'll never believe what Charlie did one time, when he was only seven – but even so, I tell her about going to look at the exhibition first. Doing my homework – I wasn't rushing into this. I wanted to get it right. So the day after Tony's bright idea, after school, I went round to the Centre with JJ, like usual, I tell her, but not to play ping-pong or ride the bikes, or even steal ashtrays. I went straight up to where the exhibition was and, even at seven, I tried to keep an open mind, because even at seven I knew Dad sometimes talked through a hole in the top of his head. And yes, I tell Diana, there were pictures of fishing boats, all bright Cornish blues and reds and whites, and fish, bobbing in and out of the water, the kind of cartoon fish you might draw if you weren't too bothered about anatomical accuracy. And, yes, there were pitheads and slag heaps. But what struck me most were the men – angular figures with heavy coats and caps and mufflers laid out in dark monochrome slabs, their faces turned against cold east winds – men hewing coal, clutching dogs or pints, pale and featureless as rocks: immobile, implacable, undeceived. This would have been a couple of years after the Jarrow march. (Dad was not a fan, I tell Diana. How come these so-called 'crusaders' got to be tolerated by the powers-that-be – encouraged, even – while the Party's hunger marchers were always beaten black-and-blue?) The men in the pictures, though – and the men who painted them – weren't unemployed shipbuilders. They were miners, the vanguard of the working class, Dad might have said. They looked back at me, not from the walls of the Pioneer Centre, but from the end of time. As if they knew how our Experiment would work out, how capitalism, how the human race itself, would work out: as if they knew that we'd already lost. Maybe they weren't all like that, but those were the ones I saw.
– Uncle Charlie?
– What?
– You were seven.
This, of course, is true: but what's her point? That I am projecting adult ideas into the innocent mind of a child? That ranting about long-dead notions like communism and the end of time just shows I'm a monument to my own senility, fit only to be packed off to some warehouse for the terminally tedious? Well, what can I say? This is the way it was, the way I remember it.
What's beyond dispute is that I came home that night to a clip round the ear for missing my tea, and straightaway dug out the watercolour set Mum had given JJ for Christmas, and which he hadn't touched for eleven months. Paper was no problem: Dad brought home reams of scrap from the print shop for Mum to line the drawers with, or wrap fish bones. Flyers, posters, pamphlets where something had gone wrong, where smudged print defaced one side, leaving the other free to fire my imagination.
What to paint?
Whatever you might think, I tell Diana, I wanted something alive, a response to all the death and resignation I had seen that afternoon. My first thought was to paint the Centre: the building itself, all bright white and glass, like something that had landed from another planet; or the swimming pool, perhaps, the gymnasium, the billiard tables I was barely tall enough to see over, much less play on. But the challenge Dad had set – that I'd set myself – was to smuggle something onto the walls that no one would spot at once did not belong. To get away with it; to prove a seven-year-old could do as good a job. And a picture of the Centre would stick out like a sore prick. On the other hand, I'd never seen a colliery. There were some landscapes in the exhibition – views of dull green hills from the edge of dirty brick towns – and the boats, of course. But I'd never seen the country, either, let alone the sea.
I filled an old jam jar with water, dipped in JJ's unused brush and wet the block of pillar-box red paint. I took a sheet of scrap and stroked the brush across it. The result came out deep red, fading to pink as I'd swept the brush across the page, squeezing out more water from the bristles as I went. I watched the streak fade and blur as the wet paint soaked into the cheap paper; I saw black words appear, reversed, from the headlines printed on the back. RENT STRIKE, it would have said, if there'd been a mirror in the kitchen to hold it up to. That gave me an idea. I rummaged through the pile of scrap paper, working my way from the bottom upwards, looking for pictures, not words. Pictures that bled through the paper would still be reversed, but it would be less obvious. There was Hitler, there was Chamberlain; there was Uncle Joe and half a dozen hammers and sickles; swastikas and Spanish bulls. There was the King and Queen Elizabeth – not the one Diana would know: her mother. The year before, there'd been a Coronation party at the Centre. The kind of people who arrange street parties like military conscription had twisted Dad's arm into printing posters; we'd pinned them to trees on every street for a mile around, inviting all the families who could have joined the Experiment, but hadn't. These were the offprints. I covered the kitchen table with an old Daily Worker, flipped over a poster and began to fill it with a deep watercolour wash. Sure enough, there they came, the king, the queen, the two princesses, bleeding through the blood red paint. I wiped my brush and rubbed it into the black paint pellet, then outlined the heads, the faces and the crowns. The coal-black lines blotted and smudged in the damp paper. When the paint dried, they looked hideous: rotting turnips just – still – recognisable as crowned heads in a bright red pit of fire. Which was perfect.
– Uncle Charlie?
– I'm on a roll here, Diana.
I cut out the heads, pasted them all skewed, like knocked over skittles, onto a clean sheet. I painted a black arch around them, an enormous furnace door; then, behind and above that, factory chimneys – did they even have chimneys in pit towns? I didn't know, but they weren't hard to paint: tall grey-brown tapering towers, with billowing smoke that merged into clouds at the top of the picture. I'd left a strip of blank white paper across the bottom. In block letters, I wrote: A DAY-TRIP FOR ALL THE FAMILY.
– This isn't true, is it, Uncle Charlie?
– Of course it's bloody true.
– You were seven.
– And?
– You weren't a revolutionary at the age of seven, Uncle Charlie. Or an artist. Mum told me you and Uncle JJ went to the Coronation Party and stuffed yourself with cake and lemonade till you were sick in the flowerbeds.
– Your mum, is it? Angela? Who'd know a thing or two about throwing up?
Or might have, I didn't say – not aloud, because even I have my limits – if her perforated liver hadn't finally packed up sometime in the early '70s. Half a century ago, JJ. So much sewage has backed up the U-bend of history since then. Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May. And that's just the ones you were around for. The ones before the real shit started flowing.
Instead I say, Would I lie to you, darling Diana?
– I didn't say you're lying.
– Then I'm mad? Losing my marbles?
– I didn't say that, either.
Of course she didn't, any more than she had said I told you so.
But I am only teasing. In my state of decrepitude, there are so few pleasures left. One night, a couple of weeks ago – perhaps: since the staircase fall, in any case – I woke up about three a.m., needing a piss. Nothing unusual in that, you might think, JJ, and of course you would be right. If anything, it's a surprise I hadn't woken earlier. But the jug I keep by the bed wasn't there. Diana, being Diana, must have washed it out, and left it in the kitchen. Sometimes I think she's starting to forget things. Like I say: no spring chicken. Anyway, by this time, three in the morning, she was upstairs in the spare room, having some hours earlier hauled herself up the spiral hill to Bedfordshire, no doubt sleeping the dreamless, piss-less, sleep of the unjust. Because I am a kindly uncle – and because I'd frankly had about as much of Diana as a man can take in any given day – I did not shout for her to shift her arse downstairs and bring the jug to me. Let sleeping dogs lie. Instead, I pulled my walking frame towards me with my stick. With considerable effort I dragged myself up, laid my arms in the plastic rests, flipped off the brakes – right, then left – and I was away, hurtling towards the kitchen at a death-defying quarter-of-a-mile-an-hour. If that. The jug was on the draining board. I backed up towards the sink, like an articulated truck reversing into a loading bay. Brakes on – left, then right – and then, clinging on with both hands, knowing this was the moment of maximum peril, I turned and sank into the Rollator's handy seat, letting my sagging Y-fronts slide towards my knees. (Diana is forever threatening to buy me new, more freshly-elasticated underwear: I tell her it would simply make both our lives so much more difficult.) My business done – a spoonful or two, barely worth the trouble – I stood, as carefully as I'd sat, emptied the jug in the sink and dropped it into the Rollator's shopping basket. I released the brakes, and I was off – etc. By now it was three-thirty. Half way back across the living room towards my bed – Lambeth and Southwark NHS Trust's bed – I needed a rest. Ignoring the pleather dumper chair, I reversed up to the sofa and – brakes on – let myself flop back and down. The cushions are old and soft and, despite my unhealed ribs, despite everything, I enjoyed the fall. If it weren't such hard work standing up, I might have done it again. At this point, however, wedged between the cushion and the arm of the sofa, I discovered a book. It was certainly not mine, and not one I'd seen Diana reading, either. She must have been doing so on the sly, I thought. Examining it, I understood why. It was a self-help book about dealing with dementia. The sort of thing I wouldn't normally have used to wipe my arse, written by an American with a middle initial and a PhD. It kept me amused, however, until it was time to get up for another piss. The book wasn't aimed at a demented readership, obviously, but at their supposedly long-suffering relatives. Apparently your 'loved one' (which it turns out isn't just an oily euphemism for the dead) might have trouble distinguishing their real, surprisingly vivid memories of early life from things they've heard, or read, or seen on television. Which, I thought, pretty much described the entire population. However, the book went on, there's no point in challenging these false memories, in trying to disprove them with facts or logic, because 'facts' have no more meaning for your loved one than their own hallucinations. (It did not say hallucinations.) It said you cannot drag them – us, JJ? – back to the real world. Instead, the trick is to follow your loved one into theirs. To explore it with them, to enjoy the creative possibilities that arise. Or humour them, as we might have said about the lunatics and imbeciles of our own day. In any case, it was a lesson obviously lost on Diana. Perhaps she hadn't got that far. Or had already forgotten it.
So now, tonight, while we're waiting for the ambulance and she's not saying that I'm mad or lying, she is nonetheless insisting that I neither did nor could have made the picture I've described, much less slipped it into the exhibition, undetected, whatever the family story says. Not when I was seven, and not later, either, because I was not an artist, ever. I was a property developer: I built tower blocks, including one that fell down, among countless others that did not. I was a Communist who made a lot of money, and who loved a lot of men – and at least one woman – along with hand-made suits and decent wine and poetry and art. I really did meet Julian Trevelyan. I met Francis Bacon, for pity's sake, and Graham Sutherland and Lucien Freud and countless others; I met them at parties and galleries and openings and even happenings, because – for a while – that was the life I led. Somewhere around here, I have something – drawings, restaurant-bill sketches, scribbled-over napkins – from each of them. But I was not an artist. I was a salesman, more or less. A talker; a schmoozer. I lived by my tongue, not by my hand or eye. It may be possible to do both, of course, to be both, to be all those things. But I wasn't, was I, JJ? I didn't.
Which is why we're here, waiting for the ambulance again.
Earlier this evening, while ridiculing Diana for some minor character flaw, I – who have always had so much to say – found quite suddenly that I had no words.
Literally. No words.
It wasn't that I couldn't speak – that my tongue, perhaps, was refusing orders from my brain – but that I suddenly had no notion whatsoever of speech, of language, of the possibility of communication or of thought itself. I was nothing: a block of meat, a carcass at the centre of a dark void that spread, like wet ink on cheap paper, fading to nothing.
It didn't last long – a few minutes, Diana is telling the paramedics now that they've finally arrived, and she's showing them into the living room, while the blue lights strobe silently outside.
Long enough, I think. Long enough to know I never want to go through that again; but that I shall. Long enough to glimpse a future that must have been your past, JJ, for nine years now. To see that when our experiment finally ends – which can't be too long now? – I will no longer need to talk to you, at last, because there will be nothing left to say.
Here's hoping.
They slide me into the ambulance, slam shut the doors, and we're away.
Guy Ware is the author of five novels, all published by Salt, including The Peckham Experiment and, most recently, Our Island Story. Guy lives with his family in south London. His new collection of stories, A Day Like Any Other, will be published in June 2026.
