An Object from a War

A festival in a local park. A Ukrainian flag flying next to a collecting tin with ‘For the Ukrainian Army’ written on it. The war feels real, here in the town, a few streets away. A woman in her early thirties and a small boy with black rimmed glasses and gappy tumbledown teeth. They both wear white shirts with colourful embroidery on the collars and at the edges. The woman is speaking on a mobile phone. If she wasn’t behind this stall, she would fit in completely with the local working class women. The small boy would the same. I guess he’s about eight.

At the foot of the stall are several paintings.

‘Are you from Ukraine?’ I ask, it seems an obvious question.

‘Yes’, he says, nodding. What images are in his eyes? What screen burn lingers there from war and death and the scream of rockets and the louder screams of wounded people, split apart by high explosives. Made in factories by working people. Except working people are coerced into this. How else will they pay the rent and the electric and gas and water bills? Where will the food come from? Coercion is a compromise. It undoes the working class. If a revolution is anything it is an end to coercion, compromise and compulsion. What will really happen when the slaves are free? Is the left ready for this? Will it cope?

‘Are you at school in England?’
‘Yes’, he says nodding.
‘Do you like your school?’
‘Yes’, he says.

‘Did you paint these pictures?’ There is a windmill in a field of poppies. The woman stops speaking on the phone and shows me a picture of a house. It looks like something a member of Der Blaue Rieter group might have painted; it’s very Gabriele Münter. The woman explains slowly and in a few words of English that this is her favourite and I come to the conclusion that it’s not for sale.

‘I paint them myself’, he volunteers. ‘They’re not paintings by numbers’.
There is a painting which states, ‘Mariupol!’ on it.
‘Is this where you come from?’ I ask
The woman nods her head in agreement. The boy bites his lower lip.

The questions that cannot be asked are hanging in the air with immense pressure.

‘Were you there during the siege?’
‘Are your family and friends safe?’
‘Is the boy’s father still alive?’
‘How did you escape?’

I pay in cash.

Much is made in certain parts of the craven press about Johnson standing with Ukraine. This is over-cooked as is everything to do with him. He stands with himself. He stands with the interests of the arms industries and the global authoritarians. He no more stands with the working class of Ukraine than he stands with the working class in Britain. He loathes and hates the poor of each and every nation.

His friends (such as they might be) are oligarchs and establishment elites who claim to stand against elites. Jacob Rees Mogg, Yezgeny Prigozhin, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, Toby Young; that sort of type. They are constipated in both their psyche and their prose. The new right. But there’s nothing new there at all, it’s just tired, jaded, bad-breath, pub-bore whinging, self-pity and a miserable-ist howling. They are all dull clinicians administering plasters and bandages to the ill-health wounds of capital.

In the supermarket a woman is looking at plastic boxes of strawberries. A baby in a pram is sucking on a dummy and looking thoughtful. The babies eyes move from its mother to the strawberries and then out of the window. And then does this again. With the most intense expression of actual thinking.

In war zones all babies are targets; of oil bombs and cluster bombs and missile and rocket attacks. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan. The list of danger spots for babies is increasing. Donald Trump is shouting, Johnson ruffles his hair once more for the photo-optic opportunity.

The missile slams into the apartment block where tram drivers, teachers, social workers, nurses, factory workers, industrial technicians live. It’s not clear where this apartment block might be. Kyiv? Moscow? Paris? New York? Middlesbrough? Is it a photo-opportunity? There are tentative hands held out in grasping support through the barbed wire and across the borders. If only those hands might meet. The photo-optic opportunities would end when a working class revolution might begin.

The camera moves to another scene. Of a town in England; of some gentle working class solidarity. A word, a hand, a gesture, just a smile. It’s a minor skirmish in a culture war. The lace curtains suddenly fall. The scene is too communistic. A frenzy of bourgeois ideology is needed. Pump up the ideas machine; the Conservative and Unionist Party, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express. It’s a never ending daily dose of hate. They are all so angry, but no-one knows what they are all so angry about. Not even themselves. They twitch the purple nylon curtain.

The woman at the checkout smiles at me. A couple of weeks ago I was waiting in the queue and the person in front of me spent the whole time talking banal cipher-conversation into the phone which she held on her shoulder by pressing her head into it.

Phrases learned from television miserablist dramas, words from social media extravagances. She was stressed and reaching out and going forward and l-o-l in equal measure. Many words, but no actual content. She paid without looking at the cashier or saying thank you. When it was my turn the cashier looked up, furiously put upon by people claiming to be victims, when in fact they are the cause.

‘The trouble with some people’, I said, ‘is they have no manners. Just concentrated ignorance’.

She looked up.

‘I don’t usually mind’, she said, ‘and most of the people who come in are alright. But sometimes I’m just not in the mood for it’.

‘I don’t know how you put up with it,’ I said. During one of the lock-downs I remember talking to this woman and she told me about someone shouting and swearing because they had to wait outside the supermarket until the numbers had decreased. A conspi-racist, the shouting right, the authoritarians who demand the freedom to tell everyone else what to do and how to think and act and dress and be. While they pursue their bigotry and hate and ignorance and filth.

Anyway, we had a chat and ribbed the unpleasant person and by the time my shopping was packed and paid for she was smiling once again.

Today we had a funny chat about the weather and the forecast of thunderstorms, ‘almost certainly tomorrow at two o’clock’, she said, ‘because that’s when we’re having a barbecue. It’s rotten when you only get one day off and that happens’. But she was smiling with her eyes and together we turned this into a comic moment. And if it does rain tomorrow at two o’clock she can say to everyone, ‘I predicted this yesterday!’ and everyone will laugh and help the afternoon be good fun despite the downpours.

I thought about showing her the painting I’d just bought with ‘Mauripol!’ on it but I don’t know her well enough. How can war be introduced like this into the quotidian of a supermarket queue, here in England, in the summer of 2023.