The Peckham Experiment Quotes

“A mirror image is not identical: it is the exact opposite. I know that now. I could not have been you”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“That’s why Mum and Dad are dead, and Angela is dead, and now you’re dead, JJ, and I’m not. Not because you are a worse – or better – man. Not because you were right, and maybe I was wrong. That withdrawal was better than complicity. And not because the good die young – we’re eighty-five, for pity’s sake – but just: because.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“So, there we were, early one spring evening a few years later, at the fag end of the century, so to speak, looking for all the world like a couple of old queens: sad and a bit baggy but still game. Even if you weren’t, we were two men together: me dressed up for a Friday night at the Admiral, you my still closeted friend. The tourists cutting through to Shaftesbury Avenue would have had to look harder now to see we were identical: not scene clones, not just brothers, in fact, but twins. Identical. Except not. Nothing like.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“My brother was a good man, surely? But his faults were my faults, his sins my sins: we were identical.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“Hindsight is common but imperfect, foresight
vanishingly rare”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“When this place was really the home of the Peckham Experiment, you had to be a family, or they wouldn’t let you in. Membership
was by family. The place was here to prove that health was not just the absence of disease, but the opportunity to grow. And growth could only occur, un-stunted, in the context of the family: man plus woman plus children. The Biologists who ran the place believed the family was the complete human
organism: only through the birth and growth of this collective organism could individuals realize their potential maturity. It was a radical utopia. One where it was simply not possible to be homosexual and healthy. And where everyone was white. It was an experiment, all right.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“In twenty years since the end of the war, we
still hadn’t sorted out the slums. Twenty years. We’d built the NHS. We’d whitewashed rock’n’roll and sold it back to the Yanks. But we still had families living in one room without running water. It was a fucking disgrace. It truly was. Dad would have been spinning in his grave, if there’d been enough of him left to bury.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“I thought he looked more like a spy than a property developer, then thought that was ridiculous. Philby had looked like the civil servant he was. If spies looked like spies they wouldn’t be much good at their job.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“There was pretty much nothing for the RAF to do. I’d signed up to get it over with, but national service was where I first discovered the joy of idleness, first glimpsed the lack of correlation between effort and reward, an epiphany that subsequent years of night school never quite snuffed out. Tony – Angela’s Tony – would have enjoyed national service, I remember thinking, if he hadn’t manufactured flat feet to keep out of the war. He’d have been good at it.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“Throwing everything away for fun was one thing. This was just stupid. ~I’m all for the modern, JJ said. I’ll happily tear down old stuff that doesn't work. You know I will. But you have to build up something in its place. Otherwise it’s just childish, destruction for the fun of it.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“You – we – only asked for decent homes, where old people could relax and families could raise their children in daylight, in warmth and space, where those children could be regularly bathed and sleep in their own bedrooms. For something better than we had known. Isn’t that what we are all supposed to do? To demand a better world
for those who come after us? I was just like you: a builder, a creator, a contributor. Your job was to clear slums and put people in new houses. Mine was to calculate and control the costs, whatever they built.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment

“We never made much use of being identical, did we JJ? Not when we were young. Once or twice, at school, and on the farm during the war, I’d managed to get out of trouble by
sowing doubt. It must have been my brother. Not me. More often, we’d get a beating just the same. For being the same, for not being different, for causing confusion and unease among our peers. There’s a reason horror films are full of twins. Our early lives were not a riot of hilarious mistaken-identity japes.”
― Guy Ware, The Peckham Experiment