Your father sends his love.
And I, mine.
Your only Mum
Stephen Pelton
50, London, Choreographer
Things you do not know:
When you leave, you will leave a child, growing. When night falls on the day you die, your officer will write two letters to two families, yours and his own. He will say to his mother that he has never had to write a letter like that. He has never knowingly lied before. He helped three of his men to bury what was left. He will ask does his mother think, under the circumstances, he did the right thing when he said ‘it was quick’?
Your wife and your mother will weep together in the kitchen, over a pot of tea. Your wife will smile through her tears and say, ‘At least, it was quick.’ Your mother will shake her head and reach for your wife’s hand.
Your child, a girl, will be born early, on a hot June night, to the sound of the first bombs to fall on London from a fixed-wing aircraft. Those bombs will hit the school in Upper North Street, and kill eighteen children, mostly between the ages of four and six years old.
You will be moved with infinite care and laid between men you never knew. Your wife and mother choose the words ‘Only son and beloved husband’ for your headstone. They mean to come and visit your grave when they can save the money. They never do.
Your daughter’s husband will be called up to fight in another war. He will leave her, pregnant with her second child, at home with your wife and mother. He will have reinforced the kitchen table with metal sheeting from the works, and they are used to sleeping underneath on a single mattress from the spare bed. Your eldest grandson, a boy of three, lies awake, listening to bombs falling on the streets. He loses his best friend.
Before their own house is hit, killing your wife and mother, your daughter and son are sent away to a farm in Wales. They never go back.
Your son-in-law will be killed at Cassino. Your daughter will not marry again. She helps out at your grandson’s school, then trains to become a teacher.
Your grandson becomes a teacher too, lecturing in sociology at Cardiff University, and he marries one of his students. They are pacifists. They do not approve of the wearing of red poppies on Remembrance Sunday but when their son, your great-grandson, comes home from his school, aged five, with a poppy, they let him pin it to the wall chart – but only after an argument.
Your great-grandson will find your photograph in a drawer, and will ask who you are. He is the first person to visit your grave, over eighty years after your death. He will become a military historian, and battlefield guide, keeping your memory alive and the memory of all those who fell with you. You don’t know this, but you’d be proud of him.
Vanessa Gebbie
Lewes, Writer
Soldier, acknowledge our salute. I know you will. You’ll slam that foot down, like a dog pissing on a tree, this is your ground; you won’t move. And as you raise that hand with the same conviction upon which you slam it against your enemies, we will know that you are resolute.
But I want to see into your eyes. I want to see if your convictions are betrayed by your thoughts. Because I worry that we have made you a caricature: the depth of a person is marked by the contradictions within them. I worry that it is too easy to portray you as the valiant hero, the resolute patriot, the loving father. There has to be more to you. And though you were equal to your deeds when you did them, I wonder if you could endure this image after. You cannot be defined by your actions, and if these actions are what we remember, then we do not know you.
Soldier, don’t stand for this misrepresentation: leave. Rip through the foundations that hold you down, tear open the tomb that entrenches you. As the material flakes away, we will be reminded of you shaking in the trenches, cold and wet, laden with the burden of self-preservation. But you overcame that burden – how else would you have ended up here?
Overcome another: and as you rise above the material we once thought you were, you give us hope. Because when life kicks me in the teeth, I need to know that I can rise above it. So be the man that meets triumph and disaster and treats them as impostors. Be more than what happened to you; teach us that we are more than what has happened to us. And when our values are strewn into the stream of life, leave us to fish out some new ones.
Soldier, look down. Let us know what you see; because I see the same things differently all the time. And it’s really hard to be grounded when you can’t find the spot you were standing in yesterday. This river keeps flowing and most of our dads never taught us to fish. So show us where to go.
I think you do that. Your statue was never meant to represent one thing, one position, one person. You stand as a springboard for each of us, to our own little spot. That might be to a conversation with an old relative, or an exploration into our own convictions, or an emblem of a broader notion.
Regardless, you stand resolute. Your stance is firm. Your posture is sure.
Your eyes: a mirror into ourselves.
Sean Spain
22, Bath, Bath Spa University, Student
I have been influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Overman & by Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If –’.
Dear Jack
I know we’re not on speaking terms but I’ve been thinking what if you die.
I’ve been finding it hard to forgive you and it’s worse because I’m the only one who thinks you’ve done anything wrong. Your family and mine certainly don’t.
It was hard to bear the white feathers and specially getting one from Ellen. Don’t flap your hand at me, I know you like her. (So do I of course, but you’re the hero now.) You’ll still say it wasn’t the feathers, you just saw the light.
Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is sometimes not wrong to kill people. Maybe this war is a glorious exception and
No, I can’t think that or only for a short time about four o’ clock in the morning. I hope in a way you’re still as determined as the day you got on the train and don’t have doubts at night to suffer as well as all the other things there. When it’s over we can argue about it in the pub.
I keep wanting to say how could you? how could you leave me? and trying to stop myself.
I want you to regret it bitterly. I’m sorry.
Will I send this? It helps writing it anyway. If I go to prison they might not let me write to you so I will send it. I expect your mother will send socks and chocolate. (Ellen too?) So just this from your friend still
Edward
Caryl Churchill
London, Playwright
Dear Tom
I hope you don’t mind if I call you Tom. But I seem to have got to know you quite well over the years. You see I was a policeman at Paddington Station for a number of years and I walked past you almost on a daily basis and each time I spared you a thought and what a great man you were having given your life for King and Country.
You will also be proud to know that Royalty has been rubbing shoulders with you for decades. Members of the Royal Family and indeed other famous people often boarded their train from platform one, from where you now stand. My colleagues and I spent many hours keeping the Royal Train safe and escorting the various dignitaries, but you’ve probably been watching all these comings and goings for years.
You’ve probably also watched the unsavoury things in life that occurred right under your nose, the vagabonds and ruffians who frequented the station to commit crimes. Nothing much has changed since you were a boy.
My grandad served in the Great War and