Still reading that letter after all the years? You really must be the slowest reader in the world, buddy. Or is it written in code? Not really, though I suppose the bit where she says, ‘I've fallen in love with Sam and we are going to be married’ means, as Dirty Harry put it years later: You're shit out of luck . Yes, it can take a while for the simplest bits of information to sink in. Only kidding. Obviously the letter in your hand is really an ongoing account of all the responses to seeing you in the long years since you took up residence here. Every time anyone looks at you they add another line. So in a sense you were the original interactive work of art.
Speaking personally, you were the second sculpture I became conscious of. The first was of Edward Wilson, on the Promenade in my hometown of Cheltenham. Wilson died with Scott in the Antarctic. And Charles Sargeant Jagger – who made you – also did the statue of Shackleton at the Royal Geographical Society, so in my mind you are sort of sandwiched between these heroic Polar figures. Obviously when I was a kid, on the rare occasions when I arrived at Paddington, I had no idea that you were made by Jagger but I knew about the war. When I used to go round to my friend Gary Hunt’s house his granddad would drop his trousers and show us his shrapnel wounds from the First World War. Mine was the last generation that could make that kind of claim, who had that direct living connection to the war. The Somme wasn’t just a historical event. It was something that had happened to people I knew.
At some point I started to think of what it would be like to be you, to be outside in a storm, wearing a soaking wet great coat. So it’s good to know that you're sheltered here by platorm1. I'm struck as well by how few people pay you any mind. Maybe that’s about to change because the war is coming into view again like a planet completing its hundred-year orbit round the sun. The present and the past – this bit of the past – are about to come into a four-year alignment. But the time when you and I were closest has passed. That was nearly 24 years ago. I was living in France, in Paris to be exact, waiting for news (of a book I'd published and another I'd finished, but trust me, that can be as agonising as waiting on news of the beloved). It was also, I realise now, the year of my most intense feelings about sculpture, specifically the statues in Tuileries. But then, as a result of being in France, I ended up becoming very interested in the War and the way it was remembered and all the sculptures that were such an important part of that remembering. That’s when I remembered that I'd known you for as long as I could remember.
You stand as a memorial to a mistake. So in a way what you're reading is more than a letter. You're reading the lessons of history. One of which is that, faced with the same situation, people would go for it all over again with exactly the same fervour. Because who could pass up the chance of making everything that had gone before seem like a prelude? A prelude to what? First exuberance and enthusiasm, then horror, then understanding. If the price was high that only emphasized the value of the lesson learned: that this was the war to end all wars. So that was great – for about two minutes. Then – oh shit, the war to end all wars turned into the peace to end all peace, and the end of one war actually contained the seeds of another even bigger one. So although we had learned the lesson there was another lesson to be learned which was that the lesson had not been properly learned – and history, if it teaches us anything, teaches that we will never stop learning. So that’s why you're still here, still reading after all these years, still poring over that piece of carved paper.
Anyway, to revert to the personal (which, as you know only too well, is just the universal in a particular context) what I'm saying is what all letters say: keep safe, stay warm and please understand if you don’t hear from me again.
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