Letters to the Unknown Soldier

There is a fantastic public memorial in the making, brainchild of Kate Pullinger and Neil Bartlett, a chance for anyone and everyone to write and send a letter or poem to the Unknown Soldier - Jagger's wonderful statue at Paddington Station - memorial to the GWR employees killed in the Great War. 
    All the pieces, from the well known and famous to the unknown, from school children to the elderly, are being published on the website and it will be there for everyone to access until 14th August. After that it will be archived by the British Library. Here's the link: http://www.1418now.org.uk/letter/?skipenter

Some of the pieces are featured as they come in, and I was moved and delighted to have mine featured today, alongside a pice from Andy McNab, among others. 

Letter to an unknown soldier

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.

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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.

 http://www.1418now.org.uk/letter/vanessa-gebbie/

And here is the detail, from the website - get writing!

Why?

In a year jammed-full of WW1 commemoration our project invites everyone to step back from the public ceremonies and take a few private moments to think.  For us, it is important to move on from cenotaphs, poppies, and the familiar imagery we associate with the war memorials.

If you could say what you want to say about that war, with all we’ve learned since 1914, with all your own experience of life and death to hand, what would you say?

If you were able to send a personal message to one of the men who served and was killed during World War One, what would you write?

Who?

Thousands of people have already written to the unknown soldier, including schoolchildren, pensioners, students, nurses and members of the serving forces.  Letters have arrived from all over the United Kingdom and beyond. Many well-known writers have contributed as well, authors as diverse and distinguished as Stephen Fry, Malorie Blackman, Andrew Motion, Lee Child, Louise Welsh, and Kamila Shamsie.

When?

The website will remain open until 11 p.m. on the night of 4 August 2014, the centenary of the moment when Prime Minister Asquith announced to the House of Commons that Britain had joined the First World War.  Between now and then every letter that the soldier receives will be published here and made available for everyone to read.

Eventually all of the letters will be archived in the British Library where they will remain permanently accessible online.

Please add your voice. What you write will help provide a snapshot of what people in this country are thinking and feeling in this centenary year. Your letter will help us create a new kind of war memorial – one made entirely of words, and by everyone.

Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger