Hibernation is over! Outside our front window, sex workers comfort strangers again, and opposite Sainsbury’s men fight with their shirts off, like boar or rutting stags, arousing passing women, loveless for too long in lockdown. And in Parliament Square, Winston Churchill emerges from his winter wooden box, snuffling the virus-free air like a cocaine groundhog. It’s past midsummer, and spring has finally sprung.
By a strange coincidence, I actually saw the controversial statue of controversial Winston Churchill unveiled. It was November 1973, I was five years old, my mum had taken me to London for the first time, and we stumbled into the ceremony. A friendly man put me on his shoulders, unimaginable today, not least because I am now too heavy to go on some waterslides. At the time, I did think it was odd that he made me sit facing him. Edward Heath appeared to salute us.
Ever since then I have been fascinated by the statue’s creator, Ivor Roberts-Jones, who incorporated bulky abstraction into Churchill’s historical reality, the image both mythic and figurative, an impression of Churchill that neither endorses nor condemns him. I believe I observed this to the stranger whose shoulders I sat on during the unveiling, but to no avail, as my thighs were clamped over his ears.
For me, the statue is a marker in the sands of time. So, on the last Friday evening before the prime minister reduced the 2-metre rule, and in the week of my late mother’s birthday, I decided to walk 16 memorial miles to and from the statue we saw unveiled together, through the now-silent city that first bustled in my brain in 1973. I still think Roberts-Jones’s Churchill statue is a brilliant work. I also think some things Churchill said are racist.
In 1937, Churchill explained: “I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. A stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” Perhaps today Churchill would have floated the idea that “taking a knee” was from Game of Thrones, like the sadly mistaken Dominic Raab, a man who expresses his opinions with the caution of a terrorist strapping an explosive to a dog and shooing it into a crowded market?
To be fair, in the 1970s, even my gran probably thought much the same thing as Churchill, though she never had the opportunity to put her philosophy into action, beyond turning off a 1974 edition of Top of the Pops when Ken Boothe sang Everything I Own. It should be noted, for balance, she hated all continental Europeans too, on account of their toilets, which were just filthy holes in the floor.
Should the Churchill statue stay? Our prime minister says efforts to remove statues are “a great lie, a distortion of our history – like some public figure furtively trying to make themselves look better by editing their own Wikipedia entry”. This is an idea the prime minister would understand well, as his handler Dominic Cumming’s old blogs were recently altered to make it look as if he had predicted the coronavirus in 2019, and the last Conservative election campaign used re-edited news footage to discredit Keir Starmer. Some distortions of history don’t matter.
In 1973, my mum was listening to Neil Diamond’s soundtrack to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is about a seagull who, instead of stealing chips and shitting everywhere, is a metaphor for something. I resolved, once I had reached my destination, to mount a copy of its sleeve on the wooden crate surrounding the statue. I scanned the album cover but I couldn’t print it as there were no HP 304 printer cartridges left in the whole world. So I drew a scale copy in felt pen, attempting to blend abstraction with reality in the fashion of Ivor Roberts-Jones himself. Then I set off, Sellotape ™ ® in pocket, on my two-hour twilight trek to Parliament Square, my seashore sunset Neil Diamond silhouette looking more like a sickly mantis crouching over a puddle of urine.
Perhaps the answer is not to tear down the statues that offend us, but to supplement them with others that more accurately reflect modern British life. Perhaps Parliament Square is the place for a statue of Marcus Rashford, raised like me by a single mother, and thus in the prime minister’s words “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate”, who forced a government U-turn on free school meals? Or of the Black Lives Matter protester Patrick Hutchinson, who scooped up a fallen counter-demonstrator and saved his life?
Some Conservative MPs made an equivalence between the largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests and the following weekend’s coke-and-boozed fuelled fascist riot of misspelled flags and racist polyphony. In the interests of balance, should the square also feature a marble effigy of Andrew Banks, the football fan who urinated next to a policeman’s memorial? Banks could be rendered in the form of Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder’s Manneken Pis, tinkling sombrely for all eternity, perhaps into the face of Churchill himself.
When I arrived at the statue the boards had already been taken down, and I sat and stared at it, secretly relieved I wasn’t obliged to enact my ritual. It seemed the folded Diamond drawing had fallen out of my pocket somewhere anyway. I started walking home through Covent Garden. A pub was serving takeaways through a window so I had my first proper pint for three months and drank it alone, high on unfamiliar exercise endorphins and cold beer, staring up through the midsummer twilight at the architecture of the Masonic Temple. When I was a boy, it was the source of the small charity bursary my mother secured, for “orphans, waifs and strays”. I don’t suppose that Churchill statue will ever mean to anyone else what it now means to me.
