What A 19th Century Statue Told Me|Story|By 14 year old from Birmingham

I live in a cosmopolitan city; it is always bustling with tourists. The surroundings are full of smells and sounds of people from all around the world: Americans, Spanish and British.

The main street is covered with skyscrapers, shopping malls and cafes. Down the street, there is a beautiful garden that has statues and carvings on the walls. The garden has all the information about the violent and cruel history of the place.

I do not like history so I never paid attention towards it, however, all the tourists would spend hours in the garden; reading the history and clicking pictures endlessly.

One day at school, we were learning about the history of the city. I was almost asleep. Suddenly, something on the board caught my attention: it was the same garden I had been staring at.

On my way back home, as usual, I passed through the same garden but it seemed weird this time. Somehow it drew my attention and without me realizing, I had entered the garden.

A very ugly statue was in the middle. It depicted the violence of the city by showing a person who is put in fire and people around were throwing stones at him. The black shimmering marble felt as smooth as ice. The statue was shiny as satin. All of a sudden, I felt a current coming from the statue. The statue started to move…. I moved with it.

Within a second, I was in another world.

I started reading what was written under the statue in bold and golden letters. The man in the statue was considered to be the criminal for the murder of a few, very patriotic people that occurred in 1874. The piece of writing said that the man was brutally murdered by the common people in return for his actions.

I was terrified after reading it and thought it was a maybe coincidence for our teacher to show the picture of the garden. It seemed weird, especially to me, a person who hates history to go inside and read the writings under the statue. That very second, I felt someone push me from the back – I turned around and saw a very different world behind me.

I was in some other place, it seemed as if I was in some 19th-century town. A man came towards me and said, “Welcome to 1874.” It was the same man from the statue. He wore brown bell-bottom pants, a red shirt and a brown leather jacket. It looked as if rags were hung on a scarecrow.

He talked in a soft, gentle voice and asked me to follow him. I had no option but to do this, as he showed me around the town. I realised it was the same place where I lived except the only difference was that I was in 1874.

In the end, he spoke to me about the injustice he had suffered. I thought to myself, he was the one who murdered a few patriotic people and he thinks that he was the one who suffered injustice – it made no sense to me.

I told him everything the people said about him and he said that he knew about it all.

He revealed that he had chosen me to tell his story because he knew that I was the one who knew nothing about him and if he had chosen someone else, they would not believe him.

He took me to a place that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. He showed me a few men inside a tent. The world inside it was the complete opposite to the world outside. Outside was a lovely little town and inside was like hell. There were men, the so-called patriots who were murdered.

The man showed me a flashback of what had actually happened. I was astonished to see it. Those patriots were serial killers from another country who were planning to plant a bomb on the place where now the garden is. That man actually killed the people who were about to kill many more thousands. I wanted to speak to him but as soon as I uttered the first word, I felt myself back in the garden in the present time. In front of me was the statue of the man who had just told me his story.