Poppies, Katariina JärvinenIn the run-up to Remembrance Sunday there’s a photo going round Facebook. It’s worth quoting the first of the two paragraphs that accompany the photo in full:

A lovely military man selling poppies stopped me today and asked if he could reposition mine – while doing so he told me that women should wear their poppy on their right side; the red represents the blood of all those who gave their lives, the black represents the mourning of those who didn’t have their loved ones return home, and the green leaf represents the grass and crops growing and future prosperity after the war destroyed so much. The leaf should be positioned at 11 o’clock to represent the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the time that World War One formally ended. He was worried that younger generations wouldn’t understand this and his generation wouldn’t be around for much longer to teach them.

Now this isn’t quite the story I learnt at school. It’s close, but it’s not the same story. It’s more rigid, and it’s got lots of detail that feels, in the way it’s described, that it must be understood as the truth and got right.

I was taught something different, of how, even in the horror of the trenches of the First World War, poppies bloomed providing a sign of hope amidst the bloodshed.

A quick internet search suggests that my memory is broadly correct and the developing meme is an embellishment of something simpler (and, for me, much more poignant) .

Why does this matter? It matters, I think, because of what is said in the  second and final paragraph that came with the photo:

I’m really pleased to have learnt some things today that I didn’t know before, although must admit I’ve spent a rather obsessive afternoon wanting to rearrange quite a few strangers’ poppies…

This disturbed me and it’s taken me some time to work out exactly why. It’s only one post from one person on Facebook (though it is circulating quite far and wide); does it really matter?

In and of itself, it’s of little consequence, but it’s happening within a wider and longer context. This is a context that has developed since 2001 and is seeing increasingly public and forceful comment about whether or not people (particularly people in the public eye) should be made to wear poppies.

I wear the poppy to remember my relatives who died in the world wars. I wear it for my great uncle, a dispatch rider, who died in the trenches in 1918. I wear it for my grandfather who died at the end of the second world war on active service while my father, who doesn’t remember him, was still a baby. I also wear it for the millions of people from across the world who have died in countless wars.

However, when I put on the poppy I am also wearing it to symbolise the futility of most wars (the Second World War and the 1999 British operation in Sierra Leone being examples of the small handful that were as honourable as wars can get).

I see no contradiction in wearing the poppy to commemorate the lives of the British Service Men who died in Iraq in a war that I marched against (and still believe was a monumental folly which has demonstrably made the world less safe).

For me, and for most people I suspect, the poppy has a rich, nuanced and deeply personal symbolism.

I sincerely hope we are not moving even closer to a state where there is only one ‘correct’ way to wear the poppy, a way that will be policed not just by the more jingoistic press, but by individuals and our culture as a whole. It feels a very short distance from the short Facebook post to the handing of white feathers to men in civilian clothes in the First World War*.

Photo credit: Katariina Järvinen

*Do read the article if you’ve time, it’s got some shocking stories in it; stories of bullying and individual culpability in the deaths of brave soldiers.