Poppies for Remembrance Day

It was Remembrance Day today; two minutes silence to remember the dead starting at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month when the armistice was signed at the end of the First World War in 1918 (not 1911). Of course, it's now the dead of all wars that we remember, with a growing number from our ridiculous involvement in Afghanistan. 

When I was a boy, it was a huge thing. Many of those who fought in the First World War were still alive and the Second World War was still very fresh in the memory. The generation above me had lived through it.

There was a parade and ceremony at the war memorial in Works Lane and lots of men with lots of medals. One of the most prominent in the whole thing was Helen Woodward’s dad, nicknamed Smokey Woodward because he was a fireman at ICI. Ironically, he’d never been in the war due to his reserved occupation.

My dad never wore his medals and my mum (who was in the WRNS) had never claimed hers. Her brother Dick had done the same. He told me that he didn't want them - they were quite unconventional I guess. I still have dad's medals in the box in which they were posted to him. I'm not sure he's even looked at them more than once. Uncle Don said I should apply for a Palestine Medal as dad had served there after the war, but he’d never been bothered to and I didn’t really want to.

Mum and dad never went to the ceremony but would wear a poppy. In those days, Remembrance Day seemed more reflective, more sorrowful. Even as a child I felt the pain and the loss that my parents' and grandparents' generation were feeling.

A collection was made and it was for the British Legion, I don't remember calling it the Royal British Legion until I became a reporter and had to write about the organisation. Then they'd complain if we missed the 'Royal' out. The money helped wounded soldiers and their families, also war widows and children. And there were wounded soldiers about: old Homas who was a bit mental and had been since 1918, although I think that was partly due to drink, and Peter Roberts' grandad Joe Corker who fought in Mesopotamia, where it was so hot you couldn't hold your rifle unless it was wrapped in a rag and where an exploding shell had blinded him. I never saw him move out of his chair in their front room.

Nowadays, the horrors of the First World War have passed into popular legend. It's an icon for the horrors of war - the mud, the barbed wire, the trenches, the poison gas, men struggling through no-man's land easy targets for the German machine guns, poems by Owen and Sassoon. But was it so much more horrible than Coventry, Dresden, Belsen, Hiroshima?

It's become almost a cliché and Remembrance Day is now quite different in feeling to how it was. We report the sums raised as if it's the school fete, other service charities such as Help for Heroes muscle in on the available popular sympathy/donations. Few people wear poppies and often it's no longer the simple poppy that used to be paper, wax and wire, made by disabled soldiers. Now it's a plastic stem and pop-on stamen, possibly made in China like everything else. Even the simplicity of the poppy has gone. They all now have a little leaf (although I pull mine off - I'm a purist) and you can buy enamel lapel badges (I've seen a lot of those), poppy rings and large, lifelike oriental style poppies, which Davina at work was wearing today.

On TV, everyone has to have a poppy, but there's an unwelcome trend (in my opinion) for presenters and entertainers to wear glittery poppies and poppies sewn into dresses. What are they thinking about? A poppy is sad, a poignant symbol of lost lives, the flowers of a generation cut down, but frail and brave growing again among the mud on the battlefields, a sign of hope and regeneration.