“Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?”

― Henry Francis Lyte, Abide With Me.

Has anyone else thought it strange that we dress our children up as soldiers?

My old school, like hundreds others around the country, had a Combined Cadet Force. A junior branch of the armed forces, every Friday cadets would swap their grey flannel blazers for military No 2 uniforms  and refer to teachers as “Captain” and “Commander”. For the most part, this was little more than Boy Scouts in fancy dress – enjoying outdoor pursuits, teaching leadership and engaging in slightly creepy flag veneration – but in early November that the military connection  became unignorable.

One by one, red badges of courage would bloom from lapels throughout the corridors of  the  school. Wreaths wet with the bloody flowers would start arriving, laid down in front of the huge memorial to our war dead that dominated the entranceway to the building. Boys too young to have fought at Paschendale or the Somme would practise their drills under the watch of those fearsome petals. And one lucky Cadet would get the honour of standing outside the hall before the lengthy Remembrance Day Assembly, hawking poppies to his classmates, dressed in his best impression of a soldier on parade in a uniform more than a few sizes too large.

At the age of 17, in my official capacity as Deputy Head Boy, I was required to pin a poppy to my lapel and sit front and (perhaps fitting) left-of-centre during the aforementioned ceremony. This posed a bit of a conundrum – as for the previous few years I’d developed a distaste for the whole thing and taken to customising my poppies to make political points. White poppies, black poppies, CND poppies; poppies were a canvas ripe for graffiti and sloganeering and I had a dirty great pen.

I realise, on reflection, that this was likely motivated in no small part by that very teenage desire for attention. I don’t doubt that my political motivations and justifications lacked a nuance and class-consciousness that I would find deeply embarrassing today. I think, that year, I went with a regular Lady Haig poppy with “War Sucks” written thick across the petals in scratchy biro, with a backup stored in my inside-left pocket in case it was confiscated by an overzealous headmaster. I got away with it and took my seat in between two uniformed Cadets, beaming my clumsy rhetoric to a thousand impressionable minds. I am absolutely certain that nobody particularly cared.

For a country so terrified and critical of it’s own nationalism, we seem to embrace the poppy and what it stands for without pause for question. Yet the poppy is a symbol, with attached and manufactured meaning, and the problem with symbols is that they can mean whatever you want them to.

In Japan, most people do not remember the fallen – perhaps because doing so would require casting a critical eye over too much of the past – but at Yasukuni shrine, the Shinto holy site for the veneration and memorial of the Empire of Japan’s war dead, you can see first-hand how deeply divisive symbols can be. To nationalists and uyoku dantai cryptofascists, Yasukuni is a symbol of a strong Japan now lost due to American occupation and foreign influence. They parade in formation under the imperial Rising Sun banner, whilst decrepit old men in full Imperial Japanese Army dress uniform pose with their medals from the campaigns in China during the 1940s. They remember the soldiers as heroes seated alongside gods, rather than naive and fearful conscripts in the company of 1,086 war criminals who are also venerated there. And when the Prime Minister or his cabinet visit the shrine, we see from the outrage in China, Taiwan and Korea that the wounds haven’t healed.

The poppy, too, is not without this problem. In Northern Ireland, in certain neighbourhoods, the poppy it is not a sombre symbol of respect, but one of imperialism. In 2010, prime minister David Cameron was chastised by the Chinese premier for wearing a remembrance poppy during a state visit to Beijing – the symbol bore unfortunate parallels to the Opium Wars, although the fact that the poppy bloomed both in the killing fields of the Somme and the opium fields of British-controlled Afghanistan was entirely coincidental. I am sure there are many other countries where the idea of respecting the fallen is inextricably linked with the imperialist jingo that those same soldiers fought for, and where the connotations hit close to home.

Even in my nascent political consciousness, I felt ill at ease with a symbol that conjured up unrepentant militarism that I wanted to keep a distance from, yet simultaneously commemorated the fallen – a sentiment that, rightly, should be remembered.  I have no doubt that, with my biros and craft paper, I was sincerely and genuinely trying to square that particular circle. For the years since, I’ve dealt with the dissonance in a slightly cowardly way, by simply not wearing one.

Symbols have the power and meaning we attach to them. Choosing not to wear a poppy due to unsavoury elements of the rhetoric around it – elements that have been attached to it by others and are not intrinsic properties of two pieces of paper held together by a plastic rivet – is to empower that narrative of what the poppy means. It’s to let the dead, hundreds of thousands of predominantly working class men who met their deaths in pursuit of a bourgeois imperialist agenda, go unremembered except by those who would gladly send them over the top again. Whole towns and villages mown down in a single afternoon, men coming home to find themselves broken irreparably by the things they had seen, wives and children who found that the men they knew and loved were never coming back- forgotten. If symbols mean what we want them to, we have to be careful when choosing their meaning.

So this year, for the first time in seven years, I have bought a poppy. Tentatively, and not without some sense of reservation, I pin it to my overcoat, ready to face the world, unapologetic. For the first time, I know exactly what my handsome little badge means.