Some Fragrant Winifred

Here's why I wear a poppy. 

I am a working class bloke. 
Like me or loathe me, that's who I am. 

I have working class appetites and a zest for the working class life. I love my family. I like horse racing, football and good music. I like to read, a rarity nowadays. 

In my life, I've enjoyed a joke, a smoke, a pint, a punch-up and a great night out more often than I should have done, but I regret nothing and would do the lot again.  

I've got a suit for Sundays and a suit for court. I've never been to a dinner party. I've attended two plays, one musical, no operas and the only modern dance I've ever seen is my dad bopping to the Birdie Song at a community centre wedding with my aunty Hilda. That's something I can't unsee and believe me, I've tried.

*

I'm no different really. I'm not a unique little snowflake. There are millions like me. Past and present. 

See, I'm just like those blokes who went over to France in 1914 and all over the world in 1939 with names like Tommy and Albert and Alfred and Norman and Harold and Wilfred and Bill and nicknames like Patch and Nipper (for the fast ones), Lofty (for the shrimps) and Titch (for the beanpoles). 

Working class lads who, like me, enjoyed a joke, a smoke, a pint, a punch-up and a great night out far more than they should have done. 

Most of them young, not even twenty, with girlfriends they loved, who they would have loved forever, like swans (always the swans), with names like Winnie and Marge and Edna and Edith. 

Ordinary blokes. 

Working class blokes who spent their Saturday mornings rolling oaken bitter barrels and shovelling shit at Shipstone's Brewery before racing down to Meadow Lane to see Notts County with their pies and their pints and their rattles and their scarves and their never-ending jokes and wind up and banter, the Alfreds and Alberts and Harolds at large in the freezing, smoke-infested horror of a British industrial city.

Real people, just like me (and just like you); only with stranger names and moustaches. 

Real people, who, without the Kaiser and Adolf and Tojo and the rest of them, would have carried on doing it. 

Living their lives, having a laugh and a giggle, a pint and a pie, sitting in the snug. Heads over the football paper, lamenting their team's criminal inability to score a goal, winking at beautiful women named Agnes and Myra, gently sipping their halves of mild by the window, with their hair done up a treat and their shiny crimson shoes.

Real people, these Alfreds and Alberts and Harolds and Wilfs, just like me, just like you, who found themselves on the 1st July 1916, at 6am in the morning, in a snaking trench on one side of a field, with the Kaiser's men on the other, under a vast, endless continental cobalt summer sky, unsullied by cloud, lit by a hovering, hazy sun and cooled by the faintest of winds, 

Not quite knowing why they were there. 
Wondering why the birds had ceased their endless song. 

The silence just before the gentle humming of the shells, which they knew would come. Just waiting for the whistle.

Alfred and Albert and Harold and Wilfred: Those Nottingham rascals.

I wear a poppy for these men who were just like me. 
And you. 

Men who were dead within ten seconds of the sound of that Officer's whistle. Blokes who never even made it ten yards from a standing start.

*

300,000 working class blokes like them died that day for reasons that no-one fully understands. Pointless, pathetic, dirty, unfair, unjust deaths. 

I wear a poppy for these men because what they did was a lot more difficult than sticking a pin in a jacket.

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A poppy isn't a flower. 

Its a bullethole sculpted in paper. That's what it is, stating the obvious. A bullethole for a fiver. A symbol commemorating the seven bullets that tore into Alfred's chest, or the three that severed Wilfred's leg at the knee, leaving him to die screaming in a  shellhole that was once lush French grassland, or the stray bullet that severed Tommy's head off at the ear. 

That's why I wear a poppy. Because they should have been living their lives back in Blighty instead of dying like that.

*

Nearly thirty years later, in June 1944, shortly after the Normandy landings, a relative of mine charged a Tiger tank in the French village of Caen. With just a Molotov cocktail and a Webley pistol. 

The mad bastard. 

Hard to know what the tank thought about it, but my relative was crushed flat as a pancake under the left track: They never found enough of his body to bury him. 

Caen was a bitter battle where flamethrowers were used extensively on people and the fighting went from house to house, hand to hand, bayonet to bayonet, with the smell of burning British bodies in the ether, and when the war wasn't between men of flesh and blood, it was between flesh and three tons of German heavy metal. 

Because the British held up that division of Tigers at Caen, the Americans were able to liberate Paris. Thousands of men died. More than at Omaha beach - which Spielberg neglected to mention anywhere in Private Ryan.

(That bit was for historians - which didn't include my courageous, but largely dense, relative, or Jack and Henry, and Harry and Bob or all the other slicked-back Nottingham rascals who died in that village, who really should have been in the pub, or at the races, or at the Notts match, or having a cuddle with some fragrant Winifred listening to George Formby on the wireless).

That's why I wear a poppy. Because it's a lot easier than standing up to a big tank.

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Finally, I wear a poppy for my stepmum's stepdad. His name was Walter. He served in Burma. I don't remember him that well, and we never really spoke, in that strange way steps often behave with each other.  

In my mind's eye, he reminds me of Mr Benn, only with a trilby, rather than a bowler hat. 

He was a painter and decorator by trade, in Lenton, and a good bloke, who was up his ladder within a week of returning from the far east. 

He liked a drink of an evening, a frame of snooker or two and watching the cricket at Trent Bridge and I always remember him being a pleasant bloke, if a little distant. 

He never once mentioned the war. Not once.

I found out later that he was on the Imphal Plain in Burma in 1944. What he saw, he kept under his trilby and not even ten pints of Guinness, a bottle of Grouse (and the occasional traumatic night spent on Lenton Park under the beech trees), could get him to talk about what he saw there, when the Japanese ran out of ammunition and charged the British trenches with sticks, lances, knives, axes and samurai swords. 

With him in it. 
In the trenches. 

A real person, just like you and me. 
What must he have seen? 

*

He's why I wear a poppy. 

Not for patriotism - I'm the least patriotic person on earth. I'm a Remainer who detests Tories, the EDL, the self-satisfied middle classes, the net takers of British society, and Brexit and all that madness, and who worries every single night of his life for the future of his country.

Nor for the glory of war - there's no glory in death, that much is obvious and war death is the messiest there is. 

And I definitely don't wear my poppy because someone tells me to. Like many working class blokes, I don't listen to anyone - I'm more likely to do the opposite of anything you tell me. I'm an arrogant so and so and I genuinely don't care what you think of me.

So I wear a poppy because I can. 

Because I'm still alive. 

Because of them, those soldiers, those rascals that could have been - nay that should have been - living the rascal life back in Blighty, I don't have to face flamethrowers and screaming Japanese swordsmen, even in my nightmares.

*

These blokes - the Alberts and Alfreds and Jacks and Harrys, from every village town and city in Great Britain - must have been scared stiff every single minute of every day. 

They watched their friends die horribly. 
They must have known their days were numbered in single figures. They watched the night skies turn to heavenly fire and they heard the gates of hell open and they saw the demons pour forth in hordes and hordes and hordes.  

They saw things I can't even begin to imagine. 
They saw horror. 

And they didn't run. 
They saw horror up close and they didn't run.

That's why I wear a poppy. 
They stood. 
They took it. 
All of it.
The fire and the flames and the screaming and the cacophony and the soaring of the shells and the explosions of blood. 

They took it. 
And they died.

In the end, for me, they were the bravest human beings who ever lived and they died so we could decide, at our leisure, whether to wear a poppy or not. 

So I wear one. And always will do.

RIP one and all. We will never forget. 

Mark Barry

PS I'll be attending the Southwell Remembrance Day Service on Sunday if anyone fancies it. You know the time. I'll buy you a brandy in the Saracen's Head and we'll raise a toast to the unknown soldier.