Poppies: memories and many meanings

I wrote about poppies last year. You write about them at your peril....

This week I read a piece about an ITV newscaster who had opted not to wear a poppy on screen. It wasn't that she was against it: she did wear one when not in front of the camera. Her argument was that ITV didn't allow her to wear anything as a broadcaster that identified her as a supporter of other charities such as breast cancer awareness, mental health or child poverty (I've forgotten her actual examples). So why, she argued, should the poppy, paid for and worn in support of the Royal British Legion, be an exception to that rule? 

I admire the logic and the ethics, but I'm afraid she is misreading the symbolism. She hasn't quite cottoned on to what the public mostly think they are doing when they wear the poppy. In social sciences-speak, she has got the semiotics wrong. 

The poppy is far more than the logo of a particular veterans' charity. As the poppy field in the Tower of London moat demonstrates, it is not quite like most other symbols. The fact that millions of people have already visited that display speaks for itself about the universal meaning the poppy has acquired in the 100 years since it became the emblem of loss and bloodshed 'in Flanders Fields'. I don't say that it's unique - national flags and religious symbols are other instances - but it's rare for an 'invented' symbol, especially a modern one, to cross over successfully from restricted to universal meanings. This is in contrast to 'natural' symbols like light, motherhood or the journey which have always carried archetypal meanings.

In today's Guardian there's a trenchant piece about the Tower of London poppy field by Jonathan Jones.  He argues that as a symbol, 'poppies muffle the truth' by substituting for the sheer horror of the Great War a generalised grief laden with noble notions of honour and pride. It is too beautiful for its own truth. 'I strongly believe that an adequate work of art about the war has to show its horror, not sweep the grisly facts under a red carpet of artificial flowers.' As a purely British symbol, it does not even include the fallen of allied nations such as the French, let alone the slaughtered youth of Germany. What is more, it airbrushes out of John McCrae's poem the clear imperative to the living to 'take up our quarrel with the foe'. And it certainly doesn't do justice to Wilfred Owen's bitter protest against the nationalist rhetoric of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori which is quoted by Jones, as it so often is in protest pieces. 

There's much that is persuasive about this argument (which doesn't deserve the Daily Mail's cheap jibe of 'sneering' against an earlier online article by the author). Yet once again I find myself asking whether it's got the semiotics right. It's too either-or. The trouble with symbols is that they are so complex and elusive, 'multivalent' as the theorists say. They never only mean one thing or the other. What may promote beautiful high-minded thoughts in one person can have the effect of drawing the next person into a raw experience of horror and despair. It's never possible to use the language of 'should' or 'must' when talking about symbols because the way we read and respond to them is a highly complex matter of shared meanings, collective and personal experience, cultural history, social psychology and emotional make-up.

I doubt that I am speaking merely for myself when I say that when I wear the poppy, I don't restrict its meaning only to the fallen of our nation or its allies. Jones mentions Christopher Clark's brilliant book on the complex origins of the Great War, The Sleepwalkers. When I read it earlier this year, I was thinking about how we would memorialise the centenary of the war's outbreak on 4 August 1914 in Durham Cathedral. One of the readings offered at that vigil as the lights in the nave were extinguished one by one was 'In Flanders Fields'. Far from seeming incongruous in a setting where we intended to remember all the war's victims, it was in fact profoundly moving because the words and symbols were able to move us from the particular to the universal, from the tragedy of individual losses to the catastrophe of the whole human condition.

I mentioned religious symbols as among those that have 'crossed over' from the particular to the universal. Take the Cross. Like the poppy it is capable of an infinite variety of readings. Historically it stands for terrible suffering exacted on the innocent by unspeakable cruelty. 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' Yet it soon came to stand for the fruits of that awful death as well: reconciliation, forgiveness, promise, peace, even triumph. It's an 'also', precisely not merely 'instead of'. You can see this development of a rich and complex idea happening in the pages of the New Testament just as you see it in the different ways people have responded to the visual image, indeed, in the different ways we find ourselves responding to that same symbol at different times in our lives. I think Jones' simplistic complaint about how the poppy has degraded and softened the symbolism of war would not stand up to scrutiny in the case of the cross which strikes me as a remarkably similar development. 

So I shall continue to wear my poppy. I do it with grief for so much loss and waste of human life, with shame for the folly of the human race and my part in it, with sorrow for the crucifixions of so many in the conflicts of our day, with prayer for the peace and healing of the world, and yes, with gratitude and pride for the courage, loyalty and service of so many past and present who have laid down their lives in war. I do it too as an act of personal resolve: to play my part in handing on the 'quarrel' with all that is cruel and wrong to the next generation so that together we can build a kinder, better, more peaceable world for those who will inherit it from us. 

Edith Cavell: a universal woman for a £2 coin.

I have signed the nationwide petition to have Edith Cavell depicted on a £2 coin in commemoration of the centenary of the Great War. This follows the Royal Mint’s announcement of a first commemorative coin showing Lord Kitchener pointing his finger on the famous recruitment poster with its motto ‘Your country needs you’.

I am not against the Kitchener coin provided that it doesn’t set the tone for our nation's World War One commemorations. I understand that there is to be a series of coins issued during the four years of the centenary. I welcome this, but am sorry that Kitchener was chosen to be the first. Our country does not need him to blaze this trail. While revisionist historians (and Michael Gove?) may be reassessing the crude, uncritical jingoism popularly associated with his image and recruiting style, this is not a move that would have endeared itself to the war poets and others who dared as servicemen to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions about Britain’s conduct of the war.

Edith Cavell is an altogether different kind of emblem of the Great War. As a nurse, she understood that her vocation to care and heal could not make distinctions between victims of war. They all needed what she had to give. She saved the lives of men on both sides, as the German authorities were quick to recognise. However, her patriotism was a conviction no less profoundly felt than Kitchener’s. This was why she helped British and French soldiers escape occupied Belgium for the safety of the Dutch frontier. For this she was charged with treason. She did not deny that her actions had helped a ‘hostile power’; she was executed by firing squad at first light on 12 October 1915.

Her words to her Anglican chaplain on the night before she died have passed into immortality. But I find them profoundly moving. ‘I realise that patriotism is not enough.  I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’ It’s important to read that credo alongside what she was reported to have said to the German Lutheran chaplain on the morning of her execution itself: ‘Tell my loved ones…that my soul, as I believe, is safe, and that I am glad to die for my country’. Pro patria mori: ‘that old lie’, Wilfred Owen had called it, yet it was Edith Cavell’s truth – honourable because it understood patriotism within the wider, and primary, context of humanity itself.

To rise above the warmongering rhetoric that so many of her generation (including Church of England bishops and clergy) espoused called for courage and resolve. I believe that her restatement of patriotic love-of-country as part of love-for-humanity makes her a truly universal figure of the Great War. Those who were our enemies in world war will be able to honour this too. She can become a true symbol of integrity and conscience in warfare where, as we know, truth is always the first casualty. More than that, she can stand for the possibility of reconciliation, building a society in which human beings are aspiring to renounce hatred and bitterness and learning the more excellent way of love.

I am saying that Edith Cavell can help us to remember the Great War well. This matters because we only learn from our history if we can reach back into our corporate memory and converse with it intelligently. This means bringing critical insights to bear on the ways we tell our story.  It's a complex, subtle interpretative task. Some recent right-wing commentary on the educational challenges of the centenary does not seem to have realised this yet.

So I hope, with thousands of others, that we shall see this great Englishwoman soon honoured on a coin of the realm. If you would like to add your name to the petition, you can find it at www.change.org.