The Woodbridge Remembrance day – with its emphasis on remembering the dead and wounded of all times and countries, and its acknowledgement of the damage sustained by civilian populations – was as lovely and moving as ever.

It is particularly plangent to be remembering the war dead in a small community like ours, where we crowd into our small market square, where all the names on the memorial are surnames of people you know, and the soldiers who attend may have just finished a tour of duty in Helmand.

I notice that  this year opinion is turning against poppy wearing, with people seeing it as a regrettable exhibition of militarism. I have heard people say “I will not be wearing a poppy next year.”

People who find the poppy symbol objectionable should maybe remember that it is only recently that we have fought wars with career soldiers. The bulk of deaths in WW1, WW2 and beyond were conscripts or volunteers – the ‘lads who will never grow old.’ Ones like ourselves, our children, our grandchildren. Ones who were poor, or rich, or middling, who had ‘a head for figures,’ were ‘good at art‘, ‘clever with their hands,’ ‘a scream‘, ‘going places,’ ‘an old head on young shoulders,’ ‘a bit wild,’ ‘dull as ditchwater.‘ Ones who were clever,  funny, ambitious,  capable, or nothing very special but loved by their family.

Most of all they were ones with all sorts of skills and potentialities  and plans for a life that was snatched from them willy nilly.

And they came from all around the world. I have even seen marker stones in Chinese in the military graveyards of northern France.

I will be wearing  my poppy next year – the centenary of the start of WW1.

I will wear it to remember my great uncle Bertie who was orphaned aged 6, grew up in a workhouse, and, too old to be conscripted, volunteered to fight because his sister, my grandmother nagged him into it  – and who was  blown to bits on the fourth day of Third Ypres. There was nothing of him left to bury.

I will wear it to remember my grandfather Howard – a working man who (again) volunteered, ended up in the RAMC, received a direct hit when carrying a wounded man to safety and who had a hole in his skull for the rest of his shortened and hard-working life.

I will wear it to remember all the millions of lives cut short or damaged in the name of war: people from the armed forces and outside. People from all across the world. People of all religions and none.

If people are ‘too cool’ to wear a poppy or choose to see it as an exhibition of militarism, they should maybe stop and think that it is very much a symbol of all those who volunteered or were conscripted. Those who died or were damaged in the name of causes they knew little of, and whose lives finished abruptly for reasons that they knew nothing about.

These days it seems a bit too easy to forget this.