Show Us Your Poppy

I failed to take a pic but mine was on my flat cap on our first driven day on Saturday and is now looking a bit bedraggled so needs replacing. I do also have a beautiful daughter named Poppy so that must win.
 
I buy three, every year, for £5.00, the traditional paper ones that soon gets tattered and torn, but I never wear it. It's a family thing. My mother (who afterwards met and married my father) did the same. She bought one never wore it. Always £5.00. From when they knocked at your door.

Once door to door collections stopped they were bought from the village Post Office. I never asked why she never wore it it was just a think that was taken as what was done. She was a War Widow of WWII. Married at twenty-one and a war widow at twenty-three.

Her husband's name, Bert Spriggs, is with some three thousand others on the Memorial to the Missing at Brookwood Cemetery on on the village memorial at Mareham-le-Fen in Lincolnshire where they had lived during that War.

 
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I buy three, every year, for £5.00, the traditional paper ones that soon gets tattered and torn, but I never wear it. It's a family thing. My mother (who afterwards met and married my father) did the same. She bought one never wore it. Always £5.00. From when they knocked at your door.

Once door to door collections stopped they were bought from the village Post Office. I never asked why she never wore it it was just a think that was taken as what was done. She was a War Widow of WWII. Married at twenty-one and a war widow at twenty-three.

Her husband's name, Bert Spriggs, is with some three thousand others on the Memorial to the Missing at Brookwood Cemetery on on the village memorial at Mareham-le-Fen in Lincolnshire where they had lived during that War.

Sad, my friend and a timely reminder of what our parents endured. Thank you.
🦊🦊
 
An original now very faded poppy picked by me 25 years ago on my first visit to the Somme Battlefields. It was past its best when I found it but it lay in the soil that the lads of the 36th Ulster Division had crossed on their record advance on the Schwaben Redoubt on 1st July 1916. Sadly neighbouring advances failed and they were cut off and annihilated. How could I not pick and cherish it?
Also Maple leaves gathered the same day from the Maple Avenue in wonderful and hugely moving Newfoundlander’s Park, where the heaviest casualties were sustained on that awful day.
Lest we forget.
🦊🦊
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An original now very faded poppy picked by me 25 years ago on my first visit to the Somme Battlefields.
I first did the WWI battlefield tours as a young Detective.

Three of us went over. Me, my DS and my DI.

In the first cemetery, as I walked up and down the line, reading the inscriptions I started to weep like a baby.

Mortified that the other two senior officers would see me crying, I tried hard to disguise the fact. I need not have worried.

Both men were in their own "private" floods of tears.
 
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