My daughter is a very cute and extremely expressive four year old. She is at the stage when she is working very hard on keeping herself clean. Any morning where there is no Weetabix, Shreddies or Cornflakes all over her uniform, she shows me with a very proud “look Mummy.” She came home from school yesterday with splashes of red paint all over her uniform. All over. It was down the front, up the sleeves with even a dot on her forehead just to complete the look. I asked her – as any mother would – what she had been doing that managed to get her quite so messy. “Painting poppies!” she replied happily, with a huge grin spread across her face. Her enthusiastic response was both totally typical of her, yet somewhat jarring. Not least because at that young age, the symbolism of the poppies would be almost impossible to comprehend, but because it is something closer to her own story than she would realise.
I began to tell her the story of my great-grandfather Solomon Zneimer. He was a young soldier who along with his two older brothers Jack, a member of the Royal Air Force and Nathan, of the Royal Garrison Artillery, fought for this country in World War One. Unfortunately, Solomon was gassed in one of the infamous bloody battles on the Somme, but still he survived the war. He married and had children, one of whom was my grandfather, but sadly died young from the effects of his war injury.
We all know that war is tragic and war is awful. When I was doing my English Literature A-level, one of the modules we studied was World War One poetry by Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen and others, some of which is really heart-breaking, though I’m not sure in school we quite accorded it the respect it deserves.
In the context of 100 years since the signing of the Armistice, we can be profoundly grateful that our lives are not affected daily by war, because sometimes it’s easy to take our peaceful lives for granted.
My father was named after his grandfather, with the Hebrew name of Shalom, meaning ‘peace’. Shalom is also the root of the word ‘shleimut’- perfection. Whilst war is when two parties cannot get along, ‘shalom’ is about joining in unity. Shalom is the word we use at the beginning or end of any human interaction, meaning both hello and goodbye. Because every interaction should be about connecting and becoming more unified.
It’s only really when you know of the true horror of war that you can understand and appreciate the meaning of peace.
We walk around and see many people wearing poppies. It should really be a reminder for us of how far we have come as people and how important our job of building a more perfect world really is.
I did wash my daughter’s uniform, but incidentally, the red paint never came out.
