The Poppy Factory

Lying almost directly outside of my front door is a river which leads all the way to the sea. A leaf-strewn path lined with trees and grassy verges mocks its meandering path for the full three miles. If this sounds idyllic, it is. The Water of Leith Walkway, along which I walk daily if I can help it, steels my soul if it is broken, sets it on fire if it is dull and forms one of the major reasons why I cannot now conceive of moving away. It led me to the café at which I now work, and it led me also to the poppy factory.
Unlike the other drab grey buildings in the area, the poppy factory is built from stone of a distinctive reddy-orange colour, so it would have stood out from its surroundings even were it not for the glossy vermilion flower motif above its green door, or the faded sign outside which bears the emblem 'Lady Haig Poppy Factory' and lists the hours it opens.
My curiosity was well and truly piqued from the first. The words 'poppy' and 'factory' seemed about as unlikely a pair of candidates for linguistic companionship as you could hope to find outside of a children's book, and then there was the presence of opening hours. There seemed little chance that the opening times would ever be found written up outside a pen or a biscuit factory. Opening hours equal invitation, and in this instance, wild horses would not have stopped me from attending.
Yet the sign informed that the factory shut at three thirty on weekdays, and being an evening or at least a late-afternoon walker, I was always too late by the time I reached the factory. Every time I saw it, I promised myself that on my next day off during the week I really would set off for my walk in time to make it inside. In the end, though, I never got around to it, so perhaps the wild horses had got the better of me after all, and there were no further developments on the poppy factory score until my friend came to visit Edinburgh for a long weekend. Since we had a lot of catching up to do, which is always best done mobile, we set off for a Friday afternoon jaunt. Our plan was to walk the two hours to Leith, where the river flowed into the Firth of Forth, have a pint in one of the seaside pubs and then walk back home again. Thoughts of the factory had played no part in my proposal, and it was only when I saw the glossy red poppy gleaming up ahead of us that it occurred to me we might be in time to pay it a visit. I checked the time on my phone, and it was just past three o'clock.
"Do you mind if we just have a look in here? I've been wondering for ages about this place."
My friend looked at the building and turned to me. "A poppy factory? What does that mean?"
"I don't really know. That's why we have to go in."
I felt almost nervous as we pushed open the gate and walked up the path, and definitely glad to have an accomplice. These feelings intensified when a man walked past the glass door, and, seeing our noses pressed to the glass, did a double take, opened the door and gave us an officious, "Hello?"
"I'm not really sure what we're doing here." I felt myself flushing. "We just sort of wanted to take a look."
The man opened the door and sighed, a deep sigh.
"Do you want a tour?"
He was extremely posh, the sort of posh which is rare these days. His vowels all seemed to be on the verge of cracking. My friend Rose and I looked at one another. The man sighed again and said,
"You're a little bit late for a tour. Follow me."
Meekly, or perhaps just not knowing what other course of action was open to us, we did as we were told and followed him inside a modestly shabby building which looked like some kind of club or association, and then through a set of double doors into a high-ceilinged white room. This, apparently, was the factory. It looked, in fact, much like the only other factory I had ever visited - a Japanese sausage factory. The place was riddled with desks and framed pictures but still managed to feel bare; the machinery was sparse and free-standing. The employees were invariably old. There was the air of industry, but only in decent proportions.
The aristocrat introduced us to Tam, who was to be our guide. He asked our names, which I took as a formality, but it turned out not to be. From that moment on, there was not one sentence that went uttered by Tam which was not personally addressed to one, if not both, of us. On repeated occasions he mourned the fact that we hadn't got there earlier, because some of the boys had already gone home, and we would have liked to have met them. Still, we were introduced to all of the workers who remained - all, we discovered, were veterans, with most registered disabled.
"Rose and Polly, this is Walter, Walter, this is Rose and Polly, they're having a tour," Tam would say. "Polly lives in Edinburgh. Rose is visiting for the weekend. Jim's job is to punch holes in the poppies."
We saw machines of all kinds, all delightfully specific in their functions. In that respect it was just like the factories of my pre-school imagination which I had used to spend hours drawing and constructing, and although there was no real 'line' to speak of, there was a progression, the man standing at the machine or the desk here receiving and then uniting or working further on the products of those we had just visited. We were allowed to assemble our own poppies, fitting the green stem through the hole of the red paper cut-out, and then wedging the black centre on top to secure it. Feeling like schoolgirls, we giggled with delight. The employees were just as jovial.
As we walked between the tables, or around the outside of the room which was adorned with historical pictures and portraits, Tam oscillated from fact to grainy fact. The poppy factory had come about in 1923, we were told. Until then, all the poppies for Scotland were made in London, but a suggestion made by Field Commander Haig's wife brought about the factory in Edinburgh which took her name in commemoration, and it is since them that all the poppies for Scotland, and latterly all the wreaths used at remembrance services have been made on the premises. Although admittedly larger than the tiny box of the sausage factory, the place is not large, and thus the idea that every single Scottish poppy is made here seemed hard to credit until we were led into the warehouse, used to store the Wreaths for every church, every scout, cub, brownie and guide group, and all other kinds of groups besides, as well the boxes of poppies, all of which accumulate throughout the year in the months leading up to November. The warehouse supervisor was sitting, leafing lackadaisically through a copy of The Sun. "This is Joe," said Tam. "He's a very busy man."
The tour was nearly over, but first we were conducted into a couple of meeting rooms, where we saw portraits of, amongst others, Lady Haig and Lieutanentant Colonel John McCrae, the Canadian Medical officer who penned the poem responsible for establishing the poppy as a symbol of remembrance, as well as a large framed copy of that same poem whose opening line reads,'In Flanders fields the poppies grow.'
Finally we were shown a three dimensional model of the Garden of Remembrance, set up in Scotland's main drag Princes Street around the month of November, showing the designated places of all the wreaths that were presented by different associations, but all made within the factory.
"It's a very important thing for people, to come and present their wreaths, to remember," Tam tells us. "Poppies are not just about the two World Wars. It's anybody, who has served for their country. You know, the boys in Iraq and so on."
His voice, as it had been throughout, was a seamless mixture of pragmatism and acknowledgment, the very same tone I recognised from my Grandma's speeches about the war. It was the sort of tone which made sense for those for whom war had been a reality - not just an ideological reality splashed across newspapers and pouring from mouths at pubs and parties, but an inescapable part of life. An experience which makes remembrance less of a duty not to be forgotten than an ever-present feature. It seems that to those for whom war has been part of life, it will never again be wholly outside of it.
Against that, there are the people of my generation and those close to it for whom the very phrase 'poppy factory' sounds like something from a dystopic novel, to whom this mild acceptance found in older generations causes discomfort, because we are certain that whatever war is, that it is something which we should not take lying down. Yet in the midst of our clamorous hope to eschew war from our definition of life in the future, we can stray too far into excluding it from our definition of the present, and even the past. Which is precisely why the plight of the Lady Haig factory and their ever-increasing number of tours is commendable in every way. Anything which helps to impress on youngsters the reality of recent history and the loss of past generations must be valued, and the poppy factory tour as an experience is such a surreal one, it seems it cannot fail to do so. Yet we all know, them at the poppy factory as well as us youngsters, that the remembrance we can offer will always be a lame cousin to that of those who have lived it. We can endeavour to understand, to respect the experiences and losses of others, but our mental images will always be that bit grayer, our tears that bit slower to fall. If we do feel genuinely sad, remorseful, some part of us rises up to object that we are not entitled to those feelings, and the rest of the time we have something which closely resembles guilt; guilt for not having to bear it, guilt for belonging to a nation whose international profile is one of almost unremitting perpetration. Included in our cultural heritage is the pressing awareness that remembrance can only be learned the hard way, and the cold knowledge that the alternative is scarcely more savoury.