"Please wear your poppy again this year with pride and remembrance"

The Lieutenant Governor of Jersey is asking islanders to wear their poppies again this year 'with pride and remembrance'.

Events are being held across the island to remember those who gave the ultimate sacrifice to protect the freedoms we enjoy today.

Church rectors are leading acts of remembrance at each of the parish war memorials.

At the Town Cenotaph for Remembrance Sunday, wreaths will be laid, and the national two-minute silence will be observed at 11am.

His Excellency, Vice Admiral Sir Jerry Kyd, said:

"There is a particular cruelty in the words “never came home”. They tell us so little, and yet they contain everything: the footsteps never heard again, the embrace that was never felt again, and the chair that remained empty. Behind every name carved into a war memorial lies a life interrupted and so many other lives connected with that person changed for ever.

"As Remembrance Day approaches, I find myself thinking of those absences. Of the young who never grew old. Of letters from the front-line kept until the paper wore thin, and of the memories and photographs on the mantel piece of happier times.

"We speak of sacrifice, but we must be careful that familiarity does not soften its meaning. Sacrifice is flesh and blood and it is a choice made by a person for a greater cause. But it is a future surrendered: the marriage, the children, the work, the ordinary happiness of an unremarkable day of the week. Those who died did not give an abstract thing called “their tomorrow”. Through their courage, they lost every tomorrow…

"Courage can be terribly quiet. It can mean doing your duty while petrified, staying loyally beside a wounded friend, or taking one more step toward the enemy when every instinct tells you to turn back. We must honour that courage without pretending that war is glorious. Anyone who understands its cost knows that remembrance must hold gratitude and grief together. We can be proud of those who served and heartbroken at what they endured. We can honour their sacrifice while working and hoping for a world in which such sacrifice is no longer demanded.

"Here in Jersey, this responsibility has a particular depth. Our island knows what it means to lose freedom. The Occupation brought fear, hunger, separation and the grinding uncertainty of life under the enemy’s jackboot. Islanders served away from home whilst families in the island waited without knowing. Others suffered deportation or imprisonment. And forced labourers brought to our shores endured brutality far from the people and places they loved. Their suffering belongs within our remembrance too.

"Our freedoms and quality of life today make such experiences difficult to imagine. We choose, speak, worship, disagree and gather without asking an occupying power’s permission. These freedoms shape our smallest daily actions. We owe it to those who suffered and fought to remember them all at this time each year. To offer our silent thanks.

"As Lieutenant-Governor, I believe remembrance places an obligation upon the living. We, quite rightly, must care for veterans carrying wounds that can be seen and wounds that cannot. We must support the families for whom service has meant separation, anxiety or bereavement. Their sacrifice continues after the uniforms are put away and long after the public ceremonies have ended.

"We must also help our children see the people behind the history. A young person standing before a memorial should understand that those remembered once laughed, quarrelled, dreamed and made plans, just as they do.

"The poppy is small enough to rest above a heartbeat. Perhaps that is where remembrance belongs: close to the life we have, close to the conscience that asks what it means and why it is so important. When we fall silent this November, let those two minutes sink in. Let us allow the silence to question our comfort just for a minute or two. It is not much to ask, surely?

"Because one day, we too will be gone. What will remain is what we have cared for and passed on. I pray that those who come after us inherit our current freedoms, strengthened by our vigilance and the courage to stand up for our values and way of life when tested, as those who came before us did so bravely. That is how we honour sacrifice, by making the lives it helped preserve worthy of the price.

For so many who gave their all, please wear your poppy again this year with pride and remembrance."