I must say that I am disappointed at the lack of comment about the date in the media – you’d think that it was just another day. I’m too young to remember the outbreak of the war (born 1937) but I have vivid memories of events in its latter years – bombed buildings, a tree in our garden losing the top 10 feet to a hit and run raider being pursued by RAF fighters, an MOI film warning about the danger of ‘butterfly bombs’, a mobile AA 4.5 opening up a few yards away from our house, spending nights in our shelter (the indoors one – I can NEVER remember which was the Anderson and which the Morrison), finding lumps of shrapnel in the street, the awful sound of glass being swept up after a raid blew out shop windows (even now, the noise of sweeping up broken glass brings it all back).
My most vivid memory, however, is the end of the war in Europe. We lived in a village outside Cambridge at the time and I had gone into the kitchen to pour myself a drink of water. Looking out of the window I could see a couple of cyclists riding by (can’t remember if male or female, young or old) and my mother bursting in from the living room where she had been listening to the radio (OK – wireless!) and saying ‘The war is over! The war is over!”
I couldn’t really understand what she was saying – at seven years old – getting on for eight – war was all that I had known. Somehow, my child’s mind couldn’t comprehend that there was an alternative to a state of war
Mike
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