It was one of my mother’s few boasts that she was outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day.
She was 12 when the war started and eighteen by the time it finished, a significant time in a young woman’s life. She lived in St Mary Cray near Orpington, part then of Kent but now in the London Brough of Bromley. It was in a direct line from the V1 and V2 rocket launching sites in Northern France and Central London so it received quite a pounding from missiles with insufficient fuel to reach the City. One landed at the end of the street and her school was also bombed. Like many children of my age, I enjoyed playing on a bombsite even fifteen years after the end of the war.
I had always assumed that my mother went with her mother, father and two younger sisters, but this was not the case according to my aunt whom I rang to check on the details. Actually, my mother was with her father and her friend Iris. My grandfather was on home from leave from Scapa Flo in the Orkneys where he was a clerk with the Royal Engineers working for 1029 Dock Operating Company in Stromness. (The Comment Orkney correspondents Mac and Carrie live 100 yards from the shore of Scapa Flo and attend St Mary’s Church in Stromness.) My aunt missed out because she was at home revising hard for her School Certificate examinations. Her mother stayed at home with her and her little sister.
My aunt could not fill me in on any details of the VE celebrations but she could tell me about what happened on VJ Day. She had been shipped down to her aunt who lived in Hastings for a bit of a cheap holiday after she had worked so hard for her examinations. When VJ Day came the road was shut off, tables put down the middle of the street and a traditional party was held with food scraped together from here, there and everywhere. She remembers it as a day of fun for the children and relief for the adults.
I recounted this story to my brother and he told me a story which I had never heard or else had forgotten. My father, when he was called up near the start of the war, was a teetotal Nonconformist. By the end he was not. He was still in Germany on VE Day but was home on leave for VJ Day and, shall we say, he entered fully into the spirit of the celebrations in Trafalgar Square. Late in the evening, he and a friend, both dressed in Army uniform, thought it would be a good idea to go and tell them in the nearby Admiralty House what they thought of the Royal Navy’s contribution to the war.
He woke up the following morning in a police cell and was released without charge but with a large headache.
Shared by Jon Reynolds
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