Victory in Europe Day (and the Little Master is fine!)

Today is the eightieth anniversary, and here in the not-so United Kingdom we’ve been commemorating it in different ways all week. There have been parades and flypasts. There will be formal ceremonies. Today, though, I’m going to look at an infinite and unashamedly small scale because I had older parents who were in different places for VE Day.

My Dad was in Germany, It wasn’t that long after Bergen-Belsen was liberated and he was there too. That, as he always put it, was all that needed to be said, except for the fact that German civilians were incredibly hungry too. He passionately believed that that was the sort of thing that happened when you respected and didn’t question authority, so he brought his daughters up to question everything. We’re very different now we’re adults, but we all enjoy our lives and get on well, especially when we’re living in different counties! He also said that one thing his War service taught him was that either everyone mattered and had rights, or no one did. Whenever I write Peter Cunningham, there’s a good chunk of my dad in him because he was thoroughly sneaky and had a habit of making you want to do things that you hadn’t wanted to do.

My Mum had been a young child during the war. She was bombed out 3 times, and was evacuated with my grandmother and came home. Some people sometimes whispered that no one would dare to kill my grandmother, but they made very sure that no one could hear them! Her mum lived with her own mother, who was allegedly even fiercer, but oddly I remember her ginger cat snoozing on the shed roof but not her. They lived close to Croydon Aerodrome, so it was a natural target

Mum told us the story of all of them crouched in the Morrison shelter which was basically a stainless steel box you used as a dining table too. You can read more about them here - https://andersonshelters.org.uk/other-shelters/morrison-shelters/. The bomb hit. The house collapsed. Great Nanny reached out for her husband and found him lying there with a sticky liquid running down his face. Did she panic? Of course not, especially since he’d actually been clobbered by the milk bottle that they’d brought under the table, which had broken and spilt milk everywhere. Great Nanny was NOT happy about that because milk was rationed. Mum, like Dad, took that sort of thing for granted, and if she was traumatised by it, then it didn’t show. She did like to have plenty of milk in the fridge if that counts!

Then there was VE Day itself. Dad ducked out of the parties and went for a walk because he loved walking and hated large groups of people. So do I, and so does my daughter now. All of us seem to think better when we’re on the move, and he was still so very young because he’d lied about his age, so he was only seventeen at this point. Can you imagine what he’d seen so young but he wasn’t so much traumatised as determined to be better and help wherever and whenever he could. He didn’t leave the Army until he retired, but he did end up in the Education Corps because he loved Army life, but he didn’t like being shot at! He ended up teaching remedial maths in civilian life, and they did better than the so-called brighter children, which didn’t surprise me at all.

So anyway, they had a children’s fancy dress competition at my Mum’s VE Party, so my Nanny covered my mum’s best white dress with strips of red, white and blue crepe paper and she went as Victory. Very pretty she looked too, because she was lovely inside and out, at least until the rain came down. Older readers will know that crepe paper is not colourfast, so I'm sure you can guess what happened next. Rationing was still a massive part of life so that did not go down well with Nanny, but she found a way to dye it, and my Mum’s best dress was dark green from then on. That, she explained when she made little dresses for her three girls, was why she’d never, ever dress us in white!

I was thinking of them as I watched the parade and the flypast, and I shall be thinking of so many other people here in Poole as I go to the service of commemoration in the park today. They got on with things. They laughed when they felt like crying. They were incredible people that I was privileged to talk to while I volunteered with various oral history projects.

Most of all, they were loved and loved others in return, so maybe it’s no wonder I’m a slushy romantic at heart?

On Sunday, I’ll write about my hundred and eleventh book and my third anniversary as a writer in phase 2 of my career. Not today though. Today belongs to memories of all those who lived through terrible times, no matter which side they were on, because very few people had a choice about whether they fought or who they fought for and against. So they got on with it, which is what I shall do now.

There are new special offers today as always, but this isn’t a day to publicise them. This is a day to remember and be grateful both to those who fought and died for us to have the right to say what we want even if it annoys people and to be incredibly grateful that I haven’t had to fight. I’ll also nip into the Red Cross charity shop and pop some money in their collecting box because I know so many people aren’t that lucky.

I’ll also end, as requested, with a picture of the Little Master and his brothers and sisters. He's growing well, and he and his family were pleased to see us, and I was pleased to see a park full of baby birds after remembering so much death.