VE Day

It was a warm May afternoon, I was 4 years old and playing in the garden on my own. My mother was in the kitchen listening to the wireless (as it was called then), and I was awakened from my day-dreaming by her voice telling me we were going out for the rest of the day. I remember asking where we were going, and her reply was vague about a celebration. She dressed me in my best shorts and pullover (I only had one), and we took the bus to the train station. We lived just outside Chislehurst, Kent at the time and the journey didn't seem too long, though I do remember seeing nothing but bombed buildings along the route. At the time, as a young child, I knew no different, and had grown up climbing over bomb sites at the end of my road, and being pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and hurried down to our Anderson shelter in the garden, listening to the dull thump of exploding bombs. When the German V1 rockets came over with their recognisable engine drone, we used to hold our breaths when the engine stopped, and count to thirty – if we reached 30 we were still alive!

But today was different. People at the station and on the train were smiling. When we arrived at Charing Cross, my mother gripped me by the hand and walked off down the road. I had never seen so many people; there were huge crowds everywhere. I remember arriving in front of a very large building, although with such crowds we were quite a long way from it; people were singing and laughing, and then a huge cheer rang out. I couldn’t see anything, but a man standing next to us put me on his shoulders and I remember seeing a balcony with people on it waving back at us. It was all great fun and for a youngster of 4 years old, very exciting. The overriding impression I had was of great happiness and friendliness. We were there for ages (or so it seemed), but I wasn’t bored, I was just amazed at the huge happy crowd singing and dancing.

Many, many years later I asked my mother why she had taken me up to London that day. She smiled, and said that she had wanted me to be part of that historical occasion. She knew that my father would also be celebrating somewhere in Germany, and that he also would have wanted me to be part of it. It was of course VE Day, and we had gathered outside Buckingham Palace watching the King and Queen, with the two Princesses, along with the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, celebrating from the balcony with the British people.

At the time I did not appreciate the enormity of the occasion, but looking back, I am so grateful to my mother for taking me there to be part of history.

I don’t remember much about the Queen’s Coronation, although like everyone else we had a day off from school. As I was at a boarding school we were taken on a day trip – to Heathrow Airport! We were bussed round to see the various areas of the airport and told that the Vanguard (prop plane) was made using 60,000 rivets. The Coronation itself was on television and our headmaster gave us a talk on the significance of the ceremony and occasion, and informed us that the Queen would have her chest anointed. 60 10 -13 year old boys got pretty excited about this, but when we realised that we were not going to actually see any bare flesh we rather lost interest!

Mike Elmitt