VE Day 1945

You must have seen the famous photos of me on VE Day!!
There was the King in his naval uniform, the Queen in pink, or was it blue (there were only black and white pictures then)? Princess Elizabeth was there in her ATS uniform, Princess Margaret, looking pretty as always, and Winston Churchill smoking his inevitable cigar, waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. And there was me - one of the thousands of Londoners who had been drawn to the Mall on that historic occasion.
I lived at Totteridge, a suburb in North London, and had spent the morning going round our village collecting firewood in a builder's barrow, which would be lit on VE2 when we were going to have a big party on the village green, as we were having two days of celebrations.
It was a lovely day and my father suggested we went down to London and celebrate. Sporting buttonholes of red roses, white alysym and blue forget-me-nots picked from the garden, my mother, father, sister and I travelled by Northern Line train. Emerging from the Strand Station, we were swept along by the happy crowds, through Admiralty Arch, up the Mall to Buckingham Palace.
It was very exciting, with men and women wearing uniforms of every nation, who had come to England to fight against the enemy, laughing and dancing with us Londoners, so relieved to know the war was over.
When the Royal Family came on to the balcony with Winston Churchill, it seemed that they epitomised our strength and that we were proud to be British.
I remember there were planes passing over all the time and were told that they were bringing the prisoners of war back home. As a member of our family had been a prisoner since Dunkirk, I wondered which plane he was in!
But there were always the thoughts in our minds that the war was still being fought in the Far East and it wouldn't be until some months later that victory could be celebrated. But VE1 Day marked the end of the war that Londoners had been in the thick of.

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