Victory!

Fancy dress competition during Victory celebrations in our village, after the end of the war in Europe and Japan. I'm the one in the nurse's outfit.

The village's victory celebration took place a little while after the end of the war, probably to make sure that all the men who were coming home, had come home.

 I don't remember a great deal about wartime. We lived in the countryside  and there were very few signs of it about. I knew that my father was a long way away, in India, because I received (and still have) one of the small records that the forces were allowed to make to send home. My father's voice seemed to be very hissy and squeaky. "Bye bye, little Bun, have lots of fun. Daddy." I wondered if that was the way he always sounded. 

As far as I was concerned, as a very small girl, life was just the way it was. The world was almost entirely populated by women, old men and children. New clothes came in a ‘missionary barrel’ from a land called ‘America’ or sometimes from one called ‘Canada’ and mostly they weren’t new at all, but I didn’t realize that. Certainly, the shoes we were given pinched. My mother said that American fittings were narrower than ours. I imagined people with long thin tapering feet like those worn with the medieval costumes in my colouring-in book. It worried me how they managed to walk. We had a wireless round which my mother and grandparents would gather, listening intently and not wanting to be disturbed. (It must have been a battery-operated one because we didn’t have any electricity, just open fires and oil lamps and candles.) I remember one evening after the news must have filtered through about what the Allied Forces were finding when they liberated the German prisoner of war camps. I was a bad sleeper, and on this occasion had been allowed to get up in what felt like the middle of the night (probably about 11 pm) and to join my mother and grandparents round the oil lamp at the kitchen table, where they were drinking tea and eating crackers and cheese and discussing  the reports in disbelieving and horrified tones. I heard  the name 'Hitler' several times and I was full of curiosity, because I knew that  nasty Mr Hitler was a very Bad Man, my questions flustered them. ‘Oh, something very very naughty. Very very unkind. ” They dropped the subject and wouldn't say any more.

Then the war was over and the Men came home. Everything seemed to change.