大象传媒

In May 1945 when I was about five weeks off my ninth birthday, I was walking up our front steps when a friend shouted to me 鈥淒id you know the War is over?鈥� This was news to me. I stopped near the top of our steps and looked out over the Medway Towns, and remember thinking 鈥淚 wonder what the world is like without war?鈥� I felt a little apprehensive, but this was soon overtaken by excitement, as flags of all sorts and bunting began to appear from every house, and joy of joy, we could do away with our blackout curtains and switch on lights whenever we wanted to. Dad had two flags - a very large Union Jack which he nailed to a long pole, and he put this pole out through one of the front bedroom windows. The pole was so long and the flag so heavy that the pole had to be anchored somehow under the bed. Dad also rigged a light at the end of the pole, and at dusk this would be switched on for the whole world to see. Dad's other flag, the White Ensign, he put at the top of the tall washing line pole at the top of the back garden. For sometime after that, as dusk fell, we would gather in the front bedroom and look out over the Medway Towns and watch as lights came on all over the place. Each night it seemed there were a few more. I thought it looked like fairyland.

Eventually a street party was organised, and our street got permission to close the road. Not that we got that much traffic apart from horses pulling carts. Tables and chairs were brought out of the houses and arranged down the middle of the road. We children sat down to what for us was a great feast. All the Mums had been asked to contribute ingredients towards 鈥楾he Cake鈥�, and one of the Mums made and iced a big square cake. It was quite the biggest cake I had ever seen! One of the older men had a piano accordion and he played for us, and we sang and danced, or pranced, about. In the middle of this, our attention was taken to the end of the road. A man in soldier's uniform was slowly walking towards us. It turned out he was the son of an elderly couple who lived at the other end of the road, and that he'd been a prisoner of war somewhere in Europe. His return was yet more cause for celebration.

This story was entered on The People's War website by Stuart Ross on behalf of Dorothy Packer, who fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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