VE Day Memories as recalled by my mother - Kathryn

"I was at school in Art Class when I heard a huge amount of noise in school – someone came in and announced that the war was over – so we all started cheering. It was a lovely big art room – we had a strict art teacher and no-one would dare talk in her class. We were all so separated out – as if we all had Coronavirus. That made it all the more memorable when we all started cheering in her class – and I do believe that Miss Rodgers actually smiled!

Later on, we were all told we could go home at 2.30pm – much earlier than normal as no one was really interested in lessons by then.

It was a lovely sunny day - we all dressed up in summer dresses that evening and walked into Melksham town square – my Dad who was an electrical engineer and ran the Radio/Electrical shop in the town – setup the music in the town square and we all went dancing. Of course, it was a gramophone player we used for the music then. Women didn’t really go into pubs much in those days – so the men would bring the drinks out to them in the street. There was a stall selling homemade lemonade. You had to listen to the news or read the paper to find out what was happening in London. There was no TV broadcasts at that time - they set the TV stations up after the war.

It was such an occasion – so great we did it two days running and we had a couple of days holiday from school. We didn’t have half-term holidays – people didn’t really go on holiday like they do today. You would just take a weeks holiday at the sea-side in Summer and that would be it.

People dressed up in red, white and blue – it was so crowded you could hardly walk down the street, and we were all dancing in the square. Later on, there were several street parties – but as we lived on the main road we were not able to have one. The street parties didn’t have much food – there wasn’t much food available – much less at the end of the war that there was at the beginning. It was after the end of the war that we started to ration bread!

However, we were really expecting something to happen soon, as of course things had been going really well for us in the war. At that time the Russians were on our side. They marched though Poland and that is something that no-one wants to see happen to their country – the Russians marching through it. That of course all changed later.

Then we repeated it all when we had VJ (Japan) day later in the summer."