The pageantry around the 80th anniversary of VE Day has gone the whole hog: the ringing of bells, the lighting of beacons, flypasts, processions, royal waving, sandwiches under endless miles of bunting. On Monday, Keir Starmer served tea and cake outside Downing Street, with all the relaxed bonhomie of a man who’s just lost a by-election. It’s that kind of an occasion.
And like all of these big national occasions, sometimes the twee-ometer maxes out. We were all invited by VE Day’s pageantmaster(!) to join a livestream starring 95-year-old Chelsea Pensioner and 2019 Britain’s Got Talent winner Colin Thackery, with whom the nation would “sing the great British Hymn ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’, standing side by side in gratitude, honouring the many sacrifices that secured our freedom”. I bear no ill will to dear Colin, but this is the party equivalent of a powdered egg sandwich.
But there are other, more elusive reasons I feel a bit odd about the VE Day hullabaloo. We’re celebrating 80 years since the downfall of fascism, while fascism looks pretty lively across Europe and America, and the end of war in Europe while war rages in Europe. It feels, at best, a bit presumptuous. At worst, it’ll tickle some people’s most jingoistic instincts. It’s hard to ignore the feeling that we’re cosplaying our recent past while ignoring, for a few days, where we are now.
But the fact is, lots of people felt weird about VE Day even on VE Day itself. We know the pictures of heaving masses of people celebrating in Trafalgar Square and Shaftesbury Avenue, and it’s easy now to flatten VE Day into the party of all parties. And yes, there was joy. Yet the Mass Observation (MO) project, which asked anonymised diarists to record their thoughts and feelings and those of the people around them, tells a very different story.
A knitted postbox topper in Tallington, Lincolnshire, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of VE Day (Photo: Joe Giddens/PA)“I had found Churchill’s speech singularly disappointing,” said one MO entry. “In fact, I thought the whole thing was a colossal anti-climax, but I suppose it was bound to be so to a certain extent.”
In these diary entries, alongside the pockets of jubilation, you see private sadness, exhaustion, grief, bewilderment, and frustration. A woman hadn’t heard from her son, a prisoner of war in Singapore, for weeks. “I’m hoping he’s alive… You have to keep on hoping,” she wrote. “I couldn’t stay at home today; it’d choke me if I did. I had to get out and be with the crowds.”
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So if this commemoration leaves you a bit cold and uncertain, then you are, in a weird way, getting closer to what the actual experience of VE Day was for many who were there.
And that’s important, I think; not blandly recalling a cheering mass, but remembering the experiences of normal people whose whole lives were fractured by the war. It’s worth us now asking the same sorts of questions they did then: what do we want now? And how do we make the sacrifices that were made worth it? That generation built a new Britain.
“This, though,” they went on, “is really no time for celebration but for dedication of our lives to work for those things we have fought for and for which so many have died. How soon will they forget? Shall it be in vain, again?”
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