I suppose the thing I remember most about the end of the war was the spontaneous street party that occurred as if by magic. From somewhere came an upright piano and this was placed on the pavement outside No 12 where the Thomases lived. Soon, in the road outside the same house, there appeared large quantities of wood and other combustible materials which were set alight in short order and soon there was an enormous bonfire. Everyone gathered and sang and danced until after dark which, with Double British Summer Time, was pretty late. I badgered my parents to stay up until the party finished and, although they didn't allow that, they did let me stay up later than usual. The legacy of this party was a fairly large, though not very deep, hole in the tarmac where the fire had been. We hung out flags a Union Jack, the Russian flag and the Chinese flag.  These latter two we made ourselves from a couple of red flags Dad had acquired from somewhere. It was, of course, a coincidence that in those days, the Council used red flags in much the same way as traffic cones are used today.

So the war in Europe ended. It wasn't long before I was introduced to an aspect of peacetime life which had hitherto escaped me and that was politics. This was because Churchill called an election for July 1945. It soon became apparent to me that my parents disagreed about politics.  Dad, not surprisingly, in view of the sort of life he had had, was solidly for Labour but Mum was Conservative.  As far as I could gather this was because she felt that the working classes should know their place.

On the day of the election, we were busy dismantling the Anderson shelter. Having taken the earth off the top and from around the sides, Dad unbolted the corrugated iron and took out all the metal bits. We then manhandled the large concrete bastions into the hole and filled in with the earth. I have often wondered what the archaeologists would make of this should they ever excavate in the distant future, especially as Dad took the opportunity to throw in all sorts of junk which he wanted to get rid of before we filled in the hole. So died our faithful old shelter. It was many years before the front blast-wall was finally demolished. I remember attacking it with a cold chisel and a club hammer on and off for ages. The election resulted in a landslide for Labour so that at the next Big Three summit meeting, Attlee went instead of Churchill. It must have been a considerable shock to Churchill but in the context of the time it was, I think, inevitable that he would get the push.

The war dragged on in the Far East and there was much talk of invading Japan and the likely cost of that in lives. In Germany, the Allied troops were warned not to fraternise with the Germans   particularly the women, but this seemed to have little effect and a good few soldiers brought home German brides, including Bobby Fox next door.

One day in August 1945, when my thoughts were concentrated on the fact that soon I would have to go to a new school rather than on anything to do with the war, I was doing a jigsaw puzzle when the news reader on the radio gave out the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima in Japan. At the time I wasn't at all clear what an atomic bomb was but it was obviously something bigger and more devastating than anything which had previously been used.  Although, with hindsight, there has been a good deal of criticism of the decision to use the atom bomb, I don t recall that there was any such criticism at the time. I guess that after six years of war we just wanted it over. I can’t really see any government of the time not using it in the circumstances. Following the second bomb on Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered; August 15 was designated VJ Day and the excuse for another spontaneous street party was provided. A second bonfire was lit on the recently-repaired site of the VE one and the tarmac ceremoniously burned again. You would probably have to seek and be refused - permission to do this sort of thing nowadays but we were a little more anarchic in those days. Eventually, a more formal street party with tables, funny hats and jellies etc. was held but it wasn't nearly as much fun as the spontaneous ones with the bonfires and the piano in the street.

Looking back, I suppose they were exciting times but I do recall a sort of boredom that was present for a lot of the time. Rationing ensured that our diet wasn't exciting but it was healthy and I never remember being hungry. We were, I suppose, short on entertainment but for most of the war there was the cinema. I vividly remember The Adventures of Smiling Jack, a serial in which the hero pitted his somewhat restricted wits against the beautiful Nazi spy Fraulein von Teufel.  Other than that it was largely a diet of Westerns with such heroes as Gene Autry, Charles Starret, Wild Bill Elliott, Johnny Mack Brown, Buck Jones and, later, Roy Rogers. There was also a serial of the Lone Ranger.

If there were an air-raid while you were at the pictures, they would flash the information on the screen and advised you that you could leave and seek a shelter. For the most part, people just stayed put.
Other than the cinema, we relied on the radio for entertainment. There were only two BBC channels the Home Service which was for the more serious stuff and the Forces Programme which was for lighter entertainment and did indeed become the Light Programme after the war. 

There was a lot of comedy on the radio. The big show was Tommy Handley’s ITMA which had a colossal following. Looking back, it was really just a lot of short sketches held together with a very thin plot, the purpose of the whole programme being to introduce on a regular basis a host of well-known and, indeed, well-loved characters and their associated catch-phrases. I can still remember to this day most of the characters and their catch-phrases, which only goes to prove how insidious these things can be. Although I started the war loving ITMA I ended by being totally bored by it. There were other well-known programmes like Happidrome starring Harry Korris and Robbie Vincent and Hi Gang! which starred Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels with Vic Oliver (who I believe was Austrian). Ben and Bebe were an Anglophile couple who stayed in Britain all through the war and later did a show called Life with the Lyons which also starred their children Barbara and Richard. There was also Garrison Theatre which starred Jack Warner before his Dixon of Dock Green days and Music Hall which was a radio version of (Surprise! Surprise!)  a music hall.

I remember whole scads of names from that era and I can even remember who some of them were and what they did for an act but others are just names.  Whatever happened to Clay Keyes, Stainless Stephen; Gilly Potter; George Doonan; Claude Dampier; Dicky Hassett; Mabel Condstandouras; Jeanne de Casalis; Forsyth, Seaman and Farrell; Ethel Revnell and Gracie West; Suzette Tarri; Murray and Mooney; Bennett and Williams and Nan Kenway and Douglas Young?  To name but a few but probably far too many at that!  My favourite programme was Monday Night at Eight a sort of magazine programme.  I also loved Paul Temple and, in the later days of the war I scared myself stupid listening to Appointment with Fear, a series of horror plays narrated by Valentine Dyall as the Man in Black.

Another thing I recall about wartime radio entertainment was the endless and seemingly inexhaustible supply of cinema organists which the BBC seemed to have pounding away incessantly on the mighty Wurlitzer. Mum’s favourites were Sandy MacPherson and Reginald Foort but there were others like Reginald Dixon who operated from the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool. I also listened to Children’s Hour but can’t remember much about the programmes except for Toytown and the ever-present Uncle Mac. He was an institution like The Kitchen Front a programme designed to tell the housewife how to make delicious dishes from the limited resources at her disposal and the Radio Doctor, who had many health tips, most of which were designed to tell you how to keep your bowels open and regular. The news was avidly listened to and the BBC started the practice of naming the newsreaders who had hitherto been anonymous.  So we became very familiar with the voices of such people as Alvar Liddell, Bruce Belfrage, Stuart Hibberd, Frank Phillips and John Snagge. There was much disquiet when Wilfred Pickles was allowed to read the news as he had a Yorkshire accent and not the well-known BBC accent.   The Nation survived this unprecedented assault on its non-Yorkshire ears and everyone seemed to understand what he was saying.

J.B. Priestly, the author, briefly made a name for himself with a fireside chat type of programme but this was taken off despite its popularity. I think this may have been done because he told the truth in his blunt Yorkshire way and the establishment didn't always want to hear the truth.

So there it was simple and, by today s standards, unsophisticated entertainment. I often think that much of the comedy owed its success to the fact that with rationing, bombs dropping around us and the general bleakness of life we would have laughed at any thing - and I guess we more or less did. Some laughs were also available from listening to Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) broadcast propaganda from Germany. The Ark Royal was reported sunk about once a week but, unfortunately, she really did go down eventually. A programme which was not for laughs was Saturday Night Theatre a weekly play, which always seemed to have Gladys Young, Preston Lockwood and Grizelda Hervey in the cast. They seemed to always be doing Dear Octopus and George & Margaret.

There were also comics to keep us amused. Fred had the Radio Fun; Pete the Beano and I had the Dandy. Nice to know Desperate Dan is still going strong in the 21st Century. Later I graduated to the story comics like the Wizard, Rover, Hotspur and Champion. That was when I made the acquaintance of Wilson and Rockfist Rogan. Wilson was in the Wizard and he was a phenomenal athlete no one could live with his speed, strength and stamina and when he took up cricket we had the year of the shattered stumps. He was, of course, the fastest bowler who ever lived.  Rockfist Rogan was in the Champion and he was a boxing pilot. He started life in the RFC during the 1st World War but was still flying and fighting in the RAF in the second World War. He went on to the Korean War and, for all I know, the Vietnam war. Who knows, maybe he was the only 80-year-old fighter-pilot cum boxer in the Gulf War!

It is surprising really how many things which had been instituted for the war were continued after it was all over. The most obvious one was rationing which came off in dribs and drabs as the years went by the most persistent one being sweet rationing, which I mentioned earlier.
The Utility range of clothing and furniture, with its CC41 symbol, continued for quite a long time but some things did get back to normal fairly quickly. I remember going down to Woolwich especially to see the neon lights outside the Granada and the Odeon. This was something I had never seen before and it was a terrific thrill to see it.

Guy Fawkes night returned and fireworks were heard and seen again. I must admit that I have never been over-keen on fireworks except on a grand scale and I put this down to having heard more than enough bangs and seen more than enough flashes during the war.

At one time during the war, dustbins had been put into the streets in which one was supposed to put old food scraps. These would be emptied from time to time to provide food for pigs thus aiding the war effort. The one outside our house was regularly dragged out into the middle of the road to serve as a wicket for games of street cricket. These bins stayed around for a long time after the war. The grammar school I attended also kept a couple of pigs again a legacy from the war.

Identity cards stayed for some time and that great institution, National Service, stayed for about twenty years. When I went to school in Greenwich, there were gangs of German prisoners of war working in Greenwich Park and we often saw sailors from ships of other navies who were paying courtesy visits to Britain. I well remember an Argentinean sailor helping us to hurl large pieces of wood into the trees to bring down the chestnuts and conkers. I also well remember legging it at a rate of knots when the park keeper appeared, leaving the Argentine Navy to explain.

My final memories of the war were the Nuremburg Trials and various other war crimes trials which took place in 1945 and subsequent years. When these were over and rationing etc had gone, the war really was over. Peace reigned except in all the countries where fighting has gone on ever since. I doubt if ever we will have universal peace it is not, unfortunately, in mankind’s nature.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Submitted by Leslie Edwards
Location South East London