The memories below of VE Day were sent to us by Peter Brown who lived in Tickhill, in Renong on Westgate, where his father Hugh Brown was a GP. He migrated to Canada in 1947.

They are wonderfully evocative of a child’s impressions and we are very grateful to Peter for his note.

I REMEMBER...
by Peter Brown

I remember well the occasion when I learned that VE Day had occurred. Why I remember it so well remains a mystery to me. I would have been just eight years old on that day in May, my birthday being on April 29. I was on my way home from the Misses Godwin’s school in Tickhill. I was walking on the footpath by the bend of the main road just near the "keep" where a lane leads past a pub to the mill pond.
As a small boy living in an English village, the War itself would have seemed to have had very little direct impact on me. Tickhill, a few miles of Doncaster in Yorkshire, and where my father was a medical practitioner, was not a place which attracted much interest from the enemy. My father, because of his age and occupation, was not called up. He donned the uniform with other members of the Home Guard. The only person I can remember who would have gone off to
war in fact was my father’s best friend, Basil Weir. Basil went to India with the Pay Corps. As to the effects of the War, we were always fed and clothed, although I suppose the adults might have complained about rationing, which I would not have understood.
There was plenty of evidence of the War, for anyone who would have known otherwise. There were concrete anti-tank obstacles on the main road just outside our house, we had thick "blackout" curtains on our windows, and convoys of army vehicles rumbling through the village were commonplace.
My father’s cars (apparently he needed two to ensure that he had one that was roadworthy all the time) were fitted with "blackout" lights and I suppose it should have been exciting living through the narrow country lanes on those times that I was allowed along on a visit to a patient after dark. I can also remember being awakened and going to the air raid shelter during one period when I was boarding at a convent school, and l can remember the summer evening sky being filled with waves of aircraft, bombers flying eastwards to take the war to the enemy.
But what l do have memories of most vividly, on what I recall as a warm sunny afternoon, was a boy a little older than myself, who I might have known, riding towards me on a bicycle, and calling out to me that the war in Germany was over.