VE Day 75th anniversary celebrations sadly overshadowed.

VE 75th anniversary celebrations sadly overlooked.

It was the greatest day of their lives, that generation and those who were simply begging for the most memorable party of all time. For six long, torturous years they had been suffering unbearably, tormented, humiliated, devastated, driven out of their homes, watched aghast as doodlebug followed one bomb after another, as they then cried rivers of tears, desperate for salvation and never believing that it would ever end even though they privately knew it would eventually.

Yesterday Britain marked the VE Day 75th celebrations in perhaps one of the most sterile, anti climactic days of our lives. When Winston Churchill, that indomitable military leader and saviour of Britain made that wonderfully rousing speech on a Whitehall balcony about peace in our time, both Britain and the world whooped with joy, and allowed itself a  complete abandonment to all of those feelings that they thought might have been lost in the charred embers of ruin and destruction before the world danced the night away.

It was 75 years ago that the whole world was resuscitated, brought back to life, warmly reassured that the guns had been silenced, the bombs were now permanent history and Britain could slowly begin to rebuild. At the time it did seem like the impossible dream but 75 years later, although now fully recovered, there is a real sense that the huge crowds of deliriously happy people who climbed onto the lions and fountains in Trafalgar Square back then are now just pale shadows of a once ecstatic day.

History and fate have a funny way of coming back to play tricks with our minds. Who could have imagined that the vast audience participation that naturally attended Victory in Europe day would now be just one gloriously isolated moment in time? Now both Britain and the rest of the world look like everything has quite literally gone back to square one. Where once there was mass rejoicing now is just a blank piece of paper, the whole of humanity now lost in the most haunted house of all time and wondering whether they'll ever see each other again. The life force has well and truly been sucked out of everybody and everything.

For a while though those of us with fond reminiscences of the Second World War could happily relate their tales of derring do, heroism above and beyond the call of duty and stirring bravura that demands a lasting admiration from those who were born 17 years after the end of  World War Two. The astonishing feats of courage, stiff upper lip stoicism and incredible fighting spirit have now been rightly acknowledged over and over again as well they should. The soldiers bore arms, went into battle, left their loved ones broken hearted and bereft but those who came back were the ones who wept into their hankies briefly, wiped the redness from their eyes and left spirits undimmed.

But on Bank Holiday Friday, the images were revived and the memories dusted down, the men in their pristine army or air force uniforms, reflecting tenderly on their yeomen service to their country, smiling at their children and grand children who may be miles away from them but nonetheless delighted to be here, thrilled to see their offspring from distant living rooms because their love will never die.

To watch a lifeless Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus yesterday was to witness a solemn church service, a remembrance service, a scary looking skeleton, an evacuation on a monumental scale. It isn't dead yet but London still feels as if it's on a life support machine. There are no unexploded bombs and there are no air raid shelters but to all appearances, the lights which joyfully burst onto the streets and roads of the world in 1945 had now been switched off because of a rampant disease called Covid 19.

Still, it was heartening to see the whole of Britain standing firm, organising its local street or road parties on a much smaller scale of course but dressing up resolutely in the wartime attire and waving those timeless Union Jack flags. Those who witnessed the full horror of it all at the time could sit outside the houses that they'd lived in for the whole of their lives and think back affectionately to May 1945, gently indulging in black and white nostalgia tinged with modern day colour.

At a lovely neighbourly party you were reminded of the morale boosting music, Dame Vera Lynn and Glen Miller floating serenely into the late spring North London air, soldiers and girlfriends doing the jitterbug in distinctive gas masks. There was my wonderful dad dancing the night away shamelessly at the Hammersmith Palais, comfortably protected from the raining bombs outside but acutely aware that not only were people dying but a complete generation, people who might have been with him at the end but were never destined to survive because all the damage had been irreparably done.

For a while though you remembered the uncomplaining sacrifice that your grandparents and parents made, the years of bitterness and repression that had inevitably followed, the feelings of numbness and inconsolable grief. For those who emerged as grandsons and granddaughters of survivors of the Holocaust yesterday's deeply emotional outpouring could easily be identified with on every level.

It is hard to believe that 75 years ago we were doing the Lambeth Walk without any inhibition, getting drunk because we'd won the War, Hitler had been slain down and the time was absolutely right. Roll forward 75 years and the atmosphere could hardly be any more shockingly different. We are still locked down, gazing out of our sun kissed windows, longing for family, freedom and friends, hoping that at no point will we ever resemble those long haired hippies from the 1960s. We don't mind queuing outside supermarkets in single file but we do look on with wry amusement at people who insist on going about their business in deep sea diving suits. Oh yes, you couldn't really make this one up. The days are getting stranger.