We will meet again

Dame Vera Lynn on coronavirus, the Queen and the 75th anniversary of VE Day

I’ll never forget the 50th-anniversary VE Day celebration at Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace in May 1995 – the last time I sang in public, aged just 78. I was a mere septuagenarian back then – still in my prime!

It gave me so much pleasure that the Queen Mother who, like me, had lived through the Second World War and the dark days of the Blitz, could be present at one of the highlights of my career.

Fifty years earlier, we had both been in London on VE Day, 8th May 1945 – although she had been with her family and I with mine – when thousands of people, civilians and servicemen and -women, mingled happily on the streets of London. Sadly, it’s impossible to imagine such a ‘party’ happening in today’s coronavirus-gripped world.

Despite the passing of the years, my memories of Victory in Europe Day, 75 years ago, are still vivid. None of us who were there on that momentous day could ever forget the sense of national rejoicing. It was a day when we could finally laugh, let our hair down and be ourselves again, in the knowledge that the Nazi threat to our homeland had forever been extinguished.

I have only to close my eyes for it all to come flooding back… I can picture the houses in the bomb-damaged streets around my parents’ home in East Ham, London – where I saw in VE Day with my family – with the Union Jacks draped from their windows on that cloudy morning. If I recall correctly, a few drops of rain even fell.