8 May 2020 | Celebrating VE Day

When this blog is published on 8 May, it will be the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Though we are in peace time now, the coronavirus has brought about similar experiences to the war-time experience – worry about disease, food shortages and separation. We could do with that old poster ‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases’! We have experienced food shortages – I still haven’t been able to get dried yeast for our bread-maker, though at least we now have flour! And I shouldn’t mention toilet rolls! 

Families and friends are separated. In the war my mother had mixed experiences of being evacuated and having to be apart from her parents (some deeply unhappy, others with people who comforted her). Some people did not see their fathers for years whilst they were away fighting. Come demobilisation, not all children greeted their fathers as fathers - some hid from them, or treated them as strangers at first.

For the majority of my little four-month-old grand-daughter’s life our only contact has been via Facetime. She will at least have seen me talking nonsense to her. Thank goodness for the social media we have today – during the war people often did not know what was happening to their loved ones and had to go to a local phone box to have urgent conversations.

From the war there is an archive, housed at Sussex University, of a Mass Observation project, where they invited around 500 volunteers to record their daily lives and experiences. One of these people was a lady called Nella Last, living in Barrow–in-Furness. She chronicled her life during the war, and the late, lamented Victoria Wood portrayed her very movingly in a film ‘Housewife 49’.

Keeping a journal becomes fascinating when you can look back and trace how things developed in your life and the life of a nation. How many of you are doing a diary of these days?

But often the recording of events comes later. It is interesting that we often don’t see the significance of what we are experiencing or what we are living through until later on. We realise what has happened and the importance of it when we have time to think and process events. Although lockdown was signalled, it seemed to me that we were plunged into it, and I didn’t realise what it was going to be like at all – and some aspects have rather taken me by surprise.

Similarly, when the British and other Allied troops were fighting at Dunkirk and waiting to be evacuated, they were in the thick of an experience they would not fully comprehend until they came out safely at the other end of it. No one in the flotilla of small boats that went over would have known what they would face, or have time to dwell on it, until it was all over and they realised the enormity of the history they had been through. One soldier’s recollection of getting back was:

Then somebody said, “there's Dover!” - that was when we saw the White Cliffs, the atmosphere was terrific. From hell to heaven was how the feeling was, you felt like a miracle had happened.

Perhaps that is why Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll meet again’ became popular later on: There’ll be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover tomorrow just you wait and see! 

Embed from Getty Images
 
But would Dunkirk have been remembered in the same way if, perish the thought, we had lost the war?

You can’t envisage what an event means until it happens. I was hearing someone’s memories of VE day in London, who said that she had been on her way to work when she suddenly got swept up in the crowds and the atmosphere. We get swept up in experiences, and it is only later we see the significance.

One of the things I have struggled to understand in the past is how the disciples were so unprepared for the cross and resurrection, when Jesus so heavily signalled what would be experienced in predictions of his passion, and when they were unmistakably told he would rise again. The prediction of his suffering, death and resurrection is recorded this way in Chapter 20 of Matthew’s gospel:

Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, he took the Twelve aside and said to them, ‘We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!’

But the disciples, even after being told what Jesus was facing, were in denial and confusion at the time of his death, and totally at sea in the situation. Then after the resurrection, we find them muddled again – wondering what had happened when they went into the tomb, struggling with what had happened on the road to Emmaus, fearfully hiding in locked rooms, and wracked with uncertainty about whether they believed in the resurrection. (See especially Luke 24; John 20 and 21).

They struggled even though they should have understood what it was all about! They had been told! Really, it is not easy to see or comprehend the significance of a time while you are caught up in the middle of it – it is only afterwards when you think about what you experienced that you begin to see the full importance. And sometimes it even takes a few years to sink in. It is later when you begin to tell others about what happened that you starting seeing a total picture of what you have been through, and can pinpoint exactly what difference it has made to your life.

The gospels were not written like a diary or record as people were actually going through the experience of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, rather they were set down afterwards when Jesus’ followers had realised and processed what they had been through. Then they wanted others to know of the deep significance of Jesus’ life and actions. They wanted to record the effect Jesus had and how he had changed their lives. The gospels were set down in the assurance of the Risen Lord being beside them.

For the time being we are experiencing lockdown – later on we will process the negative part of the experience and then hopefully celebrate the positives of what we have learnt - and be brought through to a new era.

So, I hope you enjoy your VE celebrations. Actually we can have two … Victory in Europe and Victory at Easter!

Rosemary