We were all excited, but we didn’t really understand, you know. Some of the mothers were crying and it was something that the children didn’t understand. We knew the war was over and we knew all our fathers and men were coming back, but we couldn’t remember what it was like for the little ones. It was quite difficult to understand at this age, what it was all about, but certainly everybody was very excited, you know, when all the men, all our fathers and brothers came, everybody started to understand a bit more about it.

You know when all the men came back, they just didn’t want to talk about what they had seen, and just wanted to get back to their family life, get a job and settle down to their own home again and their children again, because their children were almost strangers to them, and our fathers were strangers to us. It was this man coming home that we probably hadn’t seen or remembered, because they probably hadn’t been heard or seen for years, so it was like a stranger coming back to the house. But V.E. Day itself was very exciting.