VE Day memories

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Monika
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We were reminiscing last day about 8 May 1945. My OH remembers a huge bonfire and the letting off of emergency flares as fireworks in Ilkley. I was in Czechoslovakia (as it was then) hosing down Russian soldiers who had arrived in our garden, hot, foot sore and weary and glad to get rid of their weapons which they hung high up in the trees in our wood where we found them when leaves dropped in autumn! They also gave me so-called 'pilots chocolate' with a very high cocoa content (I had never tasted chocolates during the war) which kept me awake all night. Ahhh, memories .....
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oldherbaceous
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Dear Monika, you certainly have seen and been through some experiences in your life...makes me feel quite guilty when I grumble about something quite insignificant, in comparison...
Kind Regards, Old Herbaceous.

There's no fool like an old fool.
Stephen
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Long before my time! My parents spoke about their wartime experiences (they met at a Royal Ordnance factory making & testing plastic explosive) but never commented about VE Day in particular.
As so many of their generation they largely refrained from comment.
Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
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peter
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My dad, Flight Lieutenant RAFVR, would have still been in Imperial India at an airfield in what is now Bangladesh. Mum was in the Isle of Man, then still Miss Gale and mourning the loss of her baby brother Jimmy, Irish Guards, killed during the push to join the airborne troops at Arnhem and Niemegen
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Shallot Man
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peter. We must never forget.
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Primrose
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Not a VE Day memory but about a year after the war ended one of our local factories apparently decided it would conduct a test of its air raid siren on a Sunday lunchtime. No advance warning was given. They didn,t have the social media and communication systems we enjoy today.

My mother was just taking a hot casserole dish out of the oven when that awful urgent wailing went off. My mother stood rigid in shock for a second then dropped the hot casserole dish which discharged its bubbling contents all over the floor and promptly passed out, banging her head as she fell and her blood added to the nightmare of the scenario for me. . I could only have been about five or six years old at the time but the rest of the day seemed to be one of complete chaos and I still recall that incident as if it were yesterday.

And even now, the sound of an air raid siren wailing on a TV programme has the capacity to turn my blood to ice.
vivienz
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We live near Henstridge airfield which is a hop across the border into Somerset from our north Dorset location. A team of Yakovlev aircraft that normally fly from Compton Abbas were flying from Henstridge last week. On Thursday, some odd looking smoke was being produced by them and I commented to hubby that they'd never make the Red Arrows team like that. Anyway, it turns out it was their practice run for Friday when they were the first aircraft in the UK to do what's called sky typing. Here's a photo taken from our garden in the morning with their central message. It was such an impressive sight to see.

VE sky type.jpg
VE sky type.jpg (22.66 KiB) Viewed 2333 times
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Clive.
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I had read that sky typing had been permitted. ...but this explains the Yak' that I saw pop up on radarbox24, out the south west, when I was watching on there... whilst I was observing another group of aircraft that were heading around the country. :)

C.
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