newsChilhood memories about VE Day 1945: Five year old told to keep quiet about how his mother and father hoped Hitler would win the war
Street parties were held across Britain, marking what Christian vicars called the triumph of good over evil.
So many of the men and women who were children in 1945 are looking back and remembering. Eighty years ago they gathered in their hundreds of thousands (watched by proud parents but, tragically, often single mums) to enjoy parties held often in bomb-destroyed streets to mark Victory Day. The editor of this website TREVOR GRUNDY was told by his father to sit still, eat a bun and drink fizzy lemonade, join in the songs and not remove a paper Union Jack hat from his head and, above all, not say a word to anyone that his mum and dad had prayed Hitler would win the war.
This short extract from Memoir of a Fascist Childhood (William Heinemann, 1998 and Arrow Books 1999) tells a snippet about how a five-year-old felt that day. The whole book is an effort of truth and an attempt to partly explain how a Jewish woman lent herself to an anti-Semitic organisation until her mental collapse and tragic death in 1970.
ON VICTORY DAY every child in Loudon Road (St John’s Wood) and the adjoining area was invited to a large street party. Tables were set up in the middle of the road and there were bottles of lemonade, red, white and blue cakes, pictures of Mr Churchill doing his V-sign and at least six Union Jacks hanging from shops opposite the house where we had a one room flat. A dozen or so yards from the table was a large bonfire and on it a stuffed effigy of a man with a moustache and a lank lock of hair falling over one side of his forehead. I had seen this man sitting next to the potatoes and cabbages and in the greengrocer’s shop and women coming going said, ’Morning, Adolf. Not feeling much like bombing us today, are we?’
The day before Victory Day my parents had a gigantic row. Lovene and I stood out on the landing, listening to the shouting.
‘They’ll stick a Union Jack on his head and tell him to lie about Hitler,’ screamed my mother, ‘What did you go to prison for if you’re letting your only son be paraded in front of a burning Hitler?’
My father opened the flat door and told us to come inside. They both calmed down. They looked like Catherine Wheels that had burnt out and stopped spinning.
As if officially to end the row my mother made a cup of tea and then sat staring into space. My father went out to buy an evening newspaper and Lovene and I played anther instalment of a radio programme called The Way to the Stars. I was an RAF hero and Lovene was my girlfriend. Then we took it in turns to scrape the condensed milk tin and my mother said that we would both die of tin poisoning. My future was bleak. I’d become a drunk if I wasn’t careful or suffer a slow, lingering death from tin poisoning.
Lovene and Trevor Grundy pictured soon after the end of the Second World War
On the morning of the celebration, my father too me to the wash basin and combed my hair flat against my head, with a parting on the right which some of the kids in Loudon Road said was the girl’s side. He put me into a grey shirt and shorts and knotted my tie.
At eleven o’clock he tool me downstairs into the road and we joined a party of boys my own age. A large woman with an enormous bust out her arm round my shoulders and pulled me towards her. ‘ You from sixty six, are you luvvie?’ She put a paper Union Jack shaped like an upside-down ship on my head and someone took a photograph.
My father walked away but turned several times to check that I was all right. Within a few minutes, I was standing on my own holding a large sticky bun and a mug of lemonade.
‘Where’s your sister then, luvvie? What’s her name again? Something French?’
‘Levy something,’ said a man lifting an accordion from the back of a small car. ‘I think your dad must have made a few lady friends in France during the war to come up with a name like that.‘
They laughed and I remembered that my mother hadn’t said a word about Lovene attending the Victory Day parade. I wondered if if was only for boys but no, there were plenty of girls of Lovene’s age in the street that day.
After our lemonade and cakes, the vicar said that were gathering on this wonderful sunny day in 1945 to celebrate the end of the war and to praise God for making sure that good had once again triumphed over evil.
He turned to the man with the accordion and said, ‘I think now.’
The bonfire was lit and a vast orange flame leapt into the air and started to lick the face of the man with the moustache who crackled, slumped and exploded. After a while he disappeared, to the cheers of the children and the roars of approval from mums and dads, the greengrocer, the butcher, the postman and a couple of policemen who looked old and tired in their dark blue uniforms and helmets. The vicar beamed at the man with the accordion and later pretended to conduct an orchestra. Everyone was singing but I sat quite silent on my own.
Hitler has only got one ball
Goering his got one very small
Himmler has something similar
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.
I laughed and clapped with everyone else and then the Union Jack cake was cut. I kept the icing for Lovene in my pocket and told myself to remember the words of the song because I was good at that. I would sing the song to my mother when I got back hone
That would cheer her up.
The publication of this book in 1998 (hardback) and 1999 (paperback) led to the author being asked to talk to young Jews in Britain and Israel about Sir Oswald Mosley and British fascism. Mosley died in Paris in 1980. His British tour ended at the home of Sir Michael Rifkind, the former British Foreign Minister and a leading figure in Britain’s 280,000 strong Jewish community.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind with author Trevor Grundy at Sir Malcolm’s Edinburgh home in 2001
Note: Edna Grundy committed suicide in June 1970. Twenty years later in 1990 (the year before his death), Sidney Grundy told his son that his wife and Lovene and Trevor’s mother, Bertha Edna (nee Morris), was from Jewish stock in Whitley Bay, Northumberland.
Bertha Edna Grundy (nee Morris) the tragic mother of Lovene and Trevor
Lovene died on April 13, 2025. She was strong enough to say at the end of her life the Shema in Hebrew. She was cremated after a ceremony led by two Reform rabbis at the Jewish Cemetery in San Jose, California. The ceremony was attended by Lovene’s son Nicholas and his wife, Devan.