A Hertfordshire borough council kicked off a row this month over whether a military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE Day might be considered ‘too elitist’.
Speaking during a meeting of the Dacorum district council on 2 April, Lib Dem councillor Caroline Smith-Wright said that while ‘street parties’ might bring people together, a parade would just be for the ‘elite’.
Having read her full, stop-start statement, it seems to me that she appeared to be complaining less about ‘elitism’ than pomp. Perhaps she feared that a military parade would promote the dangerous notion that the war was won through courage, discipline, sacrifice and military might, rather than, say, community spirit or ‘values’ – such as those of Paddington Bear.
Regardless, even Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, presumably speaking from a specially installed bouncy castle on Parliament Square, said a ban on VE Day parades might be a step too far. ‘There will be a VE parade, I’m delighted to say’, he panted. ‘I’m really looking forward to VE celebrations, the 80th anniversary.’ I too look forward to seeing Ed leading the marching band, hopefully on his ceremonial hobby horse.
Still, the nation does appear to be struggling with a deeper question as we approach the 80th anniversary of VE Day. Namely, is it finally time to let the war go?
Given that 1939-45 was surely a period of unexampled misery, privation and grief, that shouldn’t be so hard, should it? Well, we know the answer, of course. Winning the war – and keeping our collective pecker up as we did so – is the foundational myth of modern Britain. It is the Blitz and Britain’s ‘Very well – alone!’ stance that reminds us of our moral fibre and national character.
But 80 years is a good approximation for the limits of living memory. And as we prepare to mark the anniversary of VE Day in May there is a dawning awareness that this is likely to be the last time that it can be meaningfully commemorated – that is to say, in the presence of anyone who was actually there.
I was born in May 1965 and will, absurdly, turn 60 on the day after the VE Day anniversary. Obviously, I don’t remember the war, but for anyone of my generation the metallic echoes were still clanging around us as we grew up. I don’t recall any bombsites or egg shortages, but no Sunday afternoon was complete without a bit of British pluck winning the day on the telly. And no self-respecting sitcom in the 1970s could manage without a character played by a Deryck Guyler, a Ballard Berkeley or a Stephen Lewis, to give young ‘uns the benefit of their hard-won insights and reminiscences.
We watched those shows and recognised that this archetype, at once defiant and self-deprecating, was in our midst. And it seemed eternal – Dad’s Army was not only set in the war and steeped in period nostalgia, it also had a character, Jones, who was gently mocked within the show itself for his tendency to bang on about his earlier service in Africa.
When we ran out to play, the war was still very much available as a legend with which to conjure. We had Action Man, of course. We had 1:32 scale soldiers, representing everything from the Desert Rats of the 8th Army to the unignorably stylish Wehrmacht. We had some rudimentary lingo. But more shockingly, in hindsight, we had access to artefacts like decommissioned sidearms, bayonets and gas masks.
And we were surrounded by real veterans. First World War heroes were the ones who were very old then – papery skin, wispy hair, prone to sudden unscheduled naps, with perhaps an empty sleeve pinned heart-rendingly across a jacket, patched and mossy with fading ribbons. The Second World War ones were those with a firm handshake, who could still stand at the bar and sport a ’tache without irony. They could tell you a story or two, possibly of bravery, or of the grateful French girls they met, or of the souvenir they brought back for the local GP.
But those images are absurdly outdated. The First World War veterans, like the cast of Dad’s Army, are all long gone. I remember the last two receiving their final marching orders in July 2009 – first Henry Allingham in Hove, then Harry Patch in Somerset.
That seems like yesterday. And now the Second World War heroes have the wispy hair and the wheels. The further away we get, the more the two wars begin to converge. And the more the veterans converge, too.
Time, as the saying surely goes, is a bastard. It is utterly relentless. Nevertheless, it is still hard to grasp that even most ‘old people’ do not now remember the war. That elderly gent holding you up in the Post Office queue was more likely to have worn military attire to affiliate with Sgt Pepper than in service of King and Country.
With time, too, comes unwelcome clarity, not least about what ‘winning’ the war really meant. For all the cheer of VE Day street parties, the spoils of war were and remained distinctly absent from the national table. It was to be another nine years before rationing finally ended, just in time for the humiliation of Suez. It took 15 years after the war’s conclusion for national service to be phased out. And it was many decades before the debts to the New World were finally settled (the last repayment for US war loans was made in 2006). Today, a growing number of living subjects are likely to suggest that, were the ghosts of the fallen to walk through our modern town centres, they might conclude that it had all been a pointless waste of time.
As our nation seems to creak and strain ever harder along fault lines that no one seems to know how to fix, or even dare to name, there is real pathos in our determination to do the Greatest Generation proud one last time. I certainly share it.
No doubt, there are millions of us (‘us’, he says, approaching his 60th birthday) who would still rush to a front, home or abroad, if such a thing could be manifested to defend. But it can’t. That front is all around us now. It operates in a different dimension to the beaches at Normandy, or Walmington-on-Sea. Nobody can any longer pretend that if push came to shove, we’d all rally round the flag. We can barely agree on which one to wave at the Last Night of the Proms.
So we should give it everything, one last time, on 8 May and let those last few survivors know that we remember and that our gratitude still burns. But once this is done, Britain is really going to need a new foundational myth if we are to right the boat we’re all in together now.
I have no idea what it might be, but we do need something. I just pray it won’t be another war, let alone a civil one. Or worse still, the values of Paddington Bear.
Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.
