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By Tony Baker

In May 1945, just two days after VE day, a party was thrown for all the children in East Barnet, then just a village on the outskirts of north London. There was little food, but we all sat at the trestle tables in the churchyard down in the village and had one or two glasses of home made lemonade and one iced bun each. The local baker supplied the buns and the grown ups all joined in and helped serve the children. I feel a bit ashamed now that I threw a tantrum because they ran out of the ‘boys’ white iced buns and I was given a ‘girls’ pink iced bun instead.

My contribution to the victory celebrations at the end of the war was decorating my bicycle with our Christmas decorations and taking part in the Victory Parade through East Barnet village and coming twenty third (out of twenty five) in the fancy dress competition, narrowly beating Clem Atlee and Joe Stalin. Proud parents dressed up nearly all the other children to look like our then national hero Winston Churchill. My mother left my two older sisters to think up my fancy dress and they were probably jealous of all the attention their much younger sibling was getting so they dressed me as a very fat Field Marshall Goering, with a pillow up the front of a white raincoat they’d scrounged and to the front of which they pinned rows and rows of cardboard milk bottle tops painted to look like the dozens of medals that the vain and arrogant Goering always wore. Most people immediately after the war saw little humour in anything German, and I’m sure my sisters knew my costume would be booed as I paraded and that they were scuppering all hopes I may have had of winning the fancy dress.

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