VE Day and the taboo of victory

I was born in 1983, and when I was a child, the second world war still had a significant cultural presence in British life. The youngest veterans – men born in the mid-twenties – remained relatively sprightly. The war was recent enough that there were men around who had been senior officers or otherwise involved in important decision-making. War films were a staple of Sunday afternoon and Bank Holiday TV, and we played ‘English versus Germans’ in the playground. Not until 2007 did the House of Commons lose its last member who had been under arms in 1939-45: the Indian-born Piara Khabra died just a few days before Tony Blair stood down as PM. Robert Runcie, who was Archbishop of Canterbury for the first eight years of my life, had won the MC on the Rhine.  

We geriatric millennials had perhaps the last glimpse of the war as a great Boy’s Own adventure, part of a long British tradition of martial exploits that went back hundreds of years.