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It all seems a very long time ago, doesn’t it? Not the first VE Day, which really was a long time ago, but the age of innocence before the coronavirus pandemic. It is already difficult to

remember how the world looked just 75 days ago, when we had no idea what was about to happen to our lives. How hard must it be to recall the world as it was 75 years ago? A lifetime has

passed since those black and white images of cheering crowds were new. So much has happened, so many trials and tribulations, so many hopes and, now, so many fears. Those fears were implied

in Prime Minister’s solitary tribute at the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, lighting a candle in an eerily vacant Westminster Abbey, emptied of the veterans who would normally be there. It is a

sobering thought that the majority of the tens of thousands who have recently died of Covid-19 were of that generation who once celebrated victory in Europe. What kind of victory was it? In

sheer destructiveness of life and limb, it was more costly even than that of the Great War a generation earlier. The defeat of Germany had taken an unimaginable toll, one from which Europe

would take decades to recover. By the time Japan, too, had surrendered only three months later, the world had entered the nuclear era. Humanity had acquired the ability to destroy itself

entirely. Nobody now spoke of a “war to end all wars”. Nobody knew it on that happy day in May 1945, but the Cold War was already beginning. The peace that had brought such rejoicing would

soon resemble an armed truce, only with arms of a hitherto undreamt of power. Yet we know now, as nobody did then, that the two world wars would not be followed by a third. The Cold War

never did explode into a global nuclear conflict. The three generations that have grown up since 1945 were spared the experience of total war. For this blessing, we have the young people

going crazy on VE Day — and their contemporaries in America, Russia and elsewhere — to thank. It was that generation, those who were still young when the hostilities ceased, who brought the

Cold War to a peaceful end in 1989. People like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl and Pope John Paul II had all seen first hand what war was like. Their

watchword was: never again. And they were as good as their word.   For ordinary people, the postwar period was tough. Rationing lasted into the 1950s. Damaged cities took a decade to

rebuild; damaged lives even longer. Those who complain of austerity today did not experience what austerity meant then. Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, first aired in 1967, gently

parodies the hardships of older generations, but those who grew up during the 1940s and early 1950s really did live through the worst of times. It was, though, also the best of times. The

joy that shines out of the grainy photos shot on VE Day is the joy of hope. The famous _Picture Post _image of young women dancing in Piccadilly Circus, evoked here by Sarah Johnson

yesterday, captures both the ecstasy of the dancers, living in the moment, and the watchful detachment of her mother, already anticipating the future. That vertiginous combination, both the

intensity of those seizing the day and the wide horizon opening before them, gives VE Day a uniquely bittersweet quality. It deserves to be remembered and celebrated, not only for what it

meant to those who were alive at the time, but for what it can teach us all today. The Queen, who surely recalls that day as one of the happiest of her long life, will bring us together as

she always does when she broadcasts to the nation tonight. She, and the generation she represents so supremely well, deserve our gratitude.