VE Day puts the Covid crisis into perspective

Whatever the enormity of the Covid-19 crisis, it surely pales in comparison to the trauma experienced by the war generation. Yet for the first time in my life, I have an inkling of how it must have felt for the nation when victory in Europe was finally declared 75 years ago. They had been living with the threat of death on and off for six years. The sense of relief and joy and loss must have been overwhelming. We’ve had barely more than six weeks of fear and inconvenience and it’s not as if my husband is on the front line or bombs are dropping from the sky.

Then as now, I suppose, most people weren’t always directly in the thick of it, but quietly accepting their new reality, whether it was waiting for military orders or getting on with farming or factory work. Then as now, the scenery of life was transformed. I am sure they grew used to sandbags and blackout blinds, just as we will grow accustomed to plastic gloves and masks, though no one could really become inured to a dreaded next-of-kin telegram or call from the hospital.

In every other respect though, their experience was harsher. The rationing of most basic goods was probably rather more trying than the long wait for an Ocado delivery slot. The years-long evacuation of children to the houses of strangers must have been inconceivably harder than our ban on cuddles

Tougher times: Servicemen join revellers in Fleet Street to celebrate VE Day in 1945 between grandparents and grandchildren. As for the economic fallout, they ended up mortgaging the country to the US and paying 90 per cent tax rates.

Still, unlike Covid-19, the war brought people together from different worlds: posh women like my grandmother, working as a military secretary for the D-day landings, suddenly met workingclass women in an office for the first time and were shocked by the conditions they lived in, such as the ubiquity of fleas. The Blitz created the possibility of close contact between strangers. My other grandmother used to recall a time when she was walking in London and a bomb landed a few streets away. A nearby woman burst into tears. My grandmother, an immigrant from Eastern Europe via Palestine who had joined the British war effort as a translator, felt an instant affinity and invited her over for tea.

Now here we are, locked away from each other, with nothing but the sound of spoons banging on pots on a Thursday night to remind us that we are all experiencing the same emergency. Aside from the endless rota of government updates, there is only one other moment when it feels as if the nation stops to listen together. It’s when the Queen speaks.