"We got the first news last night & with no vino available there was no hilarity"
I am submitting the VE Day section of my parents’ wartime love story that I have compiled from hundreds of letters they exchanged from 1943 to 1946, which I now possess. I am lucky to have both sides of the correspondence.
Dad, Mick Goldstein, was a sergeant major gunnery instructor in the Royal Artillery, who in 1944 volunteered for the Jewish Brigade, for the final push in Italy.
Mum, Sylvia Goldstein, lived with her parents in Hackney during the Blitz and doodlebugs and was a secretary PA in Fleet Street, and an auxiliary nurse with the St John Ambulance Brigade.
Transcript:
Letter 1:
VE Night
My darling – I hardly know how to express my feelings on this momentous & wonderful day. Perhaps I haven’t quite grasped the truth of it all yet; it’s gone on too long & with too much suffering for its full import to make itself felt at once. Though I feel most overwhelmingly thankful & content & also excited, I don’t actually feel for celebrating without you, Mick dearest, though now when you come home, P.G., I really will feel like it. Thank God all that awful slaughter is over & please God the other may be over soon.
We’ve just come back – comparatively early for VE night, I suppose – from the West End, where we felt we had to go, against wiser advice. So I must write to you, sweetheart, & tell you how it’s been, & how very much I have missed you on this day for rejoicing.
The actual official news came through last night, after a day of feverish expectancy while I was at the Club. Mrs. Lionel had come, & brought a large bottle of orange gin cocktail in case. But one couldn’t help realising that there were many people who couldn’t make it an occasion for joy – I’d had a letter in the morning from Nina in which she said there wouldn’t be much occasion for them to be happy, having lost two boys & one of the girls at the Club who lost a brother was red-eyed from crying all day.
Coming home with Jack, the bonfires were already blazing all around the back streets. We walked along to see one, but somehow it seemed somewhat pathetic, on a bombed site, burning what looked like salvage material & with ragged little boys running rather quietly round it.
The phone rang incessantly last night & this morning & though we felt rather tired after a late night & disturbances by fireworks & a very noisy thunderstorm till the early hours, we got on a train – buses were quite hopeless – to Green Park Station – Piccadilly Circus Station was closed! & then walked down Piccadilly to the Hotel. The street was simply crowded with people all bedecked with red, white & blue, though it did seem to me that the rejoicing was all somewhat subdued & the absence of men particularly noticeable, even with so many Servicemen about. We were almost surprised to be able to get in to the Tea-dance at The Piccadilly Hotel which was quite enjoyable, though packed to suffocation, then we went out again to see more of London celebrating. Piccadilly Circus to Leicester Square was a mass of tightly-packed people, & one particularly funny scene was an Air Force & a Naval officer, rather blotto, precariously perched on a ledge outside a window on the top
[Letter cuts off]
Letter 2:
Sgt. M. Goldstein,
I don’t even know the date!
VE DAY
Happy Peace my darling & may God hasten the day of my return to start our lives anew together. My head is still in a whirl & not having heard it on the radio myself I was loth to believe it until an official order came through ordering a holiday today, so that this finds me at the side of a stream sitting in a pair of shorts, sunbathing on the banks & as ever dreaming of you.
We got the first news last night & with no vino available there was no hilarity but our Capt shot off a few Verey lights & some of the lads went to a nearby village. Mick & I walked back to our room in a fit of nostalgia reminisced on these war years bemoaned that we were forced to spend such an eventful day in such a one-eyed place. & my resolution [unclear], we drank a bottle of whisky, long treasured for the occasion, between us & the last I remember was the pair of us lying in our beds singing all the old songs from 'Nellie Dean' to the ‘Worst Vessel’! So you see darling you’re in love with a drunken sot.
I think it’ll take days for the significance of the event to strike us fully, months before it means anything to us individually & years before it affects the world still malleesh it’s over & that’s something.
Now they’ll start to get ready for the next one.
I was going to tell you that it’s on occasions like this that I miss you most, but why haggle, the fact is I miss you all day & night & every day & every night & will always do so while we’re apart.
God Bless you my darling.
Mick
P.S. I did say my prayers
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