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On May 7th 1945 my father Tom Townsend, then a young man, having served in the Royal Corps of Signals with the British Expeditionary force in France and having being evacuated from St Malo in 1940, was working for the Post Office in central London repairing telephone lines. He happened to be in the office of Reuters News Agency this particular morning when this cable came in over the teleprinter announcing the news of the German surrender. In the ensuing mayhem, when everyone rushed into the street to spread the news, my father went to the teleprinter and tore off the message. He always treasured it and his stories of his wartime adventures, both exciting and scary but also often funny, became staples of family entertainment. He lived to be a very old man when, suffering from dementia, these experiences were at the forefront of his mind and in his last few days in hospital he sang the war time songs he remembered word perfect to the ward. He died on 19th October, 2010, aged 95. It made us realize how formative those experiences of war were for his generation, now fast disappearing, and how much it made them appreciate normal uneventful life in postwar years.