Not dancing, but watching

Amid a seething crowd of revellers in Piccadilly Circus a band of drably dressed young people, some in uniform, hold hands and dance deliriously in a circle of unadulterated joy. Just outside the circle a gently smiling young woman is watching them, her eyes cast down, a little excluded from the group but clearly enjoying the atmosphere.

The young woman who is not dancing, but watching, is my mother, Cynthia Ledsham (later Thompson), who died on 31^stMarch this year (not of Covid-19 — her death certificate simply reads “old age” which is strangely gratifying).

The above photograph is one of many Picture Post images that have been reproduced thousands of times over the past 75 years to symbolise the mood of Londoners on the news that Nazi Germany had capitulated. It has been quite a favourite among picture editors — perhaps because the image of happy young people skipping around an invisible maypole seemed to reach deeply into English tradition on this special May Morning.

But it probably wouldn’t have pleased the Picture Post editorial team to learn that one of their most-reproduced stock photos prominently features a staffer from the rival Time Life building. Cynthia was working as a researcher for Time magazine and as the great news reached the Time offices in London, Cynthia, who had just celebrated her 21^st birthday, was ordered to go out into the streets and soak up the atmosphere.

She had begun working at Time as a secretary earlier in the war. The contrast could not have been greater between her parents’ suburban Brentford home and the glamourous Time Life building filled with, of all the most exotic things imaginable, Americans, and many of them excitingly, modishly left-wing.

A true expert at self-invention, Cynthia talked her way into being designated a researcher, and not long after that, a reporter. This was despite having virtually no education. She left school at 15 and because her parents regarded her as “delicate” she spent as many days stuck at home with Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia as she did at school.

With her smiling enthusiasm and English Rose looks, she seems to have been adopted with warmth but not a little condescension as a sort of pet by the seasoned Time journalists. A number of them were staunch Communist supporters and retained their old sympathies for decades after the war, despite all the evidence of history.

One of these Time Life friends, the photographer David E. Scherman, who took the celebrated photograph of the legendary photographer and model Lee Miller reclining in Hitler’s bathtub, informed me confidently when I visited him at Cape Cod in the early 80s: “This Solidarity thing in Poland? It’s never going to come to anything, you know.”

And in May 1945 this was more or less how the sophisticated New Yorkers working at Time magazine regarded the fate of Europe, including Britain. As Cynthia picked up her notebook to dive into the cheering crowds, one of the Communist-leaning American journalists — we don’t know his name — said to her, with something of a sneer (according to Cynthia’s telling of the story), “You know this little country of yours is finished, don’t you? Bankrupt and beyond repair.”

So the truth behind the photograph is that Cynthia arrived in Piccadilly Circus feeling “rather depressed and confused. Someone handed me some kind of medallion, or put it round my neck,” she recalled years later. “I have no idea what it was.” In the Picture Post photograph she is glancing down at this mysterious object, which looks like a modern ID tag on a lanyard.

For me, the contempt in that American journalist’s dismissal of Britain’s future is echoed today in the contempt I have noticed many people, especially on the Left, expressing for everything Britain has got up to in recent years — whether it’s leaving the EU or struggling against Covid-19. Much of that contempt centres on an imagined smugness or over-confidence of an island people.

This image of the British “spirit” is an Aunt Sally, a straw man. There is no such thing as a British spirit — simply a particular strategy for reacting to adversity which might be shared by anyone in the world. “Keep Calm and Carry on” or “keep smiling through” isn’t self-delusion, it’s survival. What’s the alternative? To collapse in a sobbing heap?

Cynthia knew about bankruptcy. She knew it was shameful. She had seen her family sell up everything to save one unlucky uncle from it. The process all but ruined her father, though he managed to start all over again. To call her country “bankrupt” was a special kind of insult.

As she stood in Piccadilly Circus surrounded by whooping crowds, Cynthia may also have been mulling over her own war experience. At 15 she “added” months onto her age in order to join the WRAF. Within weeks, being a quick learner, she was a fully trained radar operator, tracking aircraft movements in the Battle of Britain to help save the lives of pilots not much older than herself. She shared a huge dormitory with young women of all walks of life who kept each other entertained after lights-out with tales of their exploits with the opposite sex (“And I said to ‘im, ‘if you touch me there you’ll ‘ave to marry me’” was one of her favourite overhearings). She was constantly aware that the bombers passing overhead were heading for her father’s home in London.

“What was it like in the Blitz?” she was often asked, and lately she simply answered, “I wasn’t so much afraid of the bombing, it was the possibility of them invading… but you trained yourself very much not to worry. I remember saying to myself, ‘I am never going to panic. Because when you panic, you lose control of what you do’.” This idea formed in her head while watching, with distaste, her unlovable stepmother “in a frightful state” as they sat in the cellar when the air raid alarm sounded.

This is what VE Day meant for Cynthia: it was the end of a struggle to stay alive, but that struggle had also given her the belief that life was too precious to spend it being negative, and that included being negative about the people in charge. She believed that most people, including politicians, were trying to do their best, most of the time, and there was no point in either worshipping them or hating them.

While my parents unhesitatingly voted Labour after the war, later they became disillusioned with what Cynthia called “people who are always running Britain down”.  If, in our current state of confusion we have anything to learn from the joy of VE Day 75 years later, this might be it.