Patricia Wagstaff’s Story

Available for over a year

Patricia Wagstaff from Appleton in Oxfordshire tells BBC Radio Oxford's Howard Bentham, how as a 14-year-old, they were told to take the afternoon off school. Then living in Hertfordshire, she cycled her bike up the hill to the village where her parent's lived. She remembers the delight that her father was at home at the time as he’d been invalided out of the navy. She was met at the front door by her parents as she got home from school. Her and her father rushed into the woods to cut down a tree to make a flag pole to hang the Union flag. She recalls how the village came out in force to celebrate the end of the war and she partied late into the evening with her close friends. She remembers that her friend, known as Pem, got tiddly on cider, and they had to take him home and put him to bed.