For five years and eight months, Britain had been dark.
The blackout began two days before war was declared, and it meant no street lights, no lit shop windows, no illuminated signs, headlamps masked down to slits, and every window in every house covered by heavy curtains or painted board before dusk. Wardens patrolled to check. People fell into canals and were run over in the dark in numbers that shocked everybody.
On the evening of the eighth of May, nineteen forty five, the lights came back on.
Buildings that a whole generation of children had never seen lit were floodlit: St Paul's, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben. Children were carried outside to look at street lamps. There are accounts of small children being frightened by them, because they had never seen one working.
The surrender was signed in a schoolhouse in Reims in France at half past two in the morning on the seventh of May, to take effect the following night.
The news leaked before the official announcement, because an Associated Press correspondent who had been present broke the embargo, and so a good deal of the world knew on the seventh while governments were still arranging to announce it on the eighth.
Britain and America declared the eighth of May a holiday. Churchill spoke at three in the afternoon and told people that the war in Europe would end at one minute past midnight.
A second ceremony was held in Berlin late on the eighth, at Soviet insistence, and because of the time difference it was already the ninth of May in Moscow when it was signed. That is why Russia and a number of other countries mark the ninth rather than the eighth, and it is not a political dispute but a clock.
In London, people did not go to any particular place. They simply went out.
Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus filled. People climbed the lamp posts and the lions and the statues. Strangers danced in lines through the streets. A very great deal of alcohol was drunk and the pubs ran dry by evening.
Churchill appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the King and Queen, and again from a balcony in Whitehall, where he told the crowd that this was their victory, and the crowd shouted back that it was his, and he said no, it was not.
Across the country there were street parties, thousands of them, organised in a few hours. Tables were carried out and put end to end down the middle of terraced streets. Families pooled rations, and a good many people quietly produced things they had been saving for years in a cupboard for exactly this.
Bonfires were lit on bomb sites, and in a number of places people burned an effigy of Hitler on top of them.
There is one small story from that night that has stayed better known than most.
Princess Elizabeth was nineteen and had spent the last part of the war as a driver and mechanic in the women's auxiliary service. Her sister Margaret was fourteen.
They asked their father whether they could go out into the crowd, and he said yes. So they left the palace with a small group of young officers, in uniform, and walked out into the middle of it.
They queued outside the Ritz. They joined a line of people doing the conga through the hotel and out the other side. Nobody recognised them, or if anybody did, nobody said so.
And then, with the rest of the crowd, they walked back to the palace and stood outside it and shouted for the King and Queen to come out, along with everybody else. Elizabeth said afterwards that she remembered lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, and being terrified of being recognised, and that it was one of the most memorable nights of her life.
She was Queen for seventy years and told that story to a documentary team in her seventies, and the thing she kept returning to was the anonymity.
It is worth being careful about the photographs, because they show one thing and not another.
The war was not over. It was over in Europe. In the Pacific and in Burma it was continuing, and it was continuing badly, and the men fighting there had by then thoroughly earned their own nickname for themselves: the Forgotten Army.
So in a very large number of British and American and Australian and Indian households, the eighth of May was a day when everybody else in the street was dancing and somebody's son was still in Burma, or was a prisoner of the Japanese with no news of him for three years.
There were also the families of the dead, and by May nineteen forty five there were a great many of them, and a street party is a difficult thing to walk past.
And there was something else, which had only become fully known in the previous three weeks. The camps had been reached in April. Newsreel footage from Belsen had been shown in British cinemas at the end of that month, and audiences had come out of them silent.
So the celebration and the discovery arrived in the same fortnight. Several diarists of that spring wrote almost exactly the same sentence, which is that they did not know what to feel and had stopped trying.
The practical situation did not improve, and in several respects it got worse.
Rationing continued. Bread, which had never been rationed during the war, was rationed in nineteen forty six, because the world was short of grain and Britain was broke. Potatoes were rationed in nineteen forty seven. Sweets did not come off ration until nineteen fifty three.
Something over two hundred thousand British homes had been destroyed and many more damaged, and there was nothing like enough housing. Families lived in prefabricated bungalows put up as a temporary measure, and a fair number of those temporary bungalows were still lived in fifty years later and were loved.
And in July, ten weeks after that balcony, Britain held a general election and voted Churchill out by an enormous margin.
It surprised the world and it did not surprise the electorate. The country had spent six years being told what it was fighting for, and had decided that it wanted a different sort of country afterwards, and it was not confident that the man who had won the war was the man to build it.
The church bells are worth a note. They had been silenced in June nineteen forty, on the order that they were to be rung only to warn of an invasion. They were rung once for El Alamein in November nineteen forty two, and freely again from the following year. On VE Day they rang everywhere at once, and for a child it was a sound with nothing attached to it, because for almost all of the life they could remember the bells had been silent.
The blackout had one lasting statistical effect that people rarely mention. Road deaths in Britain rose sharply in the first months of the war, before speed limits and masked headlights were sorted out, and in that first winter more British civilians were killed on the roads in the dark than by enemy action.
Not everybody went out. Mass Observation, an organisation that recorded ordinary British life, collected diaries from that day, and a striking number describe people who stayed at home, tidied the house, listened to the wireless, and went to bed early.
Here is something to think about tonight. On the same day, in the same country, some people were dancing in the street and some people could not get out of a chair. Both of those were the correct response to that day. How do you think a country holds both at once?