"There was an atmosphere of excitement from early dawn," jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton recalled. By lunchtime, there were 100,000 people outside Buckingham Palace.

"It wasn't long before I had a band. A man appeared with a trombone, someone else turned up with a big drum." He ended up in a handcart - "pushed at terrifying speed down The MallA road running from Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square. It became the most fashionable place in London when it was first laid out in 1660., with the rest of the band puffing along behind".

All across Britain, the Victory in Europe Day celebrations went on late into the night. After six years of war, people had earned them.

Tomorrow, the 75th anniversary will be marked with a series of events, including a speech by the Queen and a national singalong of Vera Lynn's famous song, We'll Meet Again - though street parties have been cancelled because of the pandemic.

Winston Churchill described VE Day as "the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind". Many people, however, had mixed feelings. Millions had died; cities lay devastated; food was in short supply. And there was still bitter fighting in the Far East, where JapanAn island country in East Asia, with a population of nearly 126 million. would not surrender until 10 August.

Pat Hazlehurst, whose husband had been killed in 1944, wrote in her diary: "I was tied to the office all day and then I went home and put my head under a pillow. There was nothing for me to celebrate."

David Ben-GurionHonoured in Israel as 'the Father of the Nation', he led the effort to establish a Jewish state, finally succeeding in 1948. He was born David Grun in Poland, but took the name of a Jewish hero who had fought the Romans., who was to become the first prime minister of Israel, wrote: "Victory day - sad, very sad." Like every other Jew, he had the huge number of innocent people who had died uppermost in his mind.

For housewife Nella Long, there was a sense of anti-climax. "I feel as if I'd sat through a long, tedious play," she wrote, "only living for the finale, longing for the time I could breathe sweet air, go home [...] and as if, instead, as each player had left the stage, they had disappeared and the lights gradually dimmed, till the last performer had said, 'That's all - you can go home now.' And all the audience had looked at each other, uncertain of the next move."

But teacher Wynne Lewis was less equivocal: it was "that rapturous day of brilliant sunshine and peaceful blue sky towards which we had groped through six years of terrifying black-out! That great day had come at last!"

Some say that it is only by reading about individuals that we can get a real sense of a historical event. It is easy to forget that people who lived a long time ago were basically the same as us. Their letters and diaries remind us of the fact, and make us think about how we might have behaved in a similar situation. Instead of being a collection of abstract facts, history comes alive.

Others argue that though personal stories give colour to events, we need to see the bigger picture. It is not one individual's experience of a battle that matters, but the decisions that led to it and the factors that determined its outcome. That means taking into account the politics of the day, and the actions of the most influential people - not the person in the street.