Ray Gould celebrated VE Day by banging a home-made drum and singing at the top of his voice.

He recalls: “I marched up and down with an improvised drum made from a tin can, singing: ‘We won the war in 1944’. When someone pointed out that it was 1945, I told them it didn’t rhyme!”

Mr Gould, of Stonesfield, was born in May 1939, just before the Second World War began, and was nearly six when it ended in Europe on May 8, 1945.

He writes: “I lived in Annesley Road on the Iffley Turn estate in Oxford and remember VE Day – I helped build a bonfire outside our house at No 25.

“The square of asphalt where the council repaired the road some time afterwards, remained as a reminder of that night for the rest of my boyhood.

“Annesley Road had two bonfires that night, partly because my mum, Bessie Gould, would not let us store all the wooden boxes, which we had collected from the Co-op grocers on Rose Hill, in the sideway to our house.

“This meant that my friends, including Ivor Wheatley and John Poulker, had a another pile of boxes in their sideways.

“There were so many children of similar ages who lived through the war in Annesley Road – Peter Bowles, a childhood friend, Marian Thomas, Ann and Derek North who lived next door, Joyce Newbold, twins Michael and David Day who lived opposite, Malcolm Purves and so many others whose names I am unable to recall. Most of us went to Donnington Primary School. The adults probably became very merry as the evening wore on. One event that sticks in my mind is a neighbour running through the ashes of the bonfire pushing someone in a wheelbarrow.”

Mr Gould remembers a Morrison air raid shelter in their dining room, which the family used as a dining table.

“This was made of steel with metal grilles fitted to the sides. We used it only once or twice when German bombers came over Oxford. I do remember Granny Gould refusing to get in the shelter, preferring instead to crouch underneath an upturned armchair.

“There were air raid shelters in Cornwallis Road opposite Donnington Primary School and we would practise walking across the road from the school into the shelters with our gas masks in their brown cardboard boxes slung across our shoulders.

“We had a circular white disc nailed to the front gatepost which I think indicated we had a stirrup hand pump for putting out fires. The disc remained on the gatepost for years after the war.”

* Any more VE Day memories to share with readers? Write and let me know.