It's a double celebration for VE Day baby Vicky

Retired headmistress-turned-author Vicky, who lives in Welshampton, near Ellesmere, will mark her 80th birthday tomorrow (Thursday) by returning to her home village in East Yorkshire, where she will watch the commemorative flag being raised at the Royal British Legion.

The former headmistress of Ellesmere Primary School, said this year's event would be particularly poignant as few veterans from the conflict were now alive.

She was due to have been named Anne, after her aunt, but her parents had a hasty change of plan and decided to call her Victoria instead, to mark Britain's victory in the war against Germany.

Vicky joked that wartime prime minister Winston Churchill declared 'Never has there been a greater day than this' on the day that she was born.

But she was not particularly aware of the significance of her birthday when she was growing up on a remote farm.

"I knew I had this unusual name because of the day I was born, it's quite normal now, but then it was a very unusual name," she said.

"I was always known as Vicky, I thought that was my name until I started school. I was quite upset because I thought I had got my name wrong."

She moved to the Midlands after landing a place at Dudley Teacher Training College.

Vicky, who writes a regular column for the Shropshire Star, always takes time out to think about the fallen soldiers on her birthday, saying they gave their lives so that her generation could have a better life.

She had planned to mark the 75th anniversary in 2020 with a trip to London, and visit Buckingham Palace where Churchill delivered his famous victory address, but lockdown restrictions forced her to cancel this plan.

"This anniversary will be very different, as it will be the first major anniversary when there are very few veterans left," she said. 

"In the 1950s and 60s, everything just kept getting better and better, and I was able to take advantage of opportunities in education that weren't there before.

"I often think about my parents working on the farm underneath the flightpath, with the bombers heading over them on their way to Hull."

Vicky wrote a novel called It's Not A Boy, based on her life growing up on a farm in the years after the Second World War.