IT'S VE Day on May 8. Sixty years since the end of the Second World War, six decades of peace and, for the most part, increasing prosperity for us all.

I'll be taking my kids to a local village to watch a parade and to try to drum home, yet again, just why we're all able to be out enjoying ourselves and eating ice-cream, rather than being forced to live on our knees and speak German.

Or, in the case of my own family, our ancestry being what it is, herded off to the gas ovens.

The reason we are able to live as we do is because other people, who were once young like us, were willing to put their lives on hold for six, long years.

They lived with bombs, bullets, air-raids, fear, misery, and shortage, because they knew that to shirk their duty meant the end of civilisation as we know it.

Like young people today, I doubt whether many of the 18 and 20-somethings who signed up or were conscripted off to fight, wanted to go.

Like us, they would have been much happier going to work, joining their mates at the pub, playing cricket on the green or spending time with their families.

But they gave it all up - thousands of them made the ultimate sacrifice - to face down the Nazi monster and, by their efforts, allow Europe to become the free, democratic place it is today.

How many of those who went off had an awful feeling they wouldn't come back? How many of the mothers and wives who "showed a British smile" and kept their tears for when the kids were in bed, had that dreadful feeling too?

Thank God for these people, our parents and grand-parents, and their courage, sacrifice and nerve.

Unable to change the habits of a lifetime, they were still at it after the war, anxious not to distress us, their grandchildren, with the horrific truth of what it's like to live through a global conflict.

My Grandma Elsie told me that it was "exciting", sleeping in the giant caves up on the hill while hell fire rained down on her home city.

Grandpa Don would cheerfully show us kids the scars from the bullet he took in Africa, and carefully avoid answering questions like, 'Did it hurt?'

Grandad Albert would entertain us with stories of all the jolly japes they got up to in the POW camp.

And Grandma Dolly would describe the enormous fun of living with six separate households in one freezing cold mill house, as they did during their evacuation years.

To a man or woman they never complained and they rarely described the horrors they saw.

They were, as Churchill's grandson Nicholas Soames, put it this week, "a unique generation" and one we should be proud to honour.

Now, I'm older and I've got kids, too, I think I can finally understand a little of what it must have been like to watch your child or husband go off to war knowing, in your heart, that only the lucky would return alive.

The people who did all that for the rest of us are old now, some of them curmudgeonly, others cantankerous.

Others still, are embittered, wondering if what they did and what they went through was all worth it.

I'd like them to know that despite the vicissitudes of modern life, especially when the government shamefully can't organise a proper VE Day for them on the day, what they did WAS worth it.

Everything we have today was bought with their blood, and our achievements are built on their fortitude.

Thanks to them, most of us will not have to see our husbands and sons conscripted off to war.

Thanks to them, our children's futures have been secured. And I, for one, will never, ever stop being grateful.