We passed under a tree every day on our way from the new house by the cemetery to my granddad's newsagents' shop.

When I say the new house, I mean, of course, the back-to-back in the cobbled street on which mum and dad had just put down a deposit of £200 towards the total cost of £950. And when I say we, I mean my dad in his RAF uniform and me having a ride on his shoulders. I used to hope it had been raining, then passing under the tree I could pull a branch and make the drips run down dad's neck. So he would pretend to squeal and I would get the giggles. Pure joy being on your dad's shoulders when you're three.

That's my recollection of the end of the Second World War. But it's a funny thing: you feel you lived through events that happened before you were born. I suppose it's because all the talk is of what's just happened and if you're - as my gran called me - "a little pig with big ears" - you take in everything. So, though I don't remember the night the bomb fell on the Methodist Chapel in Oak Road, I'm sure I heard the bang and saw it in every blazing detail.

"Hitler was aiming for the railway line," said my granddad "or the gasworks". I thought granddad was mad - surely Hitler must have been aiming for the paper shop! But I remember the flags as well, all the hundreds of Union Jacks carried by the shoals of children herded into a victory parade along Oak Road. And the women in their headscarves, standing arms folded on doorsteps as we marched past. You could tell we had been through a war. There were gaps in the rows of houses where Hitler - whether aiming for the gas works or the railway - had managed to wreck bits of Armley and kill a few families as they slept.

There was the nine o'clock news on the wireless. This always came on just after granddad had shut the shop and I sat at the table helping him to count the day's takings. "Count the shillings into twenties, the half crowns into eights and the three-penny bits into fours." It's like English as a foreign language now, isn't it? And everybody sat in silence as Mr Churchill spoke to the nation. I felt I knew Mr Churchill personally and I was convinced that, because of him, we were safe.

There were a lot of men and women in uniform, khaki and Air Force blue. Even then I thought the "girls" in the WAAFS and the ATS looked smashing. These soldiers and airmen would give you things. Every time you saw one of them, you'd be given chocolate. God knows where they got it - we'd none in the shop. And little homemade models of aeroplanes, the Spitfire and the Lancaster being the favourites. I also had a Mosquito and (an American) Flying Fortress and I would set them all up on the table after breakfast and make aeroplane noises.

In 1945 there was triumph, exhaustion, relief and love. The love - the first time I'd seen anyone with that enchanted look in their eyes - was Auntie Doris who had just come back from serving with the RAF in Egypt and told us she was going to marry her fianc Owen in the New Zealand Air Force. She said she was "engaged", and I thought it made her sound like a telephone. May 1945. It was Peace in our time - at last.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.