We went to the British Schools Museum for a home-ed workshop about World War II. I found it a lot better than I expected, because we actually got to go in a bomb shelter, and write with one of the special fountain pens in the classroom. We had two volunteers leading us round by the names of Yvonne and Sheila, who were really helpful to us. Yvonne was brought up in the second world war, so she had lots of stories to tell and she knew a lot about the tools and things used at the time. In fact, the workshop started at the beginning where everyone looked at the black-out curtains, the only torches people were allowed to use as a source of light, the gas clacker and also the heavy metal thing that gave a warning of an air raid. Both the gas clacker and that were really loud.
In Germany, they created lots of different bombs to drop on us, mainly in London. One of them was called a Doodle Bug. It may not sound very sinister, but it was a really dangerous object. The idea was that fuel was loaded up in it so that when the fuel ran out it would randomly drop, so the army force filled it up with enough fuel so that when it landed it would explode in the capital. As I said before, Yvonne had lots of stories to tell. The most amazing one, I found, was when she was staying in Surrey, where her grandmother lived. She went away with her mother, and her sister, who was very lucky to be able to go with her and not in a separate place instead. One night, while she was in bed with her mother, her mother heard a distant humming noise. Then it got louder and droned on for a lot longer. She grabbed hold of Yvonne and shoved her under the bed. Then she came under with her. When the noise stopped, it happened to be that a Doodle Bug had got just a little too much fuel in it, and had stopped right above Yvonne’s grandmother’s house. It dropped in the garden and made a massive explosion. Yvonne told us that she could hear all sorts of crashes and some glass smashing, and when the explosion was over, the windows had been smashed into the rooms and the whole place was a gigantic disaster. She told us she could still feel her mother’s fear from that day. It must have been really terrifying.
We got to go in the classrooms used in Victorian times. There were a load of wooden benches and desks with loads of slots and ink pots and dips and cupboards in them! We practised writing with a fountain pen (I was quite skilled because I use mine regularly at home) on some handwriting paper the staff and volunteers had left out. That was super fun as well.
We also went in the bomb shelter I briefly spoke about earlier. We had to go down a set of stairs just outside the school, and into quite a warm room at the bottom. I guessed (though I was not told) that the room wouldn’t have been there and would just have been the bomb shelter at the bottom of the steps. The bomb shelter was made of a funny, ridged tin material, and inside it there was a wooden slat bunkbed, with no mattress, blanket or anything and also a small bench for the adults. Sheila said that there would probably have been a small wooden bed, again with no eiderdown, for the granny to lie on if you had evacuated to her house, but there wasn’t one there.
The headmaster of the school, Mr Fitch, worked in the school for forty years, and lived in a small house at the edge of the school grounds with his wife and his seven children, two of which sadly died in their infancy. We were toured through the home, which would have been a lovely place to live in. I thought it was actually quite roomy for a family like theirs. It was really old and the materials and things in it were things such as old-fashioned mangles, laced white nighties, and so on. I would have really loved to live there, only it was very draughty and cold!
I would definitely go again. It was super duper fun!
