Learning A Lesson

It was the late 1980s. I was about 25 years of age and quite recently married. We had a tiny one-bedroomed house on a 100% mortgage with a 15% interest rate (yes it really was like that in those days) in Crawley.

Once settled into married life, I grew an unignorable thirst for knowledge, thus at weekends on my own, I began taking myself up to London. I visited the museums mostly. These were the very same museums I was dragged to by my parents as a kid. Even then, back in the day, I loved seeing the enormous blue whale or giant dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History Museum, or the even more giant battleship guns parked up outside the Imperial War Museum. The shells alone for the gun were taller than I was at the time.

It was the Imperial War Museum I was heading for this time. I’d heard somewhere (the radio probably, this was years before the Internet) that there was a ‘Blitz Experience’ installation going on. It sounded really interesting and, if I rightly recall, totally free! Always a bonus.

Arriving there, it was reassuring to see the same menacing-looking guns still outside, but somewhat embarrassing to find I had grown only marginally taller than the shells standing next to them still. Interestingly, there wasn’t the section of the Berlin Wall (like there is today) nearby. 

The infamous wall, over 4m high, symbolizing the Iron Curtain, where the tyrannical East meets West, didn’t come down until 1989. 

As per usual, when going to these sorts of places, I arrived almost as the doors opened. Even so, the museum was far from empty of other visitors. With that in mind, I followed signs and headed straight for the main thing I’d gone there for, The Blitz Experience. 

There was a queue of about fifteen hushed-voiced people (none were on phones of course, they hadn’t been invented yet!) including a small boy keen to show off his Ninja Turtle T-shirt to anyone who was vaguely interested. Ignoring the kid, I joined the end and waited in trepidation for what might happen next. As we moved along, I realised we were standing in a mock-up of pre-WWII London. About us were detailed and substantial looking models of famous landmarks. If I remember correctly, among rows of streets and warehouse buildings there was also a St Paul’s Cathedral, a Tower Of London, and a Battersea Power Station. It all looked very real and more permanent than one might expect. Taking it all in, I noticed it was slowly getting darker. The sun was going down on 1939 London.

Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, a siren began sounding. It was the same siren we’d all heard in those old war films. The haunting wailing, the warning that death was on its way. From one side appeared a man. He was wearing dark coloured clothing and a flat tin helmet with a white W painted on the front.

The man was part of the experience. Looking very much like an extra from Dad's Army, in character, he began herding us all forwards.

‘Quick, quick, Jerry’s on his way. Inside the shelter. Stop dilly-dallying now,’ he called in an actors' cockney accent. Half expecting him to top it off with a ‘Don’t panic, don’t panic!’ in a Corporal Jones kind of way, I and my fellow other Londoners shuffled purposely onward.

By now it was almost completely dark, and, not only were there sirens, there were searchlights too. Beams of yellow danced to and fro across fake horizons either side of us.

At last, we were all ‘safely’ inside a bomb shelter. It was warm, clammy, claustrophobic and needed a dam good sweeping out, all this only added to the realism of the experience.

‘Mind yer eds now! Sit ya selves down.’ The warden gestured to rows of wooden benches lining the walls. The door had barely closed before bombs began landing. God, it was noisy. There was whistling and thundering as time and time again bombs landed somewhere just outside our protective corrugated metal shell. The shelter shook and rattled, to a point I thought it was about to come crashing down on top of us, burying us alive. An explosion happened, much louder than the others. We must have taken a direct hit. The noise was horrendous. It was genuinely petrifying.

I wasn’t the only one who thought this too intense. In the dim light I saw everyone looking at everyone else with genuine fear in their eyes. This was hell. Too realistic? The small boy had begun to scream. Ninja Turtles were useless here. With both arms wrapped around like an Alien facehugger, he was throttling his father in fear.  

Maybe it was my fuelled imagination but I swear I smelled smoke, fire. London was burning and we were trapped inside a steel coffin. Were we going to get out of here alive? Whatever my fate, I was pretty certain the dad, now blue in the face, wasn’t going to make it either way.  

After too long, the bombs stopped. The thunder and crashing stopped. Our fear of certain death ebbed away. The Heinkels above us, their bomb bays empty now, had flown back to whence they had come. The air raid was over.

‘Up you get then,’ spoke our air raid warden still very much in character. He was as relieved as anyone to see the child loosen his grip on his father’s neck. We all watched as the man come up onto his feet relatively unscathed.

‘Follow me, quick quick’ the warden insisted, whilst opening another door at the other end of the shelter. ‘The bombers have gone now. Our Spitfires sent them packing.’

Ushering us through, we were yet again put out into darkness. With no obvious place to go, we waited for further instructions. I could smell burning, I was sure of that now. I began to make things out in the darkness. We were again in a diorama of London, a very different London, a bombed-out burning London. The sun was coming up now. The lighter it became the worse London looked. Devastation, carnage, destruction. Death was all around us. The small boy had stopped crying. Wiping his eyes on his father's shoulder, he looked around. Silent, his face said it all. ‘Why?’ It asked. ‘Why did this happen Daddy?’

That experience, so long ago, affected me beyond measure. But as horrific as it was for me and the small boy, it was nothing compared to what Londoners and millions of other city dwellers all over the planet suffered during the war.

I drove home that day with the false knowledge that those atrocities will never happen again. We had all learned from our mistakes. We were civilized, wise now. There would be no more fighting over invisible borders. No more death and torture in the name of culture or tradition, religion. The world was safe now. We could breathe, prosper, live the life we all deserve.

 

The year now is 2022. Let us change the city of London, call it instead Kyiv, or Odesa or Mariupol. Germany, once run by Hitler and his Nazis’ is no longer the aggressor. Instead, we have Russia. Hitler is dead, has been replaced by the equally evil Putin. 

I know now I was wrong in my thoughts when leaving the Imperial War Museum. We haven’t learned a thing.