1940s Day

What a fabulous time we had today at Milton Keynes Museum's 1940s weekend!
I love it there!!
There is a wartime garden complete with fruit, vegetables, beehives, long johns and corsets on the line and an Anderson Shelter. We all went down into the shelter where there are speakers which pipe in the sound of the air raid siren, the planes and the bombs, and then the All Clear. It must have been quite terrifying.
We pumped water, ran around with metal hoops, watched Churchill make his fight them on the beaches speech, heard the bone shaking noise of the Spitfire engine, put on firemen's helmets, posed with the Milton Keynes concrete cows, explored a 1940s village police station, and had an amazing chat with an Air Raid Warden in his office. His great-great grandfather was the Air Raid Warden in Harrow during the first world war and he was full of fascinating facts and stories and showed us loads of original paperwork - for blackout transgressions, instructions for how to tape up your windows, patrol logs, recruitment leaflets for the ARP. Brilliant!!!
We also got chatting to a man who'd been a boy during the bombing of Plymouth and he had lots of interesting stories too.
The Little Misses were a bit 1940'd out by then so we headed inside the museum to the street of reconstructed shops - butcher, haberdasher, pub, sweetshop, barbers, cinema, dentist, post office, cobblers, ironmongers and grocers. All originally local to the towns and villages close to Milton Keynes. Full of so many interesting things and photos!
Lastly it was into the phone room. My Blip last year was from there. The Little Misses LOVE dialling old fashioned phones and answering and hanging up. Over and over again. There are phones from the earliest days of phones (as well as telegraph and morse code machines) going right through the decades up to the latest mobile phones. So interesting to see!
Then it was time to get one last cup of tea and head home.