The all clear has sounded at St Bartholomew’s Primary School at West Pinchbeck but the young pupils won’t forget the terrible sounds of the Blitz in a hurry.
Among the screeching of sirens and the crash of incendiary bombs as they fell to earth, the most surprising sounds for the pupils aged seven through to nine were the clear notes of a baby’s cries.
That was just one of the experiences that mobile World War Two museum We’ll Meet Again brought to the school on Wednesday, thanks to class teacher Jon Midgley and administrative staff who arranged the visit.
Jon said the museum team of Linda and Paul Britchford arrived with a truck load of authentic war memorabilia, which took four hours to unload and display to enhance the pupils’ ongoing project on war.
They brought everything from Home Front uniforms, toys children of the time might have played with, to food and rations right the way through to weaponry, giving the 17 children in Years 3 and 4 – who came to school dressed as evacuees – the opportunity to dress up in uniform and sample sweets that were current then, such as jelly babies, humbugs and pear drops.
Mr Midgley, who was kindly loaned a Home Guard uniform by the museum staff, said: “The children all ate in a day what a child then would have as a month’s ration. The most emotive experience was the sound track of what it was like during the Blitz accompanied by a smoke machine, so they got the full sense of the experience. The children were listening out and writing down what they could hear and describing how they felt, and what took us by surprise is they could always hear a baby crying.”