Imperial War Museum, London

After seeing this, the sirens sounded, and I found myself led into an air-raid shelter, back in the East End. There was lots of (recorded) Cockney banter before, suddenly, there came a descending whistling noise, and our benches shook violently. The lights went out, the all- clear signal eventually came, and we emerged into chaos! An East London street on fire, wrecked buldings, with sights, sounds and smells following an air-raid. The local gasworks exploded soon after, but someone provided hot tea and buns from a market stall. The motto was "Business as Usual, Me Ol' China!". A great, unforeseen, link back to my visit to the East End, and a surprise link with our own "Wizard of Oz" garden back home. I was conscious, however, that, although this may be history to me and my children, this is still a living memory for so many people.

I never knew the Film Wizard Of Oz was that old David ! Thanx so much for the Sad but lovely History talk X

The cinema of 1939 was blessed with a bumper crop. It is so important that with the passing of the generations those with "living memory" of those terrible years who are becoming fewer and fewer must find ways to keep alive the memory of a bitter lesson learned ...
The world we know today would have been very different but for their sacrifices...
In N.A. the population sent "our boys" over to fight in Europe but the women at home had no idea what "their men" were facing and what the population in Britain were living through... I have a friend (a war bride, so called because she married a Canadian Airman and came to live here with him) who I often entice into memory... she's 86...and her memories are etched so clearly...and when she talks of rationing, and backyard airraid shelters and blackout curtains I listen very closely...she lived it, and she remembers it all...I've told her many times that if she would care to dictate her memories I would be honoured to write them down for her..
I think that allowing your children to experience that era through a film of the time is a very commendable thing... especially since they've no idea of what a world was like without instant communication... Good Job, Dad..

Lori, I am loving all your memories here on GOY, and I find that gardening is producing so many on this site (even I have, in the past, written about my childhood memories of the garden). As an avid amateur historian (lol!), I find it all fascinating! I remember when we had our first house and i had the patio all decked out with baskets and containers full of annuals, my in-laws sitting there talking about how grandpa grew these, etc. I think that more people than we realise associate gardening and plants with their childhood memories. The Museum also has a WW1 experience, where you end up in a trench among the soldiers. there is a lot of pep talk and jokes (it is in darkness with the sound of rainfall, eevrything is dark except for occasional "flares" and distant "gunfire". There is even the smells of dampness, etc. Then they "go over the top", and the exhibition area suddenly becomes a noisy, flashing gunfire, shouting mayhem. Suddenly, all goes quiet, and the air smells of gunsmoke, and the only sound are the groans of the wounded and dying. For me, this was as close as i could ever get to experiencing what my family predecessors experienced I I found, in a local newspaper of 1917, a transcript of a letter to his parents hastily written by a dying brother of my great great grandfather in a field in France (no, these things are not just done for effect in movies) given to a member of the Australian Ambulance Corps, who managed to get it home. The Holocaust memorial hall is the best I've seen. I say the best, but I never saw the whoile, as it graduallly became so graphic that even I had ask to leave via a fire exit before the end - and I've seen a few museums/sites in Europe. I'm still searching for the veggies my predecessors may have grown, some won prizes for them in their local horticultural shows as far back as 1855, but the memories and ideas being produced as a result of this are fascinating!

Very true, David... the good old Victory garden!! There weren't many "exotic" veggies grown ... Tatties, carrots, beans and squash... lots of root crops because they stored well...
We have a War Museum in Ottawa that covers the two World Wars and it has the plaster Casts of the statuary on the Vimy Memorial...wonderful pieces... it has a room that is like walking into a vignette like you describe of the trenches in WWI, they also have a mockup of a spitfire, (and the Avro Arrow), troop carriers dispatching the men on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day...... They have uniforms of the first British Soldiers to come to Canada...and a vignette of the death of Woolf on the Plains of Abraham... Then pictures of the little evacuees from London during the Blitz...with their little gunny sacks and labels on their lapels... lost little tear streaked faces...little families huddled together with big brother manfully herding them along! Lest we forget!!