The Great (Clone) War

In the trenches with the British army

We are trying to do a big trip at least every 1/2 term, and Ferdy is just about to start learning about WW1 so as an introduction we decided to go to to the Imperial War Museum in London.

Our trip began after school on Thursday when we got the train. The boys were most excited about two things: eating supper on the train and having a sleepover in Francine (my Dad)'s flat because, 'it has no stairs'.

The next morning we got the DLR to Bank, then the Northern Line to Elephant and Castle, and then walked, or to be precise, bhangred (is that a verb?) to the Imperial War Museum.

Ferdy learnt a bit of Bhangra at school on Thursday

The boys know a lot about war. They know that the soldiers were called Storm Troopers, that the leader of the army was Darth Vader... Oh wait a minute, wrong war.

Despite the fact that there are more parallels between Star Wars and WW2, Ferdy had quite a good understanding about how different countries and people come to fight each other ('like in the Clone Wars, Mummy?'). And something that the IWM does so well is to encourage the visitor to try and comprehend what it must have felt like to sign up and fight at the front, and particularly to survive in the trenches.

Luckily for me Ferdy was too small to sign up.

Ferdy is under 5ft 6 inches

But Gil managed to do so well in his medical and fitness tests, his age and height were disregarded...

Ferdy was fascinated by the model of the trenches:

And there are lots of anecdotes and stories about individual experiences which intrigued the boys. Particularly evocative was our encounter with the silhouettes of the soldiers going about their daily trench activities (see top picture) and hearing the sound of the planes flying over and a tank starting up. We were a little terrified of the thunderstorm and gas attack but managed to find a space to shelter from the rain, unlike a lot of the poor soldiers.

tl clockwise: looking at an army tank; reading the Kid's Guide;
meeting the soldiers in the trenches; Tirpitz the pig.

Both boys also loved the stories about the roles various animals played in the Great War. Ferdy's favourite was the story of Tirpitz the pig, who was rescued by British sailors off a German cruiser that was sunk off the coast of Chile. The sailors named him Tirpitz (after the head of the German navy) and kept him as a pet.

When we'd had enough of WW1, unlike the soldiers, we were able to distract ourselves with coffee and crisps in the cafe, and then we also had a look around the WW2 gallery. I must confess to getting a little bored of the game we had to play repeatedly pretending we were a family sheltering from the bombs in the Anderson shelter.

'Tell us a story Mummy we're scared, we're scared'

On our way home, we read a great book about being in the trenches, and the boys were surprisingly tolerant about the fact that we had to sit on the floor for almost the whole journey; perhaps after their own experience of trench warfare they realised that there are worse things in life to have to deal with.

Two WW2 fighter planes joined us on our journey home