Hi don't normally post on here and don't normally watch time team but loved tonights one. I find ww2 very intresting. Anyone else?

Yep, I watched it the first time around. I didn't think I was going to like it, but I was pleasantly surprised.
One of the better programmes from the modern era.

Absolutly I wish I had been there to help on the dig or there was more to follow next week.

I was three when WW2 ended and grew up with my uncle's experiences as a London fireman in the blitz, my father's in the Royal Airforce, my own fear to this day when an aircraft flies over at night or it thunders - my mother took us home to my father's village -and I always thought what a doddle it was to live in the peace and quiet.

Not so.

As an adult I researched one particular village in war time - the intensity of life, the loss of life where everyone knew each other, the enormous sums of money raised from very low agriculteral wages, the overwhelming generosity to those in need and not least to the many POWs imprisoned in the surrounding area.
Little things like schoolchildren gathering rosehips for vitimens, herbs being gathered for POW parcels because medicines were in short supply.

WW2 brought out the heroic and best in many ordinary people -and the very worse in a few.
A fascinating time.

Hi Ann,

I have been intrested in WW2 since learning about it at school. I found learning about the people living in london during the blitz very intresting there suffering going down to the anderson shelters and some going down to the underground station it must have been terrifying for them.

I belive there was also the morrison shelter that doubled as a table.

Any stories you wish to share I would love to here them.

quote:

I belive there was also the morrison shelter that doubled as a table.

My mother had a bed that doubled as an air raid shelter! Raised on blocks with pillows underneath -if there was not time to get to the shelter - under we went - my earliest memory.

That and embarassingly calling every man in air force uniform a 'daddy man', the blank incomprehension wwhen being told that daddy was coming home to live -fathers did not live at home they visited with something called 'leave'

As I've said elsewhere - study the minute books of your community -they will give a picture of life in WW2. The W.I. M.U and PCC books all brought my community to life in many unexpected ways. i.e. the wife of a British Ambassador to Moscow kept chickens in the embassy attics. Other searches on line brought one of the funniest letters I have read for ages to light.

My mother's family had a Morisson Shelter, it was a steel frame covered with wire mesh. Generally they were installed under the kitchen table.

They were as you might imagine cramped and uncomfortable. The first night my mother's family stopped using it the house was destroyed by a V2. The blast hurled Grannies old Singer sewing machine off the kitchen windowsill and it went straight through the shelter. Had they been inside instead of in their own beds they'd all have been killed. As it was they got away with some minor injuries although the house was so badly damaged the rescue services left it until last because they were sure nobody inside could've survived.

It was one of the last V2s to fall on London.