We missed Audley End. Extremely irritatingly, it was shut. Three days a week! Ha - I knew we were right to join the National Trust. Those English Heritage dossers are an idle bunch.
To SO's delight, the next possibility was Duxford Air Museum (by that point I didn't care, as long as it involved lunch). Being as how the major exhibits are all aircraft, the place is huge. We got to see inside a prototype Concorde, and ride on an electric train from one end of the museum to the other.
I found myself profoundly disturbed by the Land Warfare exhibition, which concentrated on WWII and the Normandy Landings. (I know. At my great age.) I know we weren't in there for that long, and certainly didn't see absolutely everything, but nowhere in all the diagrams and pictures and video footage that I saw was there any mention of the lives that were lost. No idea at all of the scale of human destruction. Yes, I understand that small children would be quite unjustifiably frightened by graphic representations, but no mention of the dead at all? It seems such a blatant omission, and such a cynical one. I don't understand why veterans' groups don't make a bigger deal of this.
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Of course if you were a member of English Heritage, as I am, you would have the handbook, and thus know when it was open. That's why I went on a Wednesday.
The WWI sites that I visited in June laid a lot of emphasis on the dead. Mind you, there were also large graveyards nearby. It was the scale of the deaths that made the whole experience so moving.
I go to Duxford annually to help with a schools' engineering week. I find it increasingly hard to look at the warplanes too. I don't find a sense of glorification of war, more an acceptance of it. I go with a friend who used to be in the TA and whose father was an RAF engineer, and he finds it all very interesting, from a professional viewpoint, but I just think about the people.
same thing over here. look at the wonderful toys, nothing at all about the horror done. and hardly a mention, hardly a whisper at all to mark the anniversary this country just passed...dropping the atom bomb on the japanese. i love my country but sometimes i'm ashamed to live here.
English heritage are a bunch of wankers - apparently
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