This year saw the 75th anniversary of the D-Day Landings and there have been many events held in June to commemorate the event. We thought it would be nice to do something as well so Natural Breaks planned a day out to the Imperial War museum in Manchester.

Michael, Mustafa, Alan, myself and Mark bought our packed lunches and crammed ourselves into the car for a poignant day out.

The weather was particularly abysmal. Torrential rain followed us all the way down the motorway and threatened to make us uncomfortably wet as we scampered across the car park to the entrance. I couldn’t help but think of the parallels between my dash to assemble Alan’s wheelchair and the allied forces attempt to land on the beaches of Normandy. While there was no live fire or immediate threat to life, it was very wet and time was of the essence. We made it in to the War museum without any casualties.

Mustafa was hungry and wanted to eat his sandwich. His appetite was put on hold though as the doors to the lift opened and he was met with the sight of a full size Harrier jump jet. There were videos from different conflicts being projected on to the walls of the huge hall as we perused the exhibits. We walked past the iron girders which used to live in the belly of the world trade centre and Mark took a picture to show the guys in the pub. 

Michael stopped to look at a large green bomb, about the size of a human. He said “that’ll blow you to pieces, KAPOW”. He wasn’t wrong. It was a WE 177 Nuclear bomb. I paid particular heed to the sign which read “do not touch”. I wondered if any poorly supervised children had ever climbed on it, and if it was ever knocked off its stand, would it obliterate Salford?

We spent a while looking at all the exhibits and then stopped for our lunch. We discussed what we thought of the day. Mustafa’s favourite bit was the plane, Alan liked the tank, Michael found the holocaust exhibit thought provoking and Mark enjoyed the World trade centre exhibit. 

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by David Owen