An eerie afternoon

Evening campers,


Today was a bit of a strange one. We started the day by meeting outside Stage Door of the NT to catch a coach to our second day trip out! We were all on a bit of a high because our director Polly's show "Svengali" (yes the one with Derren Brown) won an Olivier last night, so we were all really happy and bouncing around offering her our congratulations.


We eventually all piled on the coach and Jo and I plonked ourselves down in a roomy area of the coach (Jo is the other member of the Ensemble and Ismene's understudy). Here we all are:

We were off to Kelvedon Hatch Secret Bunker in Essex. It's not so "secret" anymore obviously, but it was a very special thing to be able to see it in all it's glory. The first thing we did was get a cup of tea. Standard. The canteen was an interesting place. No natural light or windows at all which made the whole thing quite claustrophobic but I suppose that was the point...?

Anywho, we then started the tour. Seeing as we didn't have a tour guide, we were given what were called "wands". Because we're a hilarious bunch of actors, we joked that because of this, we were going on a Hogwart's tour. Fnar fnar.... This was the first thing to greet us when we walked in:

It was just so quiet and empty. Really, really creepy. But pretty amazing at the same time. Here's a bit of history for ya...

Kelvedon "Secret" Bunker was built during the height of the cold war in 1952-1953. It was built to house around 600 important members of Parliament, including the Prime Minister, in the event of a nuclear attack. To protect from such an attack, it was obviously really far below ground, about 120 feet. The claustrophobia kept comin', I tell ya!

There were so many contraptions and machines dotted around, I didn't catch what they were all for. Here's some pics of them:

This dummy above scared the SHIT out of me! Look! She's got no arms. None at all!!!

As I said before, the bunker has a creepy feel about it - I'm hardly surprised there are ghost tours that take place there or that it has featured on "Most Haunted". At one point, we were all doing our own thing when looking around and I went off to have a look at what was known as the medical wing. This is what greeted me:

Let's just say I wouldn't let this guy operate on me!!

There were also various dorms with loads of bunks - some of which had dummies in and some of them didn't. There was one bed that housed Thatcher:

Completely surreal. The dorms creeped me out so much that I powered through them and ended up back in the canteen sharpish along with Chris. So the two of us sat and grabbed some chow whilst we waited for the others who soon began trickling in.

We got back to the NT at about 4 and then spent the rest of the day uniting. Everyone was pretty tired, especially Polly & Jodie who had attended the Oliviers the night before. So at 6, I think we were all pretty glad to be going home to a bath, food and bed! The last of which I'm going to do now.

Night night!! xxx