Three Bears go to RAF Cosford

After our visit to Cameo and her humans, Grizzly and Polar decided to make a day out of their journey home, so took us to the Royal Air Force Museum at Cosford.

When we arrived, we were delighted to be met by a pilot bear, who welcomed us to the museum and told us what we should see.

'If you're careful, you can climb on the planes outside the hangers,' he said.  'But don't get muddy paws on the planes inside, chaps, as they are very special and historic, and we bears and our human helpers have to keep them clean.'

We promised to be good bears and scurried outside to see the aircraft, before Polar and Grizzly had finished their cups of tea.  It was lucky for Hanley Bear that they weren't far behind us, because he climbed too close to the nose of his plane and started to slide off, but Polar caught him before he hit the ground.

 I liked the flying boat but Endon was fascinated by a Harrier jet that had been taken to pieces.  It reminded him of the Lego plane he had helped Grizzly's grandcubs to build.

Our favourite hanger was the first one, which had very sleek-looking planes which had been built to break speed records and were flown by very brave and daring test-pilots.  We would have liked to climb on them, but remembered we had promised the pilot bear we would not.  

We met a Red Arrows bear, who was allowed to climb on the planes, as he helped to look after them.  He told us that only the best pilots got to fly with the Red Arrows and he was very proud to be one of their bears.

There were some much older planes in the next hanger.  We thought they looked very flimsy, so we were surprised and sad to read that they had all been warplanes.

'Aren't humans silly,' said Endon, looking at an old biplane.  'Fancy making such a nice little aircraft and then using it to go fighting, when it might get broken?  It looks more like something you would use to fly out to the countryside for a picnic.'

Which is what small bears would use planes for, of course.  You could have loaded a delicious picnic for lots of bears and human cubs into some of the Second World War planes, for example, but humans used them to drop bombs instead.

'At least some of the humans were sensible enough to take their lucky anipals with them,' Hanley said.  'There are some very old creatures here, including a penguin who was a prisoner of war!'

We said a very respectful 'Good Afternoon' to the old hero animals, especially Percy the Penguin, and thought how lucky we were to be peacetime bears.

We didn't like the next part of the museum at all, as it was all about a time called the Cold War, when humans came very close to having a terrible war which might have killed them all - and most of us animals too!  Grizzly was in the RAF at the time of something called the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was one of the worst moments of it, and said it was very scary.  

Fortunately, there were also some wise and sensible humans who solved disagreements by talking to each other, like small bears do, but there are still lots of nasty big bombs in the world that hurt human cubs and creatures, and we think this is a very bad thing.  

We went very quiet and our ears drooped, because we were so sad about this, but Polar knows that a good way to cheer up gloomy bears is to tell us it's teatime.  We had some tea and cake back at the café and that made us feel much better.

Before we left, we said goodbye to all our new bear friends and the old hero animals, and we promised to visit them again one day, which I hope we will.