Air raid siren over Sidley!

Outside, Happy Harold the 1922 trolley bus awaited passengers and Henry Earl's bakers' cart stood at the ready.

Inside, the Victory Cafe was serving "tea and a wad" and folk were wearing battledress and tin hats.

The time machine had turned the clock back by 60 years to Victory in Europe Day, 1945.

Learning Link and Sidley Online Centre with the help of Hastings College Tutors, Buckley's Yesterday's World, Cottage Cakes and other supporters had conjured up a moment in town history.

Wartime posters entreated young women to join the WRENS - and one evidently had.

Men had joined the RAF or the Army. There in all its meagre measure to astonish young visitors and make veterans go weak at the knees was a WEEK'S ration of food.

How DID they manage ...?

Kathleen Long (nee Kitty Bailey) had written a moving account of what it was like to be a nine year-old evacuee.

Her words were on display near the gas masks, an incentive to others to venture over to the Online centre, try their hand at what would have been the stuff of science fiction in 1945 and record their wartime memories for posterity via one of the centre's computer workstations on the BBC's World War II website.

Vera Lynn was on the "wireless" and there were sandbags at the windows as Zaria Winter, a visitor from Pett recalled for the Observer her days as a Wren, plotting in-coming VI flying bombs - "Doodlebugs" on her radar screen at the Royal Naval College.

It was dangerous, exacting work. Other people's lives depended on her skills and those of her colleagues.

Asked about it, she said dismissively: "We were young...."

Sadly, wet weather curtailed the planned VE Day street party. But there were photographs of the real thing to show young visitors how their grandparents celebrated victory over tyranny and the ending of six years of listening for the All Clear to sound before venturing from their shelters.