London: A 45-year-old UK woman was left shell-shocked after discovering that her favourite flower vase that she had used for 30 years was an unexploded bomb from the World War I.
Kathryn Rawlins, a mother-of-two and a school careers adviser, had found the shell when she was 15 in the playing fields of her school and had been using it as an ornament.
She had filled with the vase with her favourite flowers until she saw a documentary featuring World War I bombs that had been dropped on nearby Coventry by German zeppelins and realised she may have been sitting feet away from a live explosive.
“The police said the shell had the potential to have killed anybody within about 20 metres of it and could have taken the house down. It’s funny to think that I had it on my mantelpiece the entire time – it’s just become a part of my family now,” Kathryn said.
“I have had the shell on the mantelpiece for three decades now and even took it to university. I used to stick plastic roses out of the top of it when I was dancing around to Madonna. Luckily my husband Chris just thought it was funny,” she was quoted as saying by The Mirror.
Ms Rawlins had called the police and experts were brought in to safely remove the explosive before the vase was handed back to her.
“I used to unscrew it and put the flowers out of the top. It’s really heavy to hold and has some writing that looks like it could be German around the top. I took it into school to show the kids – they loved it,” Ms Rawlins said.