A Second World War evacuee has recalled how mass evacuations from London during the Blitz separated children from their families and “changed people’s lives”.
Doreen Simson, who was evacuated from her home in White City, west London, in 1941 at the age of four, said she still remembered being “left crying” after she was separated from her eight-year-old brother Dennis as the pair were taken in by different homes when they arrived in Wales.
Speaking ahead of the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the 87-year-old described “getting to the station, getting off the train” and watching her brother and his friend be “chosen” by a farmer and taken away.
“I was most upset. We’d always been a very close family. My mum had told me that we had to stay together,” added Ms Simson who now lives in Crawley, Sussex.
“Then this lady came up to me and she said, ‘I’ll take this little girl’.
“I didn’t see him again the whole time we were there.”
May 8 marks the date in 1945 when the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender in the Second World War, ending almost six years of conflict in Europe. This year’s landmark anniversary will be celebrated on the Royal Albert Hall stage with personal accounts of the Second World War and performances from around 100 musicians.
Reflecting on how the evacuations saw children being separated from family members and welcomed into strangers’ homes, Ms Simson said: “I don’t even know if they were paid. You think today, it wouldn’t be allowed for people to take children. So many were badly treated and abused.”
But Ms Simson says she was fortunate with the home she was allocated in Borth, in Ceredigion, Mid Wales, describing how she was taken in by a woman named Mrs Sharpe who would go on to become a “second mother” to her.
“Mrs Sharpe introduced me to the good things in life. She used to take me around the country lanes and we would look at all the wild flowers,” she said, adding that she later became a florist thanks to Mrs Sharpe.
“I stayed there for nearly four years and I was happy,” she said.
Ms Simson was the youngest of five children when she was evacuated. As well as Dennis, she had brothers Harry, 21, Eric, 18, Derek, 13, and sister Joan, 13.
Sister Janet arrived in 1943 while Ms Simson was in Wales, and she said, “I left home as the baby of the family. When I got back there was a baby there that had taken my place! It was just very strange.”
Asked about how her family coped with the memories of the war, Ms Simson said: “We didn’t really talk about it that much. I mean, my dad was one of the air wardens.
“We never really even discussed it. All my mum used to say was, ‘Oh, you’ve been with that nice lady’. That was all she would ever say. I don’t know why, you just had no idea.”
Ms Simson’s brother, Harry, served as a cook in the Royal Navy and survived multiple ship sinkings.
“They had no counselling. They just had to get on with it,” she said.
“One day, he put his head under the blanket and said ‘none of you have got any idea what it’s like seeing your mates drown in burning oil’.”
When Ms Simson was 15, she went back to see Mrs Sharpe.
“I went every year after that. She always wrote to me. I’ve still got the letters.
“My mum and dad had never met her and I thought if I ever took them up there, they would have been uncomfortable. They were just working class whereas Mrs Sharpe was posh.
“When my own mum died, she said, you know, sorry your mum’s died but I’ll still be your mum number two and I can be number one now that your own mum’s gone.”
One year later, in 1989, Ms Simson wrote a poem The Evacuee, which describes “screaming children” being told they are “going away to catch a train”.
“I was in my shop, and it was the anniversary of when my mum had died, and I was just sitting there and I got a pen out and I wrote this poem – the only one I’ve ever written.”
After reading the poem, Ms Simson paused and said: “It makes me quite emotional.
“It was just how I was feeling that day, having lost my own mum, and l suppose all the memories came back.
“One year, around 15 years or so ago, I said to my sisters, I think I want to go out and see Mrs Sharpe, so the three of us went up to see her. We went down to the house, and she wasn’t there. She was in hospital.
“I went in to see her. I spoke to her, and as I left, I said, ‘I do love you’, which is a thing sometimes you don’t say to somebody a bit posh. A couple of days later, she died.”
– Doreen Simson will appear as a special guest in VE Day 80: The Party at the Royal Albert Hall on May 8. The event is in support of SSAFA the Armed Forces charity and is produced by The Makers Of.
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