Don Shimmield - Blooming Beside WW2

Don Shimmield awoke the morning of September third to the blaring wail of sirens overhead. He emerged from the sheets and stared out his window, expecting to see planes or tanks approaching. But nothing of the sort came. The skies were clear, the sun was rising, but the sirens continued to wake all of England’s people. The year was 1939, and although little nine year old Don didn’t know it, his country had just declared war on Germany.

“We thought it was strange,” Don said when asked about the Sunday morning sirens. “Most of the parents came out and brought us inside, probably because they thought it was an air raid siren. I think parents were very worried, but I was only about nine years old so it didn’t affect kids like me too much, because we didn’t know what was gonna happen really. Again, they thought perhaps the war wasn’t going to last very long, either.”

The Shimmield family lived in Hove, on the southern coast of England. There, he witnessed the backwash of World War Two right in his own hometown.

“The first thing was food became rationed,” he says. “We all had ration books, so we could only have so much meat and so much fruit and so much jam, so much butter. Butter was in short supply. That was the first thing. Then there was the schoolchildren.”

Displaced London school-children arrived in Hove towards the beginning of the war, having come to seek safety from the bombings in their home city. As a result of this, Don’s school days were split in half, with the latter half of each day dedicated to only the London children, whilst Don and the fellow children of Hove got to run home.

Shortly after the war’s declaration, Don recalls a year’s worth of time that passed when supposedly nothing happened. This was a period known as the “Phoney War”, and despite the lack of action, there was no shortage of precautions.

Don describes a long winter within the Phoney War, during which the town around him began to morph to fit their new times. The beaches near his home were transformed into mine fields, his childhood recreation yard was surrounded by barbed wire and pillars of steel, and was forced to sleep in air raid shelters as the sound of explosions echoed from the distance. As time continued on, childhood and war continued to bleed together.

“One day, we had come across some live mortar bombs on the south downs, and we started throwing them around at each other,” Don recalled, smiling at the memory. “Luckily they never went off. They used to have lots of training there, they would dig trenches and leave blank ammunition around, and so we used to find them and put them on bonfires.”

In addition to playing with deadly weaponry, Don and his friends formed the “Reconnaissance Club”, created for the purpose of identifying planes overhead for what kind they were. It was creations and interactions such as these that defined Don’s childhood. And furthermore, went on to help define their classroom.

Reflecting upon his childhood club, Don said that, “At school they would have contests sometimes, even the teachers would join in and ask the kids “Oh what’s that aircraft?” and “Oh what’s this aircraft?” We used to collect bits of crashed planes, bombs and shrapnel like souvenirs, that’s what I used to do.”

But separate from these fond memories lay the rest of World War Two. Attacks on Hove were infrequent(and usually unintentional), but not absent. Don tells of a time towards the end of the war, when he was out on a paper round to earn extra pounds. Looking into the sky, he watched as a doodlebug(or as Don and many others would describe them, “flying bombs”)crossed overhead towards its target.

“It flew overhead,” Don recalled. “The thing about them was, and we had all been warned about this, was that they were alright if they stayed up in the air, but if the motor had a “pop-pop” sound, then you knew that the thing was gonna come down, and there was gonna be an explosion. But they weren’t supposed to aim for us, they were off course if they came our way. The one I saw was off course.”

Doodlebugs were part of Hitler’s final attack plan on England, and thus only had to be dealt with within the final year of the war. Regardless, weaponry such as this was responsible for the destruction of Don’s aunt’s home, having been struck by a doodlebug. Alongside this came the bombing of a local theatre, a mere one town over, in which at least one hundred civilians perished. Amongst this, Don addresses himself as having been fortunate.

“My father didn’t go off and fight but some families lost people. My wife, Audrey, her father went off to fight. It was quite devastating in some cases, because the man had left and the wife was left to kind of fend for herself. Luckily it didn’t happen in our family.”

The idea of a war lurking just outside the front door is certain to terrify a good number of people, but when asked as to whether or not these attacks had scared him, Don claimed, “Not really, our father was very good, he made sure that the house was well fortified so we felt as safe as we could. Before that, with the neighbor, they dug a tunnel into the railway cutting the middle of our garden for a shelter. I remember german bombers coming over us at night times, you couldn’t mistake them. Their engines had a particular sound. We used to get up and go into the shelter, at around two in the morning. That didn’t last very long, because our father fortified the house so if it fell down it wouldn’t collapse completely. He took scaffolding poles and made a skeleton type frame around the inside of the house.”

With a fortified household and his then young mindset, Don says that the war itself felt like “an adventure.”

“As kids we didn’t appreciate too much, the dangers or the terrible effects of war,” he said. “One or two of my friends did. But by and large, it was just an experience, more of an adventure. You wouldn’t say that for people who lived in London.”

Of the most profound effects it had on his and other’s lives around him, Don says that, “I think it must have been the effect on our schooling. The fact that we had so many evacuees in the area to start with, because we could only go to school for half the day. And the other thing was the rationing.”

Once the war drew to a close in 1945, Don went on the join the National Service for two years, before then continuing on throughout the 20th century to acquire a home and family outside of Hove, having opted now for the town of Sunbury(on Thames). Standing here now in 2019, looking back on the earlier years, Don recalls everything with a soft, nostalgic grin.

“Sweets were rationed, so we hardly ever got any sweets,” he remembers, the same warmth of his grin having moved to his eyes. “In fact, when I came to Sunbury in 1950, I still had my ration book.”