wartime in Lewisham Wye and Buckhorn Weston

I had been evacuated to Wye in Kent in 1939 and was billeted at a mansion with other children in the care of Captain Horsley,I was in the church of St Gregory and St Martin when we heard on the radio that war had been declared,the sirens went and we went straight home and sheltered in a gas proof room, I have been back and found that the mansion is now a boys school and that Captain Horsley is buried in a grave marked with a wooden cross behind the church.
As the expected air raids did not happen we went back to Lewisham,but was later evacuated again to Buckhorn Weston in Dorset where I lived at Brook cottage with Mrs Bowden, Our washing water came from the stream and I had to collect drinking water from a farm up the hill in a milk churn on a trolley.
Whilst there a farmer in the field behind the house was struck on the chest by an incendiary bomb and killed.My friend Sybil Chapman stayed at the same house.
My son took me back to the cottage a few years ago to find that it was a holiday
home and the occupants allowed me to have a look in my old bedroom.
In 1944 I returned to my parents at 23
Leahurst Road ,Lewisham in time to be bombed out by a Doodlebug, then at 14 years old I started work at Chiltonian Biscuit factory,packing biscuits for the troops.
I later married Richard Gordon Ackrill who had served in the later parts of the war in the East Surrey Regiment in Italy ,Greece and Austria.
He had 4 brothers who all survived the war
Jim who was a sergeant - major in charge of a troop of crocodile flamethrower tanks .
Peter a bren gunner in Normandy.
Jack who was a soldier in the Far East
Ted who fought the Japanese in Burma
I remember seeing the german plane that destroyed Sandhurst road school killing so many children.My Husband while fire watching on the roof of his shop in Catford,
saw the flying bomb land on the air raid shelter in Lewisham High Street,he and a colleague rushed to the scene in a Sainsbury's van to assist and were confronted by a woman running towards them whose eyes had been sucked out by the blast,he helped move the bodies to a wrecked bus nearby

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