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My mother used to say, - “There’s good and bad in every nation” but some of the officers here were quite nasty. I mean I have actually literally seen them ride their horses on the pavement deliberately to see if you would get off. They would be coming down the road and they would see you walking up on the pavement and they would put their horse on the pavement. My mother wasn’t very happy with horses. She liked to see them in the field providing the hedge was between her and them and she would say —“ Get off the pavement” — and I’d say “No..”

I always remember being very defiant one particular day, was about 9-ish, and I thought I’m not getting off the pavement, there was a car coming down and I wasn’t going to get off the pavement. “Get off the pavement!” my mother was saying to me, and I stood there defiantly on the pavement. He took his horse off the pavement and grinned. If you stood up to them, they admired you, some of them. I could see a car coming down the road and in those days any cars were forced to drive on the opposite side of the road to now, you had to drive the side the Germans drove.
JEAN BUDDEN

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