Sylvia Dobson is shown at left, riding one of her horses on her small farm in Alleghany County. In the photo above, Dobson is shown riding on her family's farm in England around WWII.

Sylvia Dobson recalls surviving the Nazi blitz on England during WWII

Sylvia Dobson was raised on a farm in Iver, Buckinghamshire as her parents' only child, but during the Nazi blitz of World War II, the family took in an additional four children to protect as refugees.

"The blitz in London was really bad," Dobson recalled in a Feb. 9 interview. "(The authorities) wanted to get as many children out of the city as possible, and send them to live as refugees with families on farms."

Dobson, who will turn 72 next month, was born on the outskirts of London, but since her father, James Gilbert Dobson, always had a farm, she spent her growing-up years on farms out in the English countryside. And when she was a young girl, she lived through the "Nazi blitz" in that country during World War II, an international military conflict which started in the late 1930s and ran through the mid-1940s. The war occurred during Dobson's childhood years.

"I was a farm girl," Dobson noted. "Daddy was a retired naval captain, and before I was born, he traveled all around the world as a sea captain." She said that her father spent years in China and in India. She spent a substantial portion of her school career away from her family's home at boarding school, and the last boarding school she left was the St. Francis College. She left this young ladies' boarding school, which she said took boys up to the age of 10 during the war, at the age of 15.

She shared memories of a few people who didn't believe that England was going to go to war thinking her family to be a little crazy for having an air-raid shelter at their home during WWII. However, Dobson recalled the reason for her having slept in the air-raid shelter many a night during that time.

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