Hawk's Hill Late 40s/Early 50s

A Memory of Hawk's Hill.

I'd forgotten the name - until recently when I was reading through letters sent by my father while on Army Service in West Africa during World War II. My mother and I were living with his parents in Great Bookham (I was born in 1944, in their house - there was a doodlebug raid on and my mother never made it to the hospital). In one of Daddy's letters, he refers to my mother walking from Great Bookham to Leatherhead, (a distance of just over 3 miles) pushing me in the pram and says Hawks Hill must have been hard going. During my childhood days, we lived in Oxshott from 1949 and used to travel by bus to visit my grandparents. I always made a point, on the return journey, of sitting on the top of the double-decker and on the lefthand side, because as we came down Hawk's Hill, there was a beautiful quarry garden on that side and you got a perfect view, right down to the bottom - it was the highlight of the bus journey for me.

---

---