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| Anne's Country Gallery contains 10 years of photographs, 500 walks of Kent and Sussex. Each year it supports a different charity alternating between human and animal causes. You may or may not be able to find a photo of what you are looking for but using the search facility above may help. |
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Celebration
 “And there is an empty space in every room, she had filled the home with her presence. I had hardly been aware how this was so until this presence was no longer there. Instead there is a tangible emptiness throughout the house, A quiet stillness born of nothing where before had been something.”
The Life of Anne Poole: 
In the summer of 1940, Anne was born in Borstal, in Rochester-upon-Medway to Ethel and Thomas Goldsworthy, an engineer. She briefly attended school in Borstal until after the Second World War, when the family moved to a smallholding at Studdal in Dover, called Shangri-La. Anne spent the remainder of her childhood there, surrounded by pigs, ducks and a small heifer called Jenny,
in addition to all the local flora and fauna, which is no doubt the root of her life-long love of animals and the countryside. Whilst at Shangri-La, Anne attended Northbourne School.
Upon leaving school, Anne began work for a leading chemist’s chain in Dover. Always an active person, she cycled to  Waldershere every morning to catch the bus into the town. Never deterred by poor weather, in the winter she often rode through deep snowdrifts! The Goldsworthys were blessed twice more with children, and Anne doted on her younger brothers, Michael and John. The family enjoyed camping holidays in the New Forest, Stonehenge and the West Country.
However, Anne was ambitious, and by the late 50s camping in England no longer satisfied herwanderlust.
 In order to see the world on a budget, she joined the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) as a telephonist. She trained at RAF Compton Bassett in Wiltshire, and began her service in RAF Stanbridge in Bedfordshire, where she met her future husband. Despite a two-year separation while he was posted to Germany, they were finally married in April 1962 at St Mary’s in West Langdon, when Anne left the WRAF.
The couple moved to Putney, and in December 1963 their only child, Angela Carolyn was born. Several months later, Anne was finally able to travel abroad, with her young daughter, when her husband was posted to the George Cross Island of Malta, where the family lived in the village of Luqa.
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The Pooles returned to England three years later, and Anne realised how much she had missed the greenery of home. At the end of her husband’s RAF service, after a short stint of moving from house to house, Anne and her family settled in Chatham.
Anne’s first house in the Medway Towns was in Bill Street, Frindsbury. How lucky that her brother-in-law allowed the family to live in his house rent-free while they saved for their own home.
Once settled in her own house, Anne decided to stay at home to look after her daughter in the early years, then as her daughter got older she used her free time available to join the local art classes at Rochester, run by the local council – she always liked drawing and painting. Later, she offered some of her time to helping a lady who suffered from multiple sclerosis, getting her shopping and taking her out.
Her family, mother, daughter and her brothers were the most important thing in her life, not counting her belief in the creator. It is because of this that at the end of her life she was calm and not frightened; she put her trust in the Lord. Her ashes are scattered under the lovely trees in the same place as her mother in the beautiful grounds at Barham, Canterbury, Kent.
Part of the Hucking Estate, nr. Maidstone has been dedicated to Anne – “Her Poise and Dignity Always, Her Generosity and Belief in Our Maker Unshaken”. This area of remarkable local beauty consists of an area of ancient semi-natural woodland, comprising chestnut, ash and hornbeam coppice with oak standards, surrounded by a buffer forest of oak, ash, beech, small leaved lime, hornbeam, wild cherry, whitebeam, dogwood, elder, yew and guelder rose.
For more information about the Hucking Estate, please visit www.woodland-trust.org.uk
p2110090697 fp fm luddesdown court to dean rd, luddesdown, k
When ye come, and all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I may well be.
Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an ava there for me.
I shall hear the soft you tread above me,
And on my grave the warmer, sweeter be.
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I will sleep in peace until you come to me.
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