BRAVE 81-year-old Sylvia Dring has told how she chased off two thieves she caught sneaking around her home unaware they had raided her bedroom.

The pensioner had been pottering in the shed at her home in Lowbourne, Melksham, yesterday just after 2.30pm, when she saw someone coming out her house.

“I saw this tall figure in dark clothing,” she said. “I called out to him ‘what do you want and what are you doing on my property’?”

The man didn’t stop so the grandmother, who was wearing a pair of her daughter’s running shoes as she tidied the shed, began to chase the man as far as she could but he fled in the direction of the town centre.

It was while she was catching her breath in her driveway, she saw another man coming from her neighbour’s garden. The grandmother challenged him, asking if he was breaking into the house to which he mumbled and then sprinted towards Forest Road.

Her next door neighbour John Dixon, 64, was watching TV in his lounge at the time, unaware someone had been trying to get into his house and had searched his car.

“I heard nothing,” the Wiltshire Farm Foods employee said. “I went upstairs and all of a sudden I saw all the cop cars and forensics.”

Officers arrived within minutes and Mrs Dring told them what had happened and discovered £70 was missing from her purse, which had been in the kitchen.

However, it wasn’t until later that evening after the forensic unit and police had left, that she realised the thieves had also been upstairs, strewn clothes all over the floor and pulled all her drawers out and emptied her jewellery box with her mother-in-law’s rings in.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” said Mrs Dring, a retired Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food employee. “Ok they pinched my money – opportunists. But I just didn’t think they’d gone upstairs."

A forensic officer later returned to look for evidence but last night Mrs Dring was too upset to find out what had been stolen and stayed with a neighbour.

She feared sentimental items belonging to her late husband Graham, who died seven years ago aged 75 from cancer, could be missing including his RAF police medals.

The pensioner is now determined to not let the thieves win and is appealing for anyone with information to contact police on 101.

She has described the two men, who are thought to be in their mid-20s, as wearing jeans, dark tops, with one wearing a grey beanie hat.

Mrs Dring added: “We work hard all our lives to get what we want for somebody to come in and wreck it for us. It’s sickening.”