I'm in love with every strange unfolding day as the storm begins to break cover

[venta]

The BBC has just reminded me that it's twenty years today since the "Great Storm" in 1987. Among people my age - old enough to rember it, not really old enough to appreciate that it was more than a spot of run-of-the-mill bad weather - I suspect it's most commonly remembered as the storm which arrived in defiance of Michael Fish's jocular remarks that there was no need to worry. That he didn't really say that is largely irrelevant, of course; some stories are too big to be squashed by their own fallacy.

On the night of the Great Storm I was camping in a tent. Fortunately, only in a friend's back garden. We were determined to stay there - she had 50p riding on it, as her brother had bet we would wuss out even before the weather worsened. Her mother became increasingly determined as the night wore on that we were coming in the house. Her mother won, and I still remember being surprised the following morning by the wreckage of the garden: the large, heavy camping stove we'd cooked on the night before thrown across the lawn and the tent demolished.

I don't think the north got it nearly as badly as the south east did. Anyone else have any particular memories of it ?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I was working at a boatyard in Sufffolk at the time. I slept through the worst of the storm,but woke to find a tree accross the road had fallen. The walk to work showed more chaos in the town, though few fallen trees. At work, oh boy! An 84ft motor yacht hull slewed across the yard off its blocks and half on its side. Part off the roof off a temporary shed where it was to be housed for fitting out. Half a dozen of the many small yachts and cruisers that had torn free of their moorings were piled up on the base of our slip. And tucked away in a corner of the yard, with no chance of us getting it to the slipway, or into the water, a 40ft lifeboat suposed to be on 24 hour standby, having just had a new paint job, engine service and partial refit.

It took about a week with teams and a borrowed workboat working every high tide to remove the stranded yachts from our slip, and clear the yard enough to launch the lifeboat.

The biggest shock was on the following Sunday driving from Woodbridge to Butley for a song and music session. There are two stretches that passed through fairly dense forestry commission land, at the time planted with mostly conifers. The view through these stretches had been of the first few ranks of trees, about 200 yards at most. Now we could see the coast about 5 miles away, the whole woodland had gone apart from the odd lonesome pine.

How many remeber the hailstorm that swept Essex and Suffolk about two months earlier in August. Took out most of the glasshouses in the market gardening area from Cheltenham to Maningtree. Cars left outside had horizontal panels like roof and bonnet looking as though they had been used for a steel drum band. Friends took photos of hailstones between the sizes of tomatoes and apples/oranges. I had been upstairs gathering gear to go and run a conoeing session in the local swimming pool. I came down to find the kitchen 4" deep in water, a white water river with rapids outside the front door (on a fairly level road,albeit at the bottom of a hill the water was flowing into the tailpipe of my car's exhaust). Duration of the hailstorm as it passed over - 10 minutes!

Will