STORMS GONE BY

Throughout the day the Television has been broadcasting stern warnings as to the strength and expected destructive force of the approaching storm. Having battened down the hatches and made sure that we shall have no occasion to go out tomorrow we are as ready as we can be for whatever befalls.

Since I first heard of the storms approach I have been thanking the Gods that my dear son no longer works at night. For eight years he braved heavy snow,gales and heavy rain to get to his work place in The City, where he spent his nights as a financial editor. How I worried about him, what his work colleagues never knew was that he suffered from asthma, a condition not improved by struggling with severe weather conditions.

Now when the weather is bad I never fail to get a feeling of relief as we all settle down to a cosy night at home. I have lived through a good many extreme weather events .when you live on the high peak it goes with the territory. Gales were almost an annual event and no matter haw bad they were they seldom made the news......even the local news.....it was nothing new you see.

Three weeks after Pa and I moved in to our first home a great storm hit our area. Being new home owners and being also very young....I was only twenty we were more than usually concerned.

The storm had not been forecast, it was New Year and my seven year old brother was staying with us for the weekend. By tea time it was evident that we were in for a bad night and I decided to try to get my brother home as I knew my mother would worry even though he would have been safe with us.

Pa ,who had been to fetch the car arrived with bleeding hands having been unable to open the garage doors in the teethe of the gale. The doors had slammed shut and the glass panes had broken.

Pa had nailed up the broken windows, it was very evident that we should be going no where after all.

I called my mother who told me that she had sent my other brother and a friend to pick us all up and bring us to the safety of the farm. A massive building with walls three ft thick, as she spoke my brother arrived back at the farm with his friend but on foot,the wind had blown the van off the road and after several cartwheels it had come to rest in a ploughed field. The boys were lucky to be alive.

During the evening the wind increased,the noise was terrifying, a roaring, drumming sound interspersed with loud crashes,the big bat window of our house creaked like a ship in a storm and the whole house shook at each new blast.

The lights went out,unsurprisingly and of course the telephone was dead,now we were cut of and how I wished I was at the farm. A more than usually loud crash sent me running to the window and as |I opened the curtains I saw an apex shed roof flapping like a bird and heading directly for out house,thankfully it caught in some cables and landed in the lane a few metres from our window.

Our neighbour,an elderly gentleman appeared in the road, he picked up a downed electric cable which was spurting blue sparks, we shouted to him, to put it down but he could not hear us. Behind his back and unseen by him another cable also live writhed about in the road,almost hitting the old man so often that I could no longer bare to look. A t this point my poor little brother found it all too much and began to cry.

I made a hot drink on our primus stove and laced those drinks with brandy,liberally, soon the little chap was sound asleep in our warm bed,afraid no longer. In spite of all my past experience I was also afraid, I unlike Pa who was not a local I knew just how great our danger was....and there was nothing |I could do about it...nothing whatever.

A dreadful banging at the side of our house suggested trouble and so it proved to be. Our neighbour whose rickety garage housed a rather smart car decided to try to safe guard his vehicle by taking the boards off our garage doors and roping through our garage doors and out of a side window, it did save his car,but it cost us our garage roof and caused damage to our own car.

Now the storm was at it's hight and the dreadful sound was continuous, the wind was finding every cranny and the curtains billowed in every room. We had, in the interests of safety put out the fire and by now we were chilled to the bone, wearily we climbed in to bed on either side of my sleeping brother,and soon we were warm again.......we did not sleep but lay listening to the world outside our windows being torn apart. By first light I was glad to get up and make some tea.

The gale had dropped a little and we were able to go out side to view the horror and the miracle for although we had, through the stupid and selfish action of our neighbour lost our garage ours house was the only one in the village that still had a roof,intact.

It was not possible to go far as the roads were blocked by dead trees,my older brother, a tree surgeon made it his business to clear the road between our house and the farm and before lunch time we were sitting in the farm kitchen warm and safe and with a pile of bacon rolls before us,then we realised we had not eaten since lunch the day before..no wonder we were hungry.

All over the moor and in every village stories came in of property destroyed, roofs blow off. Haystacks blown in to the next parish,chimney stacks everywhere had collapsed in the storm. Roads were still blocked and my brother worked around the clock to clear them so that the electricity workers and the telephone repair boys as well as doctors and district nurses could get through.

He worked for four days with only an occasional break for an hour or twos sleep.

It soon became clear how great the damage had been, trees had succumbed to the gale in there thousands and whole woodlands had vanished, it was a sad sight indeed.

My father helped us to get repairs done to our house,a practical man in every way he soon had things shipshape again, but I never forgot that dreadful night.