“I really do feel for those poor people in Cumbria,” said Margaret Lock, a 72-year-old carer. “They are in for a very difficult time. For me, the worst wasn’t leaving. It was the coming back that was most traumatic, seeing the mess and realising there was so much work to do.”
Lock has firsthand experience of what is it like to be driven from a beloved home by flooding. She was one of the scores of residents who had to flee when murky, smelly water spilled into homes in the villages of Moorland and Fordgate on the Somerset Levels in February 2014.
It was just shy of a year before Lock and her husband, John, a 62-year-old railway worker, were able to move back into their home of 29 years. She is surprised now at how sickeningly green the floodwater looks in photographs taken of her living room and kitchen at the time. “But it wasn’t river water, you see. It was water that had come from the fields and was filled with all sorts of horrible things.”
How did she get through it? “You have to stand your ground. You have to fight for everything. The insurance company was pretty good to us but I remember arguing over some kitchen tiles.”
She was struggling to find exactly the same sort of tiles that were damaged in the floods, so she suggested some with farmyard animals on them. “They argued about that. I stood my ground and won but that sort of silly little thing is difficult. I know a lot of people who are struggling with their nerves even now. There’s still a lot tension in the community.”
The winter storms, which began sweeping in from the Atlantic almost exactly two years ago, led to 58 sq miles of land in Somerset flooding. Water crept and seeped and flowed into around 165 homes, 50 businesses and 12 farms. Eighty-one roads were closed and it cost Somerset an estimated £150m.
Bryony Sadler, her husband, Gavin, and children Toby, then six, and Elsa, three, (plus a horse, dogs, rabbits, guinea pig and 70 chickens) had to flee their former vicarage for temporary accommodation. They moved out in the first week of February 2014 and did not get back until November that year.
“But it was only last week that I suddenly felt settled again,” said Sadler. “It’s so absorbing. You’re fighting to get your home back, your life back. It’s exhausting.”
Watching the images of the flooding in Cumbria has brought the anguish back to residents like Sadler. “You stomach fills with horror and dread. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Stung by criticism of its response to the Somerset floods, the government eventually championed the establishment of a 20-year flood action plan for the county. Defences have been strengthened, waterways dredged and longer-term measures such as planting trees in the upper catchment areas to try to slow the flow of water into vulnerable areas started.
“But people are still on edge,” said Sadler. “In a way I’d like to see a proper storm here to see if the new measures work, to find out where we are.”
Down the road, pensioners Michael and Buttons Price will open their home to the village on Christmas Eve as they have always managed to do – even last year when they had only moved back in a few weeks before. They have had almost every piece of their antique furniture, including a set of lovely barley-twist dining chairs, restored.
“We wanted it back just as it was,” said Buttons Price. One piece that, regretfully, was beyond repair was her father-in-law’s desk. “But you can get straight again,” said Michael Price. “We’d lived here for 40 years and that was the first time we’d been flooded. We haven’t thought about moving – we don’t expect it to happen again.”
