Mary Reid

Twenty years ago my father woke on the morning of his 70th birthday to the news that much of southern England had been swept by a hurricane. His home in Wales had been spared the worst of the strom, but I wished him a Happy Birthday and described how all the roads around Hook were swathed in green branches and fallen trees. The storm had kept us awake for several hours during the night and we had heard tiles crashing from the roof.

My father's sister in Australia rang him to congratulate him on reaching 70, and he told her the news: "But hurricanes never happen in England" was her response.

Strictly speaking they don't, because the term hurricane is reserved for tropical cyclones, but the windspeeds were equivalent to a category 2 hurricane. It seems astonishing that there are three grades of hurricane above what we experienced that night.

What is often forgotten is that this one-in-three-hundred-years event was repeated in January 1990. This time the storm was not quite as severe, but it still reached the strength of a category 1 hurricane.

I can clearly remember looking out from the eighth floor of Kingston College and watching people who were completely unable to walk into the wind. We were really worried that windows would crack, and falling glass was indeed a major risk on that day. Overall the storm caused less damage than the previous one because the trees were already without leaves, and of course, many of the vulnerable trees had already fallen just over two years earlier. But sadly because it occurred during the day more people were killed in the 1990 storm than in 1987.