31/01/2023
True Stories from the East of England...
On the night of 31st January 1953 a seven-year old boy was woken by his mother.
“She stood me up on my bed and dressed me, rapidly pulling trousers, jumper and school raincoat over my pyjamas. I sat down to reach for the Teddy Tail annual I had dropped when I fell asleep and found it soggy and swollen. Water was cascading, roaring, four or five feet high, through the front door. My brother, older than me by ten years, earned my lifelong respect by standing up to his knees in water in front of a mirror and putting on a white shirt and his Essex County Cricket Club tie. ‘If I’m going to drown, then I’m going to drown decently dressed,’ he announced to us all.
“There was a scramble for the roof space.”
The boy’s father had been speculating aloud that they might eventually have to cut a hole in the roof if the water rose higher than the ceiling.
“Father hauled himself up through the trap door. Then Mother climbed onto my brother’s shoulders and was manhandled aloft. I was passed up like a package. Last came my brother...”
“My father had grabbed two cylindrical tins of Players ci******es, a bottle of rum, a pack of cards and matches: you could tell he was an ex-Navy man. My mother collected candles, money, her fur coat and jewel box. My brother had taken his best shoes and a cricket bat”.
(Barrie de Lara, in The Oldie, July 2007, excerpted in David Kynaston “Family Britain - 1951-57”, p257-258).
This was “The Great Surge” when a massive sea storm, pushed by strong winds & fuelled by an exceptionally high spring tide, first sank the ferry Princess Victoria with 133 lives lost and then swept down the East Coast from Lincolnshire to Kent. The trawler Guava, out of Lowestoft, was lost with all hands. The surge battered through sea defences, flooding out 32,000 people from their homes.
The de Lara family survived, though almost all their possessions were destroyed, but 308 East Anglians died.
58 of them were the de Laras’ immediate neighbours: the little boy, now Norwich-based writer and storyteller Barrie de Lara, was living on Canvey Island in the Thames Estuary, every inch of it below sea level.
