Personally all I remember was hearing the wind blowing like mad and hearing my Dad keep saying, “Cor! Hark at that wind”, which now I type it makes it sound like I was a kid in the 1880s, not 1980s.

Apart from that my biggest memories come from seeing all the devastation on the news.

Morning came, and it was only then that we realised how bad things were. One (exterior) classroom destroyed. Long lengths of wall smashed by fallen trees (which missed the building by inches). The roof had turret-dome things on the corners which were on the ground in many pieces. Roof damage, window damage, don’t even ask about the victorian glasshouse…

Our few resident teachers decided to send us on a “run” around the woods (as was normal for PE when nothing better was happening) in order to get us out of the way for the cleanup of the more dangerous things. But teachers, being a pretty clueless bunch, had not taken time to consider what that involved. It took us nearly an hour to get to the entry into the woods. The roads were completely blocked by fallen trees. The woods themselves? Devastated. No. Annihilated. Proud oaks and birches and something else once stood. Now what wasn’t lying down was snapped in half. I could look into what the day before was a dense forest and see the next town. I burst into tears, turned around, went back. As it happens, that was a wise thing to do, the needed to send search and rescue for those that followed the instruction literally. I bet the teachers got a bollocking for that.

One thing I will relate, however, is that I have ALWAYS had a lot of respect for BT. The day after the storm, BT men were around. Their trucks couldn’t get anywhere near the little hamlet so they carried their tools and dragged big spools of wire. They did an amazingly hacky lash-up job fixing the line to anything still standing. The local exchange was flattened, and somebody said it caught fire as well. But, you know what, at half six in the evening all the phones started ringing for about twenty seconds. And then the phones were working. For the rest of the day AND the day following, phone calls were free. I called my mother and played the entire Radio Mercury (remember them?) news bulletin from a payphone. When I hung up, it gave me my 10p coin back.
We ate like kings, for the freezers had no power so we had to eat up or chuck out. Some of the food was a bit odd, it must have been a challenge working in a large kitchen by candlelight. The emergency lights only lasted about ten hours, most of that was the night of the storm. It took nearly a week to get the power on. But the phones. Communication. The ability to call our parents. I don’t know if this was BT policy or if they did this specifically for us, but – RESPECT.

When I last passed the area, the woods were recovering, but it will not be in my lifetime that anybody will see them as I remember them. The smaller storm that followed in 1990 didn’t help either, that damaged a number of saplings. I thought it was criminal that the groundskeepers were cutting down decent trees, but none fell in 1990. I now think they identified “weak” trees and took them down before they were pushed.

But, many years have passed. The juniors I knew have long gone. All of the staff has changed. I popped by for a visit in 2001 and the dormitories had different names, the classrooms were assigned different purposes. The only thing that seemed eternal was the yucky two-tone paint scheme (vomit yellow and gaudy green in some parts!). That is the problem with nostalgia. Like going back to your home town a decade or two later and you’re like “OMG, I don’t *know* this place!”.

Anyway, hey… thanks for the memories.

In 1990 I was trying to get from Kingston to Sunbury to get a pair of boots fitted…… after half an hour in the cold outside Bentalls waiting for a 216 I gave up and went home !