Jbeesfan

I was sorting out some old photo’s a couple of days ago and came across this. I don’t know the actual date but i do remember taking this in early 1982. We lived in Teddington in West London at the time, i do remember waking up being absolutely gobsmacked by the sheer volume of snow. So i reached for my camera. Around about this time i walked from Teddington to my(then) boyfriends house in Coombe Hill Kingston, it took well over two hours. When he answered the door to my chagrin he fell about laughing because my normally long brown hair had turned completely white. It hadn’t snowed on my journey so it must have frozen. Within ten minutes of being inside it melted and soaked me. Somewhere I will still have some more photo’s of our garden taken at the same time. I can only really remember another winter in London which was so snowy -1978 (the ‘winter of discontent’). It was my last year at school and they closed the school down due to cold and strikes. Unfortunately i had my mock o’levels and had to attend with the other girls in my year! Left London in 1989.

The monumental storm broke over my home, in Bromley, Kent, at the time, around midnight and continued until around 6 am, without a word of a lie. The lightning was very scary and thunder deafening. i remember that storm.i was three years old at the time and lived in Clapham North. My parents took me out of the cot i still slept in and i was sitting on the edge of their bed, watching my mother pacing up and down, chain smoking because she was terrified of thunderstorms. My fear of storms must’ve dated from this point. I don’t remember being scared before. But, there was a slash of lightning and and a huge crash, which sent me under the covers of my parents bed, much to my father’s amusement. The next thing i remember was someone hammering on our window - the lightning had struck a tree at the bottom of the garden which backed onto the railway line, and a family of young boys who knew my brother came tearing down to us for a better look! It didn’t really finish until it got light. i was terrified of storms from that point. I can’t say when the turning point for me was. I was ok in groups of people - i remember seeing a lightning ball from my classroom window in primary school and thinking, i can’t scream because no-one else has! The 1981 storm i remember well. By then i was 18. My mother and i were at home (by now we’d moved to West London). I’d lost my fear of thunderstorms by then, my mother hadn’t and was just a pair of skinny legs poking out from underneath the coats in the hall. But i do remember feeling uneasy enough to sit on the stairs. Probably the worst storm i remember in the UK was either the 27th or 28th August 1990, stuck on York Station for five and a half hours because the pantagraph was down at Doncaster. i saw a real beauty in Rüdesheim in Germany on a boat trip up the Rhein in around August 2005. We were steaming past Bingen when a storm of Wagnerian proportion took place. The lightning danced from the golden balls atop the churches. The boat captain must've had a flair for the dramatic because he played the Lorelei over the loudspeaker and a couple of Americans were arguing about what would happen if the boat was hit. It was unforgettable. And being me, it was probably unwise..I’ve been in two separate houses hit by lightning, plus a building in Covent Garden (whilst using a switchboard) also struck in a plane. I’ve seen not just one lightning ball but two. Yesterday we had a bit of a bash, there was one colossal bang and flash and the garages at the back of our garden was hit. Under my breath i said ‘missed’.

I was on Hampton Wick Station waiting for a train. Everyone else vanished!

I was on Hampton Wick Station waiting for a train. Everyone else vanished!

I remember this like it was yesterday. it had been very humid the night before and we were woken up at dawn by a moderate thunderstorm. But, it didn’t get any cooler. It fact it was really sticky. we lived about a 40 min bus ride from Heathrow. My dad went to work. And it started to get darker. And darker and darker. Then, in the distance you could hear sporadic booms. Not cracking like normal thunder or rolling, but a boom, twenty seconds, boom again. this went on for a while. My mother was petrified of thunderstorms, and wasn’t happy with the earlier one. I remember standing in the back garden looking at the sky. And it just kept getting darker and darker. Again, no lightning just boom. No lightning at this point at all. Then it started to rain quite hard. By this time it was almost twilight. It probably was between around 8.30-9.00am. Then all hell broke loose. it turned into a pretty nasty storm. It went on a long time. My mother went and hid under the coat rack at the bottom of the stairs, and although by then storms didn’t bother me, i went and sat on the stairs. After the big pre-amble i don’t remember it going on terribly long. But when it stopped the air had thankfully, cleared and the garden was full of hail stones about the size of large marbles. i was 18 at the time. That night myself and my (then) boyfriend went up to central London to have a meal with some of his friends. They were talking about the storm too. One of the girls had been caught out waiting for a bus and got soaked. The only other storm i remember, apart from the 87 hurricane, was a big one in West/North Yorkshire in the summer of 1990. I was stuck on York Station for five hours. That day in York was so humid you could scarcely breathe. We were all so packed in on York Station, no trains going in out or anywhere at all. The staff announced over the loud speaker that free tea, coffe and soft drinks were available. When i finally got on the train (all the Pantagraph electric wires were down at Doncaster) the storm raged all the way to Darlington. It began at around 5pm and was still raging when i got off the train, at around half ten, and bolted for my house in Northallerton in pouring rain. It was the overdue Edinburgh train and jammed pack. I looked out the window and ALL the fields were like lakes in the dark. No one seems to recall that one. i