This story was contributed at our Your Stories In Song event at Pickhams in June 2024. The story inspired a lot of discussion between the audience members of our experiences of the storm and we created a quick chorus of a song using phrases shouted out by the audience. It was fun to do but we’ll start afresh on a new song inspired more specifically by Terry’s words below:
I was a tree surgeon in S W London at the time. We had worked late the day before so my ‘ground man’ had stayed over. During the night the ‘phone kept ringing (only land lines in those days). Every time I got it, it stopped, in the end I disconnected it. In the morning we awoke to the devastation that had taken place in the night (it was my mate on the council trying to contact me to clear the roads who had been trying to ‘phone). The devastation was so great because it was October and the trees were all in full leaf plus is had been wet leaving the soil loose around the roots.
We worked for 6 months, 7 days a week clearing the devastation. If you walk in woods even today and see a group of larger trees lying all in the same direction, chances are it will be a legacy of that night.
IMAGE: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aftermath_of_the_Great_Storm_of_1987.jpg
David Wright, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons