After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave. Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death. Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades. Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently. No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power. A case of presque-vu.įor winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London. But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable. Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable. The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature. 'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'. A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave. Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee. The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped. Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes. And the radio itself was strangely different. On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home it was pointless going to work they said. People milled around, some taking photographs. Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement. Everywhere there were scenes of destruction: huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road. People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity.
No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled. Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am it was as if time had had a heart attack. The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead. Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong. An enormous silence hung over the whole building. With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done. Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power. Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips. Shortly afterwards, I wrote a cheerful little piece about it, reproduced for your delectation below: Parenthetically, I was there when the Great Storm struck.
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"There is a very high percentage of dead wood in there," Mr White revealed, "which is now home to invertebrates, which birds obviously feed on. The result?Īs part of the recovery programme on the hill, the National Trust formed a partnership with English Nature to see what would happen if 50 acres (20Ha) of the 450-acre (180Ha) site was left to recover naturally.
Twenty years on, the woods are growing back - some of them naturally, not in a managed way as they were before the storm. In 1987, the Great Storm struck south-eastern England one result was the mass destruction of many woodlands:īecause the hill was effectively a monoculture of mature beech trees of a similar age, it did not surprise Mr White that so many were lost in the storm.
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