North Sea Floods 1978

What it is like when the sea pays a visit to the office

Floods and solicitors do not mix well.

My postings here will range from the distant past to the present. Here is a glimpse of a night to remember more than 45 years ago. We are beset by the vagaries of an unpredictable climate now, but it has never behaved impeccably as our experience in 1978 will show. The town of King’s Lynn in Norfolk, along with other coastal towns and villages, suffered extensive flooding.

Here was our story

Davina, who was then a newly qualified solicitor,  is the kind of person who manages to look the part in every situation. The night of 11 January 1978 was no exception. There was a sophistication about the way she stood blue with cold and with water lapping over the hem of her skirt. The North Sea had just transformed our office into an oversized septic tank.

Only two months earlier we had moved there from our snug first floor office on the other side of the town. We had spent a whole day moving many years' accumulations of filing cabinets, desks, deeds and secretaries. We then watched as decorators gradually erased the brown and grey paint and transformed it all to a glistening white. Carpet men then laid plush carpets and finally came the telephone engineers to install the very latest system (but the receivers still had dials!)

We were the branch office (head office being 15 miles away in Wisbech). Our previous office had become overcrowded even though by careful partitioning we had managed to compress two, even three, persons into every room. Suddenly we had three times the space and we felt like battery hens turned loose on Dartmoor. It was like being in a strange new school and one kept having to ask where Maureen or Jill's room was and which way was it to the lavatory. However we overcame our agoraphobia and by the time 11 January came along we had settled in very nicely.

Office under water

The wind had been blowing hard all day and when I got home I was beginning to fear for the safety of the roof of the coal shed which I had just replaced .. The roof stayed on but half way through the evening Davina telephoned: 'I am afraid the river has overflowed its banks and there is some water in the office'.

Some men like to show their virility by having extremely noisy cars or  loud hi-fi units. Others measure their prowess by attaching long telephoto lenses to their Japanese cameras. For me nothing can beat yards and yards of plastic hose connected to a very powerful pump. The pump and hose were acquired to suck water out of our well at home to provide us with the only green garden in Norfolk during the drought. Not thinking for a moment that anything more than a broom would be necessary to sweep the water out of the office, I wound the pump, the hose and two buckets into my car and my wife and I set off for King's Lynn, dodging the fallen trees which made the journey an obstacle course. It took some time to get to the office as many roads had become rivers and the nearby Tuesday Market Place was a lake. By the time we had waded the last 50 yards to the office I knew that we were not going to have to cope with just a puddle.

We all take a lot for granted as we struggle through life. On the whole fires stay in grates, earth stays underfoot and water keeps in its appointed channels or washes around in the sea. But when water, 3 ft deep, muddy, stinking and cold has spread over half the floor space of your office which a few hours earlier was dry and warm, your senses refuse to accept that it is real. Your reaction is to try to get rid of the unwanted intruder. Davina (whose room was the worst affected) had already started bailing out with the dustbin and my wife joined her with a plastic wastepaper basket, but they might as well have been using teaspoons for all the good it was doing. There was so much water that it seemed an impossible task to get it out. The fire brigade should have been the answer but they were still on strike. Our telephones were flooded but beside the nearest telephone kiosk was a gleaming red fire engine full of real firemen. Would they come and help pump out our office? 'Sorry sir, we are waiting for union instructions.'

The union instructions never materialised and we were thrown back on our own resources. The pump was set up and water started flowing quite satisfactorily into the drains but it was a very long time before the water level dropped even a fraction of an inch. The senior partner had been put in charge of communications and gradually reinforcements from the other office started to arrive. First to get there were William and Liz dressed for an Arctic expedition. They were soon followed by two more solicitors and a rather bewildered barrister who evidently thought that he had been briefed only to appear in court. He did not realise that when you instruct barristers in these parts you expect them to do far more than cross-examine. The barrister soon discovered that he too had a pump fetish and he very happily spent the rest of the evening removing dissolved telephone directories, sodden legal periodicals and even an enterprising fish, all of which had found their way into the works of the pump. The same barrister, later in life became a very fierce judge

Filing problems

Meanwhile the rest of us had other problems; we keep all our old files in cardboard apple boxes, a system which had up to then worked well. Now many were afloat, but sinking fast. Their bottoms fell out if you tried to lift them and besides they were already impossibly heavy. The only solution was to moor them and wait for the flood to subside. Filing cabinets were not so easy. We worried that  if we left the files where they were we would either never get them out or they would burst the sides of the filing cabinets. With much flexing of muscles the dripping drawers were taken upstairs and their contents spread over what was left of the plush carpets.

Suddenly a nice thing happened. Our next door neighbour, whose flat still had a lot of the sea in, it arrived with tin mugs and a bottle of whisky. Even hardened tomato juice addicts gulped it down and its fire did a lot to restore flagging wits and thaw frozen feet. Throughout the night we received predictions that the tide the following morning would be higher still and thus discouraged at about 2 o'clock, having rescued what we could and reduced the water level to a mere foot, we went home to our warm baths and then to bed.

The next day was calm and sunny. The centre of King's Lynn was full of talk about the experiences of the night before: the cinema audience which was marooned while watching 'The Deep'; the lady who clung to her umbrella and was swept over a wall in the gale - christened 'Mary Poppins' by the - ambulance men who brought her to hospital, and the box office assistant who waved to hidden admirers as she floated down the street in an army dinghy but overbalanced and showed only her tail feathers for the rest of the voyage.

Cleaning up

But calm and sunny contrasted with cold and clammy in the office. Robbed of the drama of the night before, the task of cleaning up was all the more oppressive; but I had reckoned without the other members of the firm who had slept through the deluge. In no time  the  secretaries had donned overalls and started cleaning up with a vigour which would have been the envy of the leading Soviet Women's Coal-mining Squad. By the end of the day the water had been expelled, the walls and the floors had been sponged and hundreds of valuable pieces of paper had been carefully hung out to dry.

This was no mean feat, particularly as many clients had decided that we had somehow concocted the flood to frustrate their wish to move into their new homes within a week of instructing us. Action was what they wanted and they would not leave us to our mops till they got it. Some even made witty remarks about floods which we received with hollow laughter and vivid thoughts of hitting them on the nose. But I forgave a widow who was desperately upset at the death of her husband. For weeks she had been coming into the office looking forlorn and lost. Viewing our desolation her face crinkled into a smile for the first time and she said 'You must be doing well to have got an indoor swimming pool. Tee hee hee'. I bit my tongue, clenched my fist in my pocket and forced a watery smile. Curiously she has looked a lot more cheerful ever since.

And us? It will take a long time to dry the floors and walls but life has returned to normal and we do now have a delicious excuse: 'Dear Sirs, We are sorry about the delay ... floods ... inundated . •.. washed away ... several months .. .'. It could have been a lot worse. At least we all had dry homes to go to, which is more than can be said for many in this area. And the apple boxes have been replaced. They are in the attic and we are keeping our fingers crossed that the office does not now catch fire.