For a few weeks in February 2014 our village was the centre of media attention. The Thames burst its banks and flowed through the Main Street. Life took on a surreal quality. The media descended on us, the army and the fire brigade pitched in and ev...
The first inkling we got that our village was about to become the centre of national attention was turning on the TV and seeing it broadcast from literally the end of our street. It had been a very wet winter with week after week of rain and we'd been nervously eyeing up water levels on the Thames for a while; but to say we weren't prepared for what was soon to happen would be an understatement.
Sandra, my wife catches the early train each morning and I'd turned TV on to make sure the trains were running because, in the UK, any unforeseen weather; rain, heat, snow or even famously; the wrong kind of leaves on the line, can stop them from running but what I saw when I turned on the TV was hard to take in at first. The location looked familiar. The location looked very familiar! I yelled for Sandra, 'We're on TV, they are filming from the end of the road." It was true; there was a camera crew on the Green, where Our street meets the Slough Road.
The gist as I recall was flood warnings in place along our stretch of the river Thames and no trains running in or out of Datchet as the train lines were flooded. That should have been a clue to what was about to happen but, a bit like everyone else our focus was still on the river levels across the railway and down the road to the river.
There are a set of river side benches we use as our gauge. We start by checking how far out of the water they are, then how far up the first set of benches the water goes then how far up the second set they come. Both sets of benches were under water but the thing to make clear at this point, and that I'll come back to, is we don't live near the river. The river is about 500m, a quarter of a mile or more away. So what could go wrong?!!
Well you only have to go in the village pub and see the pictures of 1948's floods on the wall to know that things can go very wrong in Datchet. There are pictures of water flowing through the centre of the village and people being carried round it boats. So it can happen but it's a once in a generation thing. We'd kind of got used to the Environment Agencies Flood Alerts, the disembodied voice mail telling us there was a threat and we should take action but we were used too to nothing actually materialising and this time ironically there had been no such warning.
But we were scared and to know why we were scared you have to know the geography of the village.
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