Living with Jonah Jones - Kathleen Jones' disastrous identity

I once heard script-writer Andrew Davies say that 'nothing bad ever happens to a writer because they can always earn money writing about it'.  I tried to remember that when my home was under water recently.

Living through turbulent times seems to be my specialty - in fact friends tell me my surname ought to be Jonah rather than Jones because I seem to attract catastrophes.  I went to Christchurch NZ to take part in a literature festival and got caught in the middle of an earthquake;  I house-sat for friends in Italy and got hit by a weather bomb and a catastrophic landslide that cut off an entire village for 6 months.  So it was little wonder that, deciding to spend Christmas at home, some terrible event was bound to strike.

341 mm of rain in a single 24 hour period is a record for the British Isles, and I'm proud to say that Cumbria, my native county, holds it.  Courtesy of Storm Desmond, the rain was biblical.

The Mill on the river bank

I live in an old water mill on the edge of one of the Lake District's biggest rivers, the River Eden, which - when provoked - is anything but Paradise.  It runs down from the hills with a speed and ferocity that has to be seen to be believed.  Normally the river is about 40 feet wide, with a ford below the weir that you can walk across knee deep - perfect for children with shrimping nets.

The ford under the footbridge, which disappeared under the flood water.

Above the weir the placid water is up to your chest, but you can still wade across it. We've had summers of fun swimming off the weir or paddling canoes upstream.

The weir on a normal summer's day - a lovely picnic place.

But, when the river gets angry, swelled by rainfall up in the hills, it swallows up the land on either side and begins to rise up the banks, engulfing the footbridge and my garden, surrounding my house, and creating a brown torrent a hundred yards wide.

The river just about to cut off our rear entrance. 

At one point, this time, it was more than 20 feet deep, running like an express train.  The Mill is built on a plinth about 6 feet above the river bank, several yards from the river, but it quickly rose over the threshold, up through the ground floor, smashing windows and partition walls and then started rising through the workshops on the mezzanine level, at first floor height.

One of the partitions demolished by the flood.

It's never been that high before in the entire history of the Mill.  The building was marooned in the river, encircled by water, both front and back entrances cut off.

Ground floor windows about to disappear.

At one point I had a Sea King helicopter overhead and a kind gentleman on the phone asking if I'd like to be rescued.  I assured him that I had an escape route into a neighbour's garden and would stay.  But after the electricity went off it became much too scary - so much water in the dark - the whole building was thrumming with the force of the water going through, so I left to spend the night with friends wondering if I'd have a home to go back to.

The bridge just before nightfall, about to be engulfed.

I wrote the whole story up on my blog and was very surprised to be contacted by a magazine asking if they could use excerpts from it and some of my photographs. Which just shows that writer's blogs are useful tools.  I've received only a small fee but it will help to swell the flood reconstruction fund. There!  Andrew Davies was right.

Meanwhile, we've been flooded again (Christmas Eve), had a tree blown down by the next storm, and are on flood  alert for yet another storm next week.  I'm getting a bit tired of being stalked by them - Dastardly Desmond, Evil Eva, Ferocious Frank - it was all right until they started giving them names. Hatches now being battened for Gruesome Gertrude.  At this rate, we'll have reached the end of the alphabet by March and I'll have enough material for a book!

The aftermath. Water levels reached up to the beginning of the arch above the doorway.

Smashed windows inside.

I strongly recommend that, when you plan your holidays, you find out where I'm going next and make sure you go somewhere else. Unless, of course, you love a good disaster ...... after all, you can always write about it!

Kathleen Jones is a biographer, novelist and poet who publishes on both sides of the fence.  She blogs at 'A Writer's Life', is often to be found wasting time on Facebook, and Tweets incognito as @kathyferber 

Her latest novel is The Centauress, available on Amazon.