As I slowly came to at about six in the morning I became aware of the windows rattling rather noisily.

Still half asleep I got up, showered and dressed and then the phone rang. It was my headmaster.

"Don't bother trying to get to school today", he said, "you won't be able to get through. Oh, and could you pop down the road and tell the caretaker not to come in as well. His phone isn't working"

The caretaker lived a few hundred yards away from us so I duly went out and found that devastation had hit the village. It was still very windy but I made it to his house and passed on the message.

Back home we put the television on and watched in amazement as the havoc of the night before unfolded before our eyes. The worst storm in over 300 years had uprooted trees and damaged property.

Later that day the children and I went for a walk to see what had happened in the village. The route we normally took to school was completely cut off by about a dozen large trees, uprooted and laying across the road in an untidy heap. We were able to climb over them and found that what used to be a wood was now almost an open piece of ground.

However, the main thing that has stuck in my mind, and maybe I should feel a twinge of guilt over this, is that, thanks to the gales of 1987 we had four days of unexpected holiday from school.