If conditions persist, Hambledon may not dry out until March. Resident and retired naval officer Nick Bailey explains how the village is coping. Our first flooding of the house occurred six weeks ago, when we had the first surge through the village. We had water coming in through the floor of one room. We've been living upstairs for six weeks now.
Some rooms downstairs are three or four inches deep in water.
At one stage, we had a sandbag barrier in our kitchen which divided the stream flowing through our conservatory, into the hall and underneath the door from the cooker. If the cooker had gone, we would have had to abandon the whole house. Desperate measures We've spent the past few days digging trenches and putting pipe systems around the back of our house as a sort of moat, with some success. Our boiler, which is in a flooded room, is mounted on a plinth just above the water. So we have hot water, we have an Aga to warm the kitchen, and lots of sweaters.