A crash course in survival (From The Northern Echo)

A crash course in survival

11:19am Thursday 20th January 2011 in Mum At Large

THERE always seems to be a drama of one sort or another going on in our house.

Perhaps it’s because we have five boys, three of them teenagers. But while the everyday chaos of life in a large family can be fun, there are times when I long for some peace and quiet.

After an action-packed Christmas and New Year, we wanted to get away from it all. A short break on the North Yorkshire coast was just what we needed. A few calm, uneventful, relaxing days were all we were after.

But, of course, it didn’t turn out quite as we’d planned. Hit by winter bugs, we ended up plagued by everything from sniffles and sore throats through to raging headaches and sickness. We spent most of the time in the holiday cottage flat out, buried under duvets.

Why couldn’t I just have lain there on the sofa, like the rest of them, until it was time to go home?

But when my husband, still recovering from a painful broken shoulder after a sledging accident before Christmas, pleaded for someone to go out and get him a newspaper, I made the mistake of taking pity on him.

The 15-minute drive to the shop in Whitby was fine. It wasn’t until the journey home that I found myself in the middle of a major news story.

A sudden blizzard came out of nowhere and, within minutes, the road, which had been clear, was covered in several inches of snow. Heading down a narrow hill on a windy road, my car was sliding all over the place. Three cars in front skidded and smashed into each other. The road was impassable.

So I headed back to the main Whitby to Scarborough road. It was jammed with hundreds of cars, bumper-to-bumper. No one seemed to be moving.

I could see flashing lights ahead and it looked as if there had been a number of accidents. After half an hour, I phoned my husband: “I don’t know what to do, people have started abandoning their cars. Lots of people are walking to nearby villages.”

“What are you talking about? The roads are fine down here. It isn’t even snowing,” he said, as if I was making it up.

I was only about five minutes’ drive away, but I started to wonder if I should find a B&B to stay at. Snow was still falling and by now the Mountain Rescue Service and Coastguard had turned up to help the police and other emergency services.

“It can’t be that bad,” said my rather unhelpful and annoyingly unsympathetic husband when I phoned him after another hour. “You’re only a few minutes away.” By this time, I had moved a whole few inches. More people were leaving their cars and braving the raging blizzard to go and seek refuge.

After two-and-a-half hours, I managed to reach my turn-off. It took another terrifying half hour of skidding and slipping down the treacherously icy lane before I got back to the holiday home where, sure enough, there hadn’t been any snow at all.

What should have been a 15- minute journey had taken me three hours and I was still shaking as I came through the door. But I needn’t have expected any sympathy in this snow-free zone.

“My newspaper, at last,” said my husband. “What took you so long?”

The boys only had one concern: “Did you get us any sweets?” they asked.

NEXT day, I waved the newspapers under their noses, complete with the dramatic photographs which proved I really had been in the thick of a major drama on the Moors the night before.

“I can’t wait to get back home, to normality,” I said, still a bit shaken, as we drove home next day.

That night, we were all watching television when we heard a deep rumbling sound. The whole house shook. The floor started to shudder, as if an underground train was running directly under the house. Eightyear- old Albert, who had been asleep in bed, appeared at the door: “Is the house going to fall down?” he asked.

I called The Northern Echo newsdesk, which confirmed there had just been an earthquake, the biggest to shake the area for 230 years. Why didn’t that surprise me? And it turned out the epicentre was just behind our village butcher’s shop, about a mile from our house.

A friend phoned when she heard it on the news. I told her about being stuck on the Moors for three hours in a blizzard the night before: “You realise these things always come in threes...” she said.

I’ll keep you posted.