By a huge stroke of luck an enormous oak tree crashed down straight between two houses during Friday’s torrential downpour.
Teacher Sally Pollington, who was indoors with her husband, said: “A metre either way and the tree would have got our house or the neighbours’. I don’t know how we were so lucky.
“Afterwards, the fire brigade came to check it was safe. They couldn’t believe it. They told us we should have bought a lottery ticket, we were so lucky.
“We were so shocked it came down. From its trunk, the tree looks about 200 years old. It was really tall.
“On Friday when it rained all day we were just at home. We heard a noise and thought it was thunder, but it was the noise of branches going down our roof. But nothing was damaged. Our neighbour just lost a fence panel. Even the rhubarb in our garden survived.”
The tree came down into the footpath which separates the two houses in Harrison Close at Twyford, falling from the wide grassed open area in Broad Hinton. The firefighters put up warning tape to stop people using the path.
Sally went to inspect the tree’s root ball. “Strangely it didn’t look as if the roots went very deep. I think it fell because the soil was so wet.
“We’re at the bottom of the hill. The water has been running down the path like a river. It’s like a swamp outside our back door. There are many other oak trees up the road and in friends’ gardens.”
She said they’d always worried about a massive branch hanging towards their house, but even that didn’t hit their home and fell to the ground instead. If it had hit the house they would have had to move out so a large repair job be done. “We do feel very lucky,” added Sally who teaches in Hampshire.
People living some distance away in Cotterell Gardens and other roads heard the loud noise of the crashing tree.
The couple rang Wokingham Borough Council’s out-of-hours emergency line on Friday night. Sally said they understood the tree was the local authority’s responsibility. WBC told them this week that the task of dealing with it had been passed to their tree team.
”There is one branch towering over our house we’d [particularly] like removing,” said Sally on Monday.
“We’ve lived here more than 25 years. The tree has always been there, it’s just a bit of a shock. A squirrel was wandering round there looking a bit lost.”
