Sara Kilpatrick took one look at the house by the sea and fell in love with it. Not that it looked anything special. It was just a glorified beach chalet on stilts, one of a clutter of timber and asbestos bungalows and shacks punctuated by the occasional brick-built house that straggled along Hunstanton’s South Beach.

Aftermath: Freeman Kilpatrick, hero of the floods, surveys the wreckage of his family’s home on Hunstanton’s South Beach in the days following the destructive sea surge.

Designed more for summer vacations, they had been pressed into service in the years after the war by an acute shortage of housing. In autumn and winter, they were cold, draughty and exposed to the full blast of the icy gales blowing in off the North Sea.

But none of that bothered Sara. The seaside location was its charm and, in any case, it meant that she and her husband, Freeman, and their four-year-old daughter Suellen, could be together in their own home.

“I loved it there,” recalls Sara. “I loved the beach. I loved being able to walk along it into Hunstanton. I loved everything about the place. It was just ideal as far we were concerned, and although we only moved in during the Fall and it could get pretty cold we used to love our walks along that beach.”

The Kilpatricks were part of the second “friendly invasion” of Norfolk by Americans in the space of a decade. The first time, during the war, the influx had been restricted to servicemen and women. But when the Yanks returned to meet the challenge of the Cold War, they brought their families too, so that the area around the Sculthorpe air base became freckled with Little Americas.

Hunstanton’s South Beach, with its rough, unadopted road running towards Heacham, was one such place. The Kilpatricks were part of an expatriate American community consisting of enlisted men, NCOs and officers together with their young families, all living cheek by jowl with local families, most of whom had come to accept their presence there as the norm.

Among the locals was a family called the Stubbins, who occupied a small, wooden bungalow at the Heacham end of South Beach. At one time, there had been seven of them living there. But, by the January of 1953, there were just four of them: Bill, a general foreman for the Great Ouse Catchment Board, his daughters Joyce and Marjorie, and son Derek.

Bill’s wife, Mary, had died of cancer six years earlier, leaving him to bring up five children alone. Since then, his eldest son had left to do his National Service with the army in Hong Kong, and his daughter Joan had married and was living in Skegness, where she was expecting her first child any day.

Since Joan left, it had fallen to Joyce, who had just turned 17, to keep house and to act as surrogate mum to her nine-year-old sister and 14-year-old brother. In between housework and taking care of Marjorie and Derek, though, she found time to earn some pocket money babysitting for the American families along South Beach.

Among those she had helped out in the past were the Kilpatricks. The routine was simple enough. Freeman would usually wander down the road to her family’s bungalow and ask if she could watch over Suellen for a few hours while he and Sara popped into town for a night out.

And that’s what happened on Saturday, January 31, just as the sea, whipped by gale-force winds, began to batter the coast. The Kilpatricks wanted to take in a movie. They’d be back well before midnight. Usually, with her father in, she never had to seek permission. But that night was strangely different. “Because it was so rough outside,” she recalls, “I asked my father if he was going out and if it would be all right to go. He just said he was going to check the sea defences, which were just across the road from us, and that was all.”

What she didn’t know then was that this brief exchange would be the last conversation she’d ever have with her father, still less that her decision to make the short walk to the Kilpatricks’ home would mean the difference between life and death. As she made her way along South Beach in the inky darkness of early evening, the storm was already breaking, heralded by a howling wind. But still there was no indication of the catastrophe to come. After all, gales battering the coast in winter were scarcely a new phenomena.

She’d hardly ventured into the Kilpatricks’ home, however, before the first signs materialised that this was no ordinary storm. While his wife made final preparations for going out, Freeman Kilpatrick wandered over to the window and, peering out into the darkness, saw what looked like a sheen of water, trickling across the road.
“It was coming up across the yard,” he remembers, “and I went down to check it out. I bent down and tasted it. It was salty. And it was at that moment I knew we was in big trouble...”

What followed that night 50 years ago has been the source of occasionally heated, if unresolved, debate in the Kilpatrick family ever since.

For with hardly a word to his wife, the 23-year-old staff sergeant from Opelika, Alabama, was gone. “I don’t know what came over me,” he says. “I just knew I had to warn people, so I just went off down the street trying to get as many people as I could to leave.

“Even to this day, my wife’s still mad at me for leaving her and going down to help other people. But at times like that you don’t sit down and say shall I do this or do that. It doesn’t work out that way. Anyway, I never thought it’d all happen so fast. I knew the water was going to come up, but I thought it’d take several hours and we’d all have time to get out.”

In fact, it all changed in the space of a few devastating minutes during which the trickle became a flood and the flood became a swirling black tidal wave. “When I set out, it was only ankle deep and you could wade in it all right, but then, in a matter of maybe 20 minutes, it was 30ft deep in places and there was debris flying everywhere. You couldn’t believe what was happening.”

Nothing in his background, nor his training, could have prepared him for the desperate emergency he now found himself in.

At Sculthorpe, Freeman Kilpatrick’s job as a member of 3rd Communications Squadron was the singularly unglamorous one of maintaining the base’s telephone network. A friendly, easy-going fellow who spoke in the slow southern drawl common to many Alabamans, he was known as someone who was always willing to help out his neighbours in a crisis. Yet few among even his closest friends would have imagined him ever being cast as the central figure in a life-saving drama of such magnitude as the one into which he found himself propelled with shock-ing suddenness on January 31, 1953.

But cometh the hour, cometh the man. Dressed only in the clothes in which he had intended to go to the cinema, he nevertheless pressed on with his self-ordained mission, half-wading, then teetering along brick garden walls and, finally, swimming from home to home.

“It was pretty bad,” he admits. “All the power had gone and it was so dark, you couldn’t see much. And then it got to the point where the stone fences I was walking on started to crumble. So, the only way to carry on was to swim and just try to grab hold o’ things and pull yourself along.”

For some of the way, he was joined by another American, a neighbour he’d alerted. Together, they called and cajoled as many families as they could to leave their frail bungalows and head for the nearest brick-built, two-storeyed building, which was rented by an air force captain.

“It was a case of just warning people, a bit like Paul Riviere, during the American revolution,” says Freeman. “I mostly got ’em to follow me. But some of them didn’t want to leave. I guess they thought it safer to stay inside, but they died.

“After a while, we couldn’t go any further, so we just led those we could through the water towards this big house we could see. It was just a case of urging ’em along. I don’t know how many we got there. Later on, they said it was 18 people, but I didn’t have time to count them.”

By then, his thoughts had turned to his own family. And while the families he’d helped save took shelter in the attic of the sturdy, brick-built house, Freeman set off again through the icy torrent, accompanied by the same American who had helped him alert so many neighbours.

“I’d helped him get his family out, and he decided to help me,” recalls Freeman, “and I’m glad he did, because I don’t know if I’d have made it if it hadn’t been for him.
“The water was so deep and running real fast. It was just a matter of the two of us struggling along and when one of us started to slip away, the other would grab their hand and keep us going.”

They made it back not a moment too soon. The 20ft high flight of steps leading up to their raised home was swamped and the floodwater had doused the fire in their living room. “When Freeman had set off I hadn’t seen any real danger at all,” recalls Sara, “but by the time he got back water had already begun seeping underneath the door and I was about to panic because I didn’t know what to do.

“He just said we had to get up on the roof, to which I objected at first because I’ve got a terrible fear of heights. But he practically forced me up on to the balcony railing and then he just kinda helped pull me up by my arms and I clambered and climbed on to the roof, along with Joyce and the baby.”

The danger facing the five of them as they lay, huddled together, exposed to the full fury of the gale, was far from over. “You could see the water rising rapidly,” recalls Sara, “and no sooner had we gotten up on the roof than the house started disintegrating right under us.”

Joyce recalls being forced to move position two or three times as the roof gave way beneath them. Then, with a sickening wrench, the roof was torn completely off. “Suddenly,” says Sara, “we were just floating on a little portion of the roof that was left. It was awfully frightening. All kinds of things ran through my mind. I’ve a fear of water to start with, and I could see us drifting out to sea on this piece of roof.”

Meanwhile, Freeman was beset with worries of his own. “I had my wife and my daughter and the babysitter there,” he recalls, “and what was going through my mind was if the roof started sinking I didn’t know which one I was going to try to save or even how I was going to decide what to do.”

Thankfully, he never had to make a choice. Moments later, the roof snagged a utility pole and became wedged fast. A short while later, as they lay, sodden wet and buffeted by the icy gale, an air-sea rescue boat, manned by Americans with two local policemen and a number of flood survivors on board, crashed into them.

“They weren’t coming for us,” says Freeman. “The boat just got caught in the current and smashed right into where we were sitting. We then clambered aboard, but you couldn’t go hard in those conditions. You were just at the mercy of the wind, and it wasn’t long before the boat got stuck in all the debris.”

For the rest of that long night, they remained marooned in the boat, exposed to the bitter wind and treacherous current. “It was the coldest I have ever been in my whole life,” recalls Sara. “All I can remember about it is feeling cold. Cold and wet. And that howling wind.”

By that time, shock had begun to set in. “Everybody was freezing to death and nobody was really worried about getting drowned or anything,” remembers Freeman. “The big concern was: did anybody have a cigarette? In those days, Americans always had cigarettes, but none of us had any that night. One of the bobbies had about four and we passed them around.”

Eventually, as day dawned, another boat arrived and took them off and ferried them to higher ground. Taken to a Red Cross centre in the town, the man who had survived hours immersed in freezing water downed a glass of whisky and promptly passed out!

Freeman Kilpatrick woke in his base hospital to find he had been listed among the dead.
For Joyce Stubbins, however, the agony was far from over. Relief at being alive was tempered by the discovery that her father, brother and sister were all dead and their home destroyed.

“One of our neighbours, who’d lost his wife and daughter, came and said they’d found Marjorie’s body. Dad was later found in Heacham, but it wasn’t until the middle of the following week that they found Derek.”

By then, Joyce, who had been parted from the Kilpatricks almost as soon as they reached the town, had been picked up by her sister Joan’s husband, Tom, and taken to Skegness.
Before heading north, he made his way to the edge of South Beach. “It just looked as if it had been blitzed,” he recalls. “Everything was a heck of a mess. There was hardly anything left of it. It was just as if it had been bombed.”

In all, 31 people had perished in the mountainous surge of water that swamped South Beach, 16 of them Americans, including an entire family of six. But terrible though that figure was, it would have been far worse but for the courageous actions of Freeman Kilpatrick.

Not only had he been largely instrumental in saving the 18 people who had reached the two-storey house - one of only a very few buildings to survive the night - but he and his heroic neighbour had been responsible for preventing the almost certain deaths of his wife, daughter and teenage babysitter. “What he did was unbelievable,” says Joyce Scully (nee Stubbins). “If it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t be here. I could never thank him enough.”

Joyce has had plenty of time to reflect on the tragic fate she almost shared with three members of her family. “The sadness never goes away,” she says. “And you can’t help thinking about what might have happened: had I not agreed to babysit for the Kilpatricks, if they’d left to go to the pictures a few minutes earlier. Either way I wouldn’t have survived.”

For his actions “without regard for his own safety”, Freeman A Kilpatrick was awarded the George Medal, the highest honour for bravery that Britain can bestow on a foreign national.
Now 73, and long-since retired after 30 years service in the USAF, he lives with Sara in Louisiana where he has apparently lost none of his talent for survival, having overcome life-threatening colon cancer.

Recently the couple were reunited by telephone with Joyce for the first time since they were separated straight after the disaster. “It was wonderful to hear her after all those years,” says Sara. “Back then, I’d kept asking people what had happened to her, but nobody knew.”

For most of the intervening years, she’d been too busy bringing up a family to think about to those harrowing hours when their lives hung by a thread. “It’s hard to believe it happened,” she says. “But when you’re 21-years-old you think you’re invulnerable. If it happened now, I’d die from the sheer fear.”

As for the hero himself? “I don’t think about it much at all,” shrugs Freeman. “I just think about getting old, you know.”