The tears still well up as Hilda Gilbert thinks back to the tragedy which devastated her family half a century ago. Time has failed to dim the memories of events leading up to the numbing realisation that her sister and three young nieces had perished in what became known as Norfolk’s worst peacetime disaster.

Jennifer (right) and Suzanne - two of the victims of the terrible disaster. "All I could see of her bungalow was the chimney and a little bit of the roof. I knew then, really, that there wasn’t a lot of hope," says their aunt, Hilda.

Many lives were saved after the huge tidal surge struck Hunstanton’s South Beach on the night of Saturday, January 31, 1953, leaving a trail of havoc in its wake.
But Phyllis Papworth, 32, and her daughters Pat, 15, Jennifer, 11, and eight-year-old Suzanne were not among the lucky ones.

Their bodies were found in the remains of their home two days later, on the Monday.
The only survivor was Phyllis’s fourth daughter, Janet, 14, who had gone to a party at a friend’s house on the fateful Saturday and spent the night there.

The family had lived at their rented bungalow, Cherry Hinton, since the early 1940s.
Phyllis and her husband split up after the second world war, leaving her to raise the four girls on her own.

“She had a hard life, really,” recalled Hilda, 76, who lives at Emneth, near Wisbech. “She worked in an old people’s home. There were no handouts in those days. You didn’t get any benefits so she had to go to work. I lived with her some of the time to help her out with the children.

“She absolutely loved it there. She even loved it in the winter because she used to say, ‘all the holidaymakers have gone now and we can get the bread and milk’.”

Despite the hardships, life beside the sea was good, with no inkling of the tragedy in store.
“You used to know that there were high tides but nothing like that ever happened when I stayed there,” said Hilda. “There wasn’t much sea defences at that time, really. There was only a little wall.”

In January, 1953 she was in her mid-20s and living at Newton, near Wisbech, with her mother, father, and six-year-old son – now the mayor of Hunstanton, Fred Pooley.
The first sign that something could be amiss came on the Saturday night, when her parents returned home from the cinema to say the River Nene in Wisbech was lapping over its banks.

“It didn’t panic me then but on the Sunday morning I got up with this terrible funny feeling inside,” remembered Hilda. “I said to Mum, ‘it must have been terrible at Hunstanton if the Wisbech river was up like that. Whatever must the sea have been like?’ I said, ‘I’m going to go over there’.”

She made her way to Hunstanton by bus. As the journey progressed, the nightmarish impact of the floods slowly began to sink in.

The bus had to be diverted to Saddlebow because it was impossible to get over the bridge across the River Great Ouse at King’s Lynn. As they drove past homes in South Lynn, Hilda saw that the water was level with the windowsills. By now, she was starting to feel a rising sense of panic.

At Heacham, the vast expanse of water, dotted with the wreckage of beach huts, had reached nearly as far as the road. But the worst was yet to come, as the bus began the approach to Hunstanton at Redgate Hill and Hilda had her first glimpse across the fields to her sister’s home.

“I looked over – and it’s tragic when you think about it,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“All I could see of her bungalow was the chimney and a little bit of the roof. I knew then, really, that there wasn’t a lot of hope. It would have had to be a miracle if anybody got out of there because they were all underwater and broken up.”

Information was being posted at the Sandringham Hotel in the resort but there was no mention of any Papworths on the list of those rescued. A total of 31 people had died at South Beach. “The bungalow was only wood on legs and it just would have disintegrated,” said Hilda. “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Janet, meanwhile, was still at the home of the Turner family, where she had spent the previous night. Amazingly, it was there that the Papworths’ pet mongrel, Trixie, appeared on the Sunday, cold and with several broken ribs. The funeral for the young mother and her children was an unbearably poignant affair. Phyllis was buried with Suzanne and the two other girls interred together.

“They were lovely kids really,” said Hilda. “The tragedy of it is that Pat, the eldest one, got swimming certificates for life-saving at school.”

Janet stayed with the Turners for a while and then moved to Norwich. She married an American and moved to the States but has since died of cancer. Hilda married later in 1953 and had another five children. Family life went on but the hurt has remained, along with the thoughts of what might have been for Phyllis and her children.

Anniversaries, inevitably, are always a difficult time.

“I think you’re in shock at the beginning,” said Hilda. “You can’t believe it – it’s so tragic.
“You know it’s happened. You know they are not going to be there any more but you just can’t grasp why. There’s always a why. Why did it happen?”