Up to a dozen North Walsham customers were still unable to use their phones this lunchtime, three days after a violent electrical storm over the town.

A BT spokesman said lightning had struck one of the company's aerial cables in the Furze Hill Drive area of the town on Sunday afternoon.

'The lightning runs down individual drop wires and blows out the sockets in the customer's premises,' she said.

'We do have an engineer dealing with it. He is picking up faults two or three at a time and service will be restored as soon as possible.

'We are having to go into people's homes to fix, so will agree mutually-agreeable times with people who are not available when our engineer has knocked.'

As reported earlier, lightning also struck the Clarke family's house, off Happisburgh Road, causing severe internal damage, but no-one was injured.