FAMILY memories of a serious flood in Northwich are still heartbreaking for a woman who remembers it vividly.

Audrey Turner, neé Eyres, was 11 when the town centre flooded in 1946, and had only just recovered from a bout of chicken pox that day.

She lived in a long-demolished riverside road called Jubilee Street, by Hayhurst Bridge, which featured in a Remember When article on February 4.

This article centred on the family history of Guardian reader Margaret Newton, who now lives in Moulton, who grew up with stories of her pregnant mother and sister being rescued from a neighbour's bedroom window in Jubilee Street just two months before she was born.

Audrey said: "It was at my mother's house where we all were, marooned upstairs from the Friday afternoon to the Sunday.

"We flew a white tea towel out of the window, and what we were actually saying with that was 'come and get us out' - in the paper a bit later they put that we had put a flag out to say 'yes, we're alright'.

"It's something I will never forget. When you looked through the window you could see people at the top near the infirmary looking down.

"There was sludge in the water and all kinds of things. At the end of our street there was a grocer who sold everything – you should have seen all the stuff that came from their place.

"Someone left their back door open and there was a dust bin in their house, all kinds of things were in there.It was horrendous really.

"I heard my dad discussing with my mother, he said 'if it comes any higher I'm going to knock a hole in the roof'."

An Army truck rescued the beleaguered Jubilee Street residents and took them to safety. They were taken for a hot meal and then to the baths hall, in Victoria Road, where they stayed for a week, thanks to a councillor called Harry Mathers, who also found them clean clothes from the Red Cross or Salvation Army.

"I'm 82 but it is so vivid – I will never forget it as long as I live," she said. "When I see on the TV all the people with their houses flooded it breaks my heart for them."