DETECTIVES were today continuing their hunt for masked raiders who subjected a family to a terrifying ordeal at their home before escaping with property worth about £15,000.

The raiders struck at the home of of Lesley Dawes at Mount Ephraim, Hernhill, near Canterbury.

Australian-born Mrs Dawes, 51, said: "I was going upstairs when I noticed a cushion wedged in the door of the yellow sitting room and a light on in the billiard room. I went in and saw coming towards me a man wearing a black balaclava and for a split second I thought it was someone playing a joke. Then he rushed at me yelling and waving his arms. I slammed the door and screamed with terror."

In the house at the time were her daughter Alice, aged 16, her mother-in-law Mary, 86, her assistant Sally Clifford-Cox, and her son Nicholas, aged 11.

Mrs Dawes said: "There was so much aggression in the man and he was so threatening that I thought they'd continue stripping the house. You know from television how situations like this can go and my husband, Sandys, is away on a walking holiday in Cornwall. The phones had been immobilised so my mother-in-law hit her panic button and the police were here in seven minutes.

"It was such an audacious raid" she said. "One end of the house was lit up. There were a number of cars parked by the back door and yet they'd driven round on the grass, and parked behind a tree. There had to have been at least three if not four of them because some of the furniture was just too heavy to lift."

A spade had been used to snap the window lock in the yellow sitting room and the thieves had then crossed the hall into the billiard room which has a morning room leading off one end and a dining room off the other.

The window locks had then been unscrewed from one of the morning room windows and valuables passed through. Among the items lost are a massive Victorian rosewood table which was the centre piece of the marble hall which had only been disassembled and moved two days earlier to make room for a wedding, a hand-painted Venetian table, solid silver candleabrum, porcelain figures and candle sticks.

What has distressed Mrs Dawes most of all is the knowledge the family must have been watched over a period of time, and the previous evening Alice had been alone in the house for two hours at exactly the time the thieves struck.