EIGHT-year-old Christine Wraight stood at the top of the stairs and watched as her treasured Christmas presents floated down the hallway.

She lived with her family in low-lying Cromwell Road, Whitstable one of the many streets in the town badly hit by the great flood and the image of ruined toys is one of her most vivid memories.

"The flood happened not that long after Christmas and I remember looking down the stairs and seeing some of our presents, jigsaw puzzles and things, floating past," she says. "It was awful."

For the adults the flood was a time of horror and despair, but Christine now Mullins, of Friars Close, remembers the disaster through the eyes of an excited eight-year-old child.

"Mum woke my brother John and I in the middle of the night to see the water in the streets because she said it was something we would never see again," she recalls. "Of course, she didn't know then that the water was going to last for days."

Christine's father, Fred, was skipper of the Thames barge Kathleen, and her older half-brother, also Fred, was his mate.

"Dad knew the water was coming over because he had been up at the harbour. He knocked on the neighbours' doors to warn them.

"I'm not sure exactly how high the water got in our house but I remember it was high enough for the kettle to float off the stove.

"Ours was one of the few houses in the street to still have electricity because Dad had had all the power points put in halfway up the walls."

She remembers her mother Ivy making tea in the bedroom and passing mugs through the window to neighbours, and people in rowing boats putting loaves into baskets lowered from first floors.

The family cat lived upstairs with them until it was put out of a window on to a ground floor roof to answer a call of nature. The cat decided to make a bid for freedom, jumping into the water and proving that its species is not designed for swimming.

"My brother Fred had to wade out in the icy water to rescue the cat," she said.

It wasn't the last time Fred would get a soaking he used two chairs as makeshift stilts to get to the food safe in the kitchen. The plan worked well until one of the chair legs caught on a loose piece of lino, catapulting Fred into the freezing water again.

Once the floodwater subsided Christine was sent to stay with her older half-sister while her mother tackled the horrendous sludge which it left behind. The flood proved a double disaster for the Wraight family. The barge Kathleen, which Fred Wraight skippered, had been on a slipway at Whitstable awaiting repair.

She, and many other boats, suffered serious storm damage that night. As Richard Walsh recounts in his book Kathleen: "The foreshore was a shambles, with small craft, and some not so small, smashed to smithereens; and serious damage to those which could be considered to have survived."

It was to be more than five months before Kathleen was repaired and relaunched.