It was snowy, freezing but the worst part was the false hope

The days after Storm Arwen were cold and dark, according to Emma Hardman, 37, but it was the dashed hope that was most dismaying.

The mum, who lives in Kirkton of Tough, near Alford in Aberdeenshire, said mobile phones, internet and landlines were out of action because of the power cut and the storm damage. She said: “We had to drive five miles to get any kind of signal to see if there were any updates on the SSEN website.

“It said the power would be connected at 6pm, then it changed to 10pm the next night. You’d sit and wait for the promised switch-on that never came and drive out again only to discover that it was due to go on midnight the next night. It was false hope all the time; that was the worst part. In the end we gave up. We live in a tiny community with a maximum of 20 houses. We felt completely cut off. The Army should have been called in earlier.”

Hardman, who with her oil worker husband George, 46, and children Ailsa, 10, and fiveyear-old Arran and Cocker Spaniel Oggie, camped for four nights and four days around a single log burner, said: “It was like something out of a disaster movie. It felt apocalyptic. We had no communication with the outside world and didn’t know what was going on.”

She had collected the children from school on Friday, which had closed early because of the storm, and returned home when soon after the power was cut.

Hardman, who runs Sew Unique, an online kids clothing company, said: “The power went off at 4.30pm on Friday last week and didn’t come back on again until 3.30pm on Tuesday. We were all huddled around the log burner in the living room. It was a life-saver. I don’t know what we would have done without it because it was freezing – it was snowing outside.

“We all slept together there on a sofa bed in the living room. But there wasn’t much sleeping going on. We were up all night going out into the snow every half-hour to get logs to feed the burner and stay warm. We had tea lights and dug out Christmas lights that took batteries.

“We had water but it was cold so we had to heat what we could on top of the log burner. It was just enough to wash the children, and boil water for pasta. We lived on pasta for four days.”