All they took with them were three ferrets and a carrier bag stuffed with Mandy's knickers.

Mandy Hartley bursts into laughter at the memory.

"Roy knows me really well; I can't go anywhere unless I've got a supply of clean pants. I scooped up the entire contents of my knicker drawer and left everything else."

It sounds like a scene from a sit-com, but it was only too real - and there was nothing funny about losing 90 per cent of your belongings and watching you neat- as-a-pin Catcliffe home fill with a mire of stinking mud.

The two-bed semi had been everything Mandy had ever wanted. The pair had sold their ex-council house in Low Edges to live their dream on California Drive.

"We'd always wanted a brand new house, one that didn't need anything doing to it," she says. "California Drive was lovely. It reminded us of Brookside Close off the telly."

Millions of gallons of floodwater shattered the dream.

"We're now stuck here whether we like it or not," says Mandy. "Who would want to buy it and risk the same nightmare happening to them?"

Mandy and Roy are asking the same question as many other Catcliffe residents.

"Why were new houses allowed to be built on a flood plain?

"After the floods villagers told us there used to be a row of pit terraces here, which flooded so often the council tore them down in the 1960s."

On the day that Catcliffe started to flood, Mandy was confident their little close would escape - just as it had done in 2000. She told Roy and daughter Donna not to fuss.

So when police came calling in the middle of that night, the family were totally unprepared.

"Leaving your home and all your possessions to get ruined is a terrible feeling," she explains.

"But there was nothing else we could do."

Boats were waiting on Orgreave Road to take them to an emergency shelter, but the family went to stay with daughter Marie and her husband. Just for the time being, they thought...

When they went back home four days later, the scene was heartbreaking.

Mandy shudders: "The waters had been so strong, they had knocked over the sofa and risen up past the windowsills. Everything was ruined."

The stay at Marie's turned out to be for nine months.

Like so many throughout Rotherham and Sheffield, the house had to be gutted and the insurance company footed the bill.

"We lost things we can never replace, like his mam's rolling pin and my dad's knife. I'd had that 20-odd years. I cried over losing my ironing board. I know that sounds stupid, but it was a wedding present 40 years ago. Roy's Auntie Eva bought everyone an ironing board when they got married. It was a family tradition.

"There didn't look to be anything wrong with it, but it had to go. Contaminated, they said. That word... I came to hate it. It's all everybody seemed to say to us."

Families in Catcliffe were told that spores in the sewage-filled waters could have contaminated anything they touched and were hazardous to health.


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