A PENSIONER left homeless for more than a year by Coverack's flash flooding has described finally moving back in this week as "heaven."

Leigh Bernard, 86, has been staying with various friends since a granite boulder smashed through her dining room window during the floods of July 18 last year, leaving the entire ground floor of her cottage at Sunny Corner underwater.

It has taken more than a year to replace the flooring, re-plaster walls and generally make the cottage habitable again. At one stage it was even feared the structural integrity of the foundations and the back wall may have been compromised, but this has now been signed off.

Her friends threw her a ‘welcome home’ tea party with Champagne at the end of last week, after she returned a couple of days earlier on August 1 – her eighth move in just over 12 months.

Leigh told the Helston Packet: “It’s almost unbelievable. It’s absolutely wonderful to be back in your home again. Everyone has been so supportive and wonderful to me; I’ve been well cared for during this time. But to be in my own house is heaven.”

On the fated day last July, Leigh had been downstairs when the thunder began to rumble and she realised she would not be able to go out for a while.

For some reason, she is unsure why, she decided to go upstairs to read a book and ended up sleeping through the entire storm, so that when she awoke she knew nothing about it – that is, until she went to go downstairs and could only see the first two steps of her staircase.

“The rest of it was water,” she said. “When I looked out the window the garden had gone; it was just water running to the sea. That was a tremendous shock.”

Trapped in her own home, with no phone line working and her emergency alarm underwater, Leigh resorted to shouting out of a window in the hope of attracting help.

“The only thing I could do was shout through a little window in the bedroom at the back and hope somebody on the path behind might hear me.

“My neighbours did. Two men came down and broke a hole in the door, and allowed the water to start escaping. After some time we were able to wade through and they took me up to their cottage behind,” added Leigh.

She spent that night with neighbours and has been sharing the homes of friends ever since until this week.

“It just shows you what a wonderful, caring area this is – not only in Coverack but the adjoining village of St Keverne as well, I received great, great kindness. It’s all that together that has enabled me to survive,” she added.

Now something of a local celebrity, due to her many appearances on various news channels in the wake of the flooding, on Monday Leigh was invited to open the village fete.

“I came here as a child, on my tenth birthday in 1941 – and it’s taken me 76 years to open the fete,” she laughed.