The day before the Great Hurricane of 1926 ripped directly over Bermuda, there were no weather signs to indicate the approach of the deadly hurricane that had recently injured 2,000 and killed 27 people in Cuba.

The forecast indicated the tropical disturbance of great intensity moving up from the southeast was moderating.

The sky was not overcast, the sunset unremarkable. The winds were southerly at Force three on the Beaufort scale (8-12 mph).

Reassuringly, the barometer held at above 30 through the night. The telltale sound of surf on the South Shore was yet to be heard.

According to official records at 0800 the next morning, October 22, the barometer started a rapid plunge and the wind increased dramatically.

Right about that time two young girls, ten year old Lois Kempe and her older sister Eleanor, were boarding the ferry at Darrell's Wharf on their way to Bermuda High School .

"I remember when we got to Hamilton the tide was so high we couldn't land at the regular place, Lois recalled. We circled around in the harbour for a bit and then we came alongside Number One Shed.'' They decided not to go to school and went instead to their father's office on Front Street. It had a balcony so the two girls had a front row seat to watch the storm.

"I remember seeing boats that had broken loose from their anchors, drifting down the harbour towards the Great Sound.'' Lois recalled.

"We had been there for some time, when the wind died down and my father decided to make a dash for it. I remember him saying to us in an urgent voice 'Come now, quickly, we're going to hurry home.

"So we hurried down the stairs and got into a carriage,'' she said.

The carriage was what they called a Victoria, with a hood. We proceeded down Front Street very gingerly because there were broken electrical wires and branches and all sorts of things in the street.

Lois' home was Kempdon on Harbour Road in Paget. Her father decided to go over Trimingham Hill and along Middle Road, rather than risk being caught on Harbour Road after the eye had passed.

Though the lull in the storm lasted for almost an hour, the longer route along the limestone roads littered with broken branches and debris ate up the time.

The storm returned while they were still enroute.

"The wind was so terrible,'' Lois said.

"We almost flew threw the air! My father took us back to Willy Young's house and he went on alone to get through to my mother at Kempdon.

"He crossed over to Harbour Road at Warwick Academy and had to crawl on his hands and knees across the playing field, combating the wind.'' Lois' future husband, Thomas Aitchinson, was eleven years old at the time and living in a cottage on Woodbourne Avenue, where the Mayflower Court is today.

He gives his account.

"We had no sophisticated warning system in those days,'' Mr. Aitchinson recalled.

"What most Bermudians relied on was the storm surge on the South Shore. When we heard that we knew something was afoot, and if it continued to develop we would realise a hurricane was coming. That morning we could hear the waves from where we lived, a regular sustained roar.

"So we battened down everything,'' he said.

"We had a Dutch door at back of the house and I remember my father getting twice as much lumber as usual to nail across the door to stop it from blowing in.

"All the shutters were down and it was very dark. I was an only child so I entertained myself by playing a make-believe game of cricket, which I love.'' Mr. Aitchinson explained that power outages were not so disabling in 1926 as they are today. Everyone had kerosene stoves to cook on, and since they had a supply of kerosene nearly every house also had kerosene lamps.

The refrigerators were not electric, and the ice in the ice boxes would melt at the usual rate.

"As the morning wore on it felt as everything was going to be blown away,'' he said.

"Around the middle of the day it went very, very quiet. We undid one door and went out to take a look. I vividly recall there was a yellowish grey haze and everything was so still.

"From our cottage I could see for a distance of about a mile. It took about an hour for the eye to go over.

Continued on page 12 Memories of the Great Hurricane of 1926 Continued from page 10 "I could see trees in the distance start to sway and then bend under a terrific wind.

"You could see the storm moving closer by the line of trees bending as the storm hit them. I'll never forget those trees swaying in the wind like blades of grass.

"So we hurried back inside and battened down again. You never forget that feeling of the wind going from nothing to being in a great grip of ferocious wind. I remember the rain was torrential.

"The thing I remember most was the cedars,he said. I was amazed to see some of big cedars, with trunks two to three feet thick, lying flat on the ground with their roots sticking up in the air.

"They must have been several hundred years old and survived quite a few hurricanes before.

"As I remember it, the wind gauge that they had at the time recorded wind speeds of 140 miles an hour and remained for there for two hours.

"That was as high as the gauge would go, 140. It takes a powerful hurricane to rip up cedars.'' There were no fatalities on land in the Great Hurricane of 1926, but the island was plunged into sadness by the loss of HMS Valerian which was stationed at Dockyard and her crew known to many.

Returning to Bermuda from a mission of mercy in the Bahamas, HMS Valerian was overrun by the hurricane and went down just 18 miles off Gibbs Hill Lighthouse.

Only nineteen souls managed to survive. Clinging to rafts in high seas through the long night, they were rescued by HMS Capetown at first light.

Along memory lane: Mr. and Mrs Thomas Aitchinson remember their experiences as students during the Great Hurricane of 1926.