Gran's lightning strike

01 July 2005

LUCKY gran, Ella Ibbs, is keeping a look over her shoulder for her next close shave with disaster.

Now the 89-year-old is awaiting fate's third attempt on her life after she survived a lightning strike last week and a direct hit by one Hitler's secret weapons during World War Two.

Ella joked: "They say these things come in threes - so I'd better start looking over my shoulder."

The lightning strike happened on Monday, June 21, as Ella opened her living curtains. The lightning bolt hit the roof of her masionette in Rosewood Avenue, Elm Park and shot straight down through the building.

"I heard a gigantic crack of thunder and as I touched the curtain I felt electricity enter my head and shake my body down to my toes. It was like pins and needles all over.

"I was paralysed for a few seconds and dropped into my chair," she said.

Electricity surged through the entire house blowing out every power socket destroying all the connected appliances including the pensioner's television, kettle, and boiler.

Next door suffered the same damage and Ella's neighbours, Elaine Alston, 54, and son Robert, 21, rushed around to evacuate Ella. All three waited outside for the fire brigade to arrive. The firefighters patched a hole in the roof and put out burning curtains.

The power blast only caused Ella from some pain in her left arm, but she did not go to hospital. She said she found it more painful getting her insurance company to replace all the damaged goods.

Contemplating her most recent lucky escape she said that in 1945, she was asleep in her home in Barking, when a high-explosive Doodlebug rocket bomb crashed into her bedroom.

Her husband, Charles, who died in 1991, ran in and put out a fire started by the crash before the two of them escaped the collapsing building before the bomb finally exploded.

She added: "I always think that I'm so unlucky that these things happen to me, but I'm not one to get unnecessarily alarmed.