With the prospect of yet more heavy rain in Cumbria, those whose homes were flooded are unlikely to be thinking beyond the end of the next downpour. But when they do start working out how to rebuild their lives they might want to take a look at what has happened in Tewkesbury.

The good news from this medieval town, famously turned into an inland island when it was cut off from the rest of Gloucestershire by the flood waters of July 2007, is that the inhabitants are back on their feet. The bad news is that it took them a long time and they are still dealing with the fall-out from more than two years ago while living with the fear that it might happen again.

The state of anxiety is explained by Vernon Smith, whose home was ruined by the flooding. “When it rains here in Tewkesbury, people are tetchy and nervous.”

Tewkesbury is situated where the Avon meets the Severn, and where a number of other tributaries converge. Even yesterday, after recent heavy rain, the playing fields behind the town’s abbey were covered with water. That, apparently, is normal for the time of year. When it rained and rained that July three people were killed in the flooding and around 800 saw their homes inundated by foul water. “This was a river straight through here,” says Smith, 48, standing in his garden. “It’s hard to believe now: 2ft of water went straight through the house.” Before the flood he sent his wife and children to higher ground at his mother-in-law’s home in another part of Tewkesbury, but he stayed at the bungalow because he was worried about looters. He was woken at 5am by the dogs barking and realised that the water was lapping on to his bed. He waded through to the living room, plucked his two cocker spaniels off the floating sofa and escaped in his underpants, scrambling up a bank, from which he was rescued by a RNLI boat.

“We lost everything. It is the emotional factor,” he says pointing at his restored home in which just about every object is new. “I have no memories here. I didn’t realise it would affect me as much as it did. Sometimes I see my wife crying at the sink if it’s raining. The memories come back.”

He says he was “very very lucky” because he and his family spent only ten months in a 13x6ft caravan. The last displaced Tewkesbury people moved back into their homes only in summer this year.

Everywhere you go in Tewkesbury people are watching the TV reports from Cockermouth. “I feel great empathy for the people there,” Smith says. “After the media has gone and the Government has made empty promises, there will be pain and frustration and continuous calls to loss adjusters and an effect on your health. It’s going to take nearly a year before things are slightly back to normal. Those people are going to spend Christmas and Easter and next summer in a caravan. They might be back in for the next Christmas. It’s stressful. There’s a lot of anger. You blame it on each other: ‘Why didn’t you save this?’ ‘If only I had done that.’ Normal human emotions.”

There are many stories in Tewkesbury of people trying to renew their insurance and being landed with flood insurance excesses of £5,000 or more. One couple who live in a Grade II listed house are fighting with their insurer after finding that the excess is £19,000. “That’s wildly unreasonable,” says the man, who does not wish to be named because of his fight with the insurer. They are terrified of being flooded again because they won’t be able to afford to pay the first £19,000 of repairs and would be unable to sell the house.

His wife says that when it started to rain heavily recently “I just stood here and I was in tears. It was ridiculous. I was worried that it might flood again. But it’s not so much the flooding. It’s where you are going to find the money. Insurance is supposed to make you feel safer, but it doesn’t.” House prices, as everywhere else, have fallen, but buyers are even warier about Tewkesbury. “When I have inquiries from people outside the town the first question is ‘did it flood?’” says Anthony Rhodes an independent estate agent in the town centre. He has been able to sell properties within the flood plain that escaped flooding in 2007. But two that were flooded have remained unsold for a year, despite dropping their asking prices by at least 15 per cent. “Tewkesbury has been especially hit by the recession and for being a flood area.”

Two of the town’s ten estate agents have gone out of business. A development of new houses called The Water Meadows has been renamed the Meadows.

There is anger at plans to build new houses in the flood plain. Under the regional plan, part of the Government’s blue print for three million new houses, some 14,000 new houses have been proposed for the Tewkesbury area. “You put that many houses in a flood-risk area and water displacement becomes the issue,” says Laurence Robertson, Tewkesbury’s Tory MP.

Vernon Smith started studying drainage and flood alleviation policy. Now he can tell you anything you want to know about ditches. He believes that the best way to avoid another Tewkesbury is to dig more ditches and clean out the existing ones, along with the drains, culverts, streams and rivers that have suffered from decades of neglect.

He is among those who say that the Government has not done enough to help with flood alleviation works. A council tax rise after the flood paid for some initial work but the councils do not have the cash for big new projects. “Two years and four months on our county council has taken up the cudgels and started clearing the drainage systems with no help from the Government,” says Dave Witts, secretary of Severn Avon Valley Combined Flood Group. “The drainage systems in the UK have suffered with 30 to 40 years of neglect.”

The Environment Agency has pledged to increase cash for flood-risk management to £800 million in 2010-11 and then to £1 billion in the year 2013-14. But Lawrence Robertson says that “we haven’t seen an awful lot of that.” You might expect Robertson to be making political hay but he is restrained in his criticism. He says that the Government’s flood Bill is “weak” because it doesn’t lay out clearly who needs to do what, but he admits that “one of the problems is that so many people are responsible for different things”. With all those rivers and streams and ditches and culverts and drains “we need to make progress towards clarifying who is responsible for what,” he says. “But I am not sure how.”

Canon Paul Williams, vicar of Tewkesbury Abbey, has already spoken to the clergy in Cockermouth, offering support. He has been active spreading the message, particularly to tourists, that Tewkesbury is open for business. He said small businesses hit by floods found it hard when the recession bit. In his town “people helped themselves but there has to be a political will. Whether we like it or not floods are going to be part of our agenda.”

One positive thing to come out of the affair was “the amazing goodness and humanity it brought out in people. I’m sure it’s the same in Cockermouth and Workington. It brought the community together.”

For Vernon Smith floods have become his life. He became so heavily involved in trying to find solutions to the problems highlighted by the events of July 2007 that he was elected a Tory county councillor and is working full time on flood issues.

He hasn’t got round to clearing out the flood damage in his garage. But he did take a holiday in the summer. He took his wife, Kate, to Bruges to study their canals and next summer he is planning to do the same in the Netherlands. “In Bruges they were saying ‘clean your water courses, dig your ditches.’ I don’t want to be a politician for years. But I want to be able to hear the rain at night and turn over and go to sleep.”

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