‘This is the third earthquake I have felt in Charente in a decade’

According to the official carte des zones de sismicité our little part of South Charente should not be an earthquake zone.

We are in a zone of slight risk, 20 km from the line which marks a zone of medium risk.

This part of the world is also nearly always on the line between two weather systems on the evening weather report.

Even so, I have experienced three earthquakes in the past decade.

The latest on Friday (June 16), which was centred 150 km away near the village of La Laigne, in Charente-Maritime, led to around 150 nearby houses being badly damaged, leaving some uninhabitable.

We were on the beach when it struck on Friday and did not notice it.

Read more: ‘Big bang and whole house shuddered’: Earthquake rocks western France

But that night an aftershock woke me up, with a strange noise, like that of a cat or a dog having a good scratch.

I woke, thinking: “I am sure I put the cats out”. When the sound stopped and then started again, this time vibrating the bed slightly, I realised it was an earthquake.

No one else in the house woke, and there were only the usual cracks in the old part of the house the next morning.

A friend living in a townhouse in Barbezieux, which has a metal spiral staircase, described how the staircase started to vibrate, “as if an army of ghosts was marching up it.” Spooky.

An earlier one, about four years ago was closer to the centre of the quake, which was close to Royan about 60 km away in Charente-Maritime.

It struck at around 10:00 while I was working and lasted two or three seconds, long enough for me to start climbing under my desk.

There was a noise like rolling thunder in the distance and the house twisted slightly from the left top corner to the lower right corner, but no damage was done apart from some old rendering falling.

People outside did not notice it, but in Barbezieux a chimney fell into what is normally a busy street – no one was hit or hurt.

Experts later said it was 4.6 on the Richter scale.

The first, a 4.2 quake, also happened when I was at my desk at our home near Barbezieux. It was closer in Charente-Maritime, about 40 km away along a minor fault line, which the experts said had been “inactive until now”, and sounded and felt like a blast from a mine or quarry.

There was a bang and the house shook, no big drama – my aunt and uncle used to live in a mining town where people set their watches to the mine blasting.

A sonic boom, also about four years ago by a Rafale from Mont de Marsan rushing to intercept a Russian bomber in the Channel, shook the house more.

It could be that I am an earthquake magnet – when I was little in Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, the city was rocked by an unexpected and unprecedented force five earthquake, which badly damaged a few homes. I slept through it.

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