It is strange when the sun shines on days of meteorological crisis. It happened here in Suffolk after the '87 hurricane, glorious blue-and-golden days illuminating a chaotic landscape of fallen timber and sparking power lines. On Friday morning too it shone, as the storm surge drove great hammering, spouting fists of water up against sea walls, drowned quays and turned the A12 into a shining extension of the Blyth estuary. Early in the day the sea wall at Aldeburgh, a thin battlement between rising brown river and hammering waves, felt like the only place to be. There is fear and loss and inconvenience in these great natural events, but there is also exhilaration.

Exhilaration — and relief — should not be taken too far. It is true that nobody died and only a few homes were flooded (though the Broads were hit, bitterns may not nest next year and the Harbour Inn lost its kitchen). Most of those evacuated went home to dry houses. Helicopters and loudhailers proved unnecessary. We got away with it.

But the local fear now is of complacency, and that government will sit back with a sigh of relief and forget how close it came. The main surge went through at 3.30 in the morning at low tide; had it been six hours later, coinciding with high water, it would have been a catastrophe. John Gummer, MP for Suffolk Coastal, is outspoken about the policy described on the Environment Agency document as “making space for water”, and accuses it of deliberately writing off villages and land. A hasty denial yesterday from Defra said there is no general policy of this kind, but used the word “sustainable” and “prioritised” too often to comfort those who know perfectly well they are not priorities because population is scanty and farmland considered expendable. The Environment Agency admits that the funding constraint “... does mean withdrawing protection in rural coastal areas”.

Mr Gummer calls it an immoral decision: “We have been defending this coastline for thousands of years and this is the first government to decide that we will give in. While Holland is defending every square inch, we are intending to give up large acreage of land which we desperately need for food security as well as houses... Could it be that there are no votes for them on the coastline?”

Be that as it may, he has a point. Whitehall's shrugging fatalism is not only upsetting to communities but out of date. Arable and grazing land, for decades seen as a luxury because imported food was cheap, is becoming something to treasure. The biofuel boom and the rising appetites of India and China for meat and milk are just beginning to bite. Giving up land — or letting it degenerate into marsh nature reserves — is less wise than it seemed ten years ago. So is the abandoning of housing land in Eastern counties with a rocketing EU immigrant population.

It is not cheering to those in poor, low-lying lonely areas to be told that they don't matter. Or even that their environment doesn't: there is considerable angst about what will become of our small rivers if defences are not maintained (last year the Environment Agency publicly gave up on the Blyth because “the cost of repairing defences outweighs the benefits”).

Above all there is a general sense of frustration at the Olympian attitude from London. Landowners who live close to the problem all year round claim that the flood defences are in better condition than the Environment Agency claims. Sir Edward Greenwell, of Orford, says: “The defences are very robust. They have stood up well and we need to make clear that they are maintainable; we do not have to walk away from them.” Another farmer observed that “the cost of maintaining these walls, which were built 300 years ago, is minimal compared with the money the agency has spent on consultants who recommend the defences be abandoned”. Peter Boggis, the rebel of Easton Bavents, is fighting in the courts against the refusal by Natural England to let him go on maintaining a home-made sea wall near his home.

The thread running through all this is of anger and fear that distant decisions always overrule local feeling; and that Defra is no more fit to make decisions about sea defences than it proved fit to maintain a simple bit of pipeline that would have prevented the escape of foot-and-mouth disease from its own laboratory (which incompetence cost, incidentally, years' worth of coastal defence money).

Country people accept the inevitability of erosion. Our house sits a mile back (a shrinking mile) from the coast at Dunwich, once a great port city and now a hamlet. Farmers — not bureaucrats — will recognise the right time to abandon a grazing meadow that has become salt. These are practical people.

Not all the handling has been bad. The Environment Agency's early-warning system worked. The emergency services were ready. But unease persists: there is no real accord between the local authorities and the Environment Agency. One comment by a member of the public in Sudbourne village hall last week had a universal resonance: “The agency are servants of us, we are not servants of them. We will not be dictated to.” It wasn't nicely printed consultation documents and a dawn Cobra meeting and the smiling Mrs Follett popping up for a photo-op at Great Yarmouth docks that saved us on Friday. It was a lucky tide and a wind shift.

Of course one day the sea will win; but Mr Brown is looking for a motto and I have one to commend to him. It is borrowed from the Mississippi River Engineers at Vicksburg, who work diligently to prevent their rowdy charge from flooding settlements and leaving others stranded. They too know that the river will win in the end, but they bear on their crest the one-word motto: Essayons. Let us try.

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