Surveying the grim wreckage of the once elegant garden at his battered three-storey Edwardian redbrick in north London, Sunil Vijayakar is fighting back the snuffles.

It could be the bitingly cold wind that now whips straight through the house that he shares with his wife Geraldine Larkin and their eight-year-old son Finn — or it could be excess emotion from a tornado striking your home just before Christmas.

“That trampoline came here from the garden five doors down,” says the 45-year-old writer and food stylist, pointing at a large tangle of aluminium and rubber by the remains of his garden shed.

“The top floor has come off next door’s house, too — it belongs to a 90-year-old woman.” Her chimney stack was lifted up and dropped on the roof of Sunil’s study. It could collapse in on his library of precious food books at any time.

Neighbours have described Crediton Road — which found itself smack in the middle of the tornado’s path on Thursday morning — as a “war zone”. Surveying the devastation at the back of Geraldine and Sunil’s house, it seems a fair description.

Geraldine gloomily estimates that it will take them six months to repair the damage to their roof, windows and garden — a plot they had already spent seven years doing up. “We’re now waiting for surveyors’ reports,” she sighs, as three men from the insurance company tramp through the hall.

“I just feel kind of numb. You couldn’t anticipate it, you couldn’t do anything about it. It’s just bricks and mortar and you have to move on.”

When the police finally allowed the family back into their house to collect their toothbrushes on Friday morning, Geraldine and Sunil had to enter via the garden because next door’s roof had crashed down blocking the front door — not before it had crumpled a Mercedes parked outside like a sweet-wrapper.

Out front, a row of once-neat gardens have been knocked into a hundred-yard smear of mud and trash, with trees, fences, swings and bird-tables all lying in smithereens..

Inside Geraldine and Sunil’s home there are chunks of broken glass from the blown-out windows and I can hardly hear them speak over the hammering of builders erecting scaffolding outside the living room window. The street is jammed with builders’ vans.

Nevertheless, they are trying to put a brave face on it — mostly because they know that their experience of the Kensal Rise apocalypse could have been much, much worse.

Larkin, a textile designer in her late thirties who works for couture fashion houses, explains that her son Finn was at home being looked after by a family friend when the tornado struck.

“I was on a shoot but I happened to call home five minutes after it hit,” says Sunil. “He was terrified.”

After Geraldine rescued her son from the house and took him to a friend’s, she had to turn off the television coverage showing their ravaged street because it was upsetting him too much: “But even on the internet I could see the back of our house and next door’s with the roof blown off. We got phone calls from all over the world to see if we were okay.”

As we are talking, Caroline Phillips, a 47-year-old writer from two doors down, arrives with her 11-year-old daughter Anya to swap war stories.

“When the tornado struck,” says Phillips, “I was in my office. I heard a noise like thunder and thought it was an explosion. I saw this black cloud coming towards me, like something out of the Wizard of Oz, and I dived under my desk. When I looked out of the window, all the fences were down and the trees were across the gardens.”

Caroline’s house has also suffered serious damage but luckily, like Geraldine and Sunil, she is insured. At the nearby Royal British Legion hall, which acted as a shelter for the refugees of Kensal Rise, not all the tornado’s victims were so lucky: “It was so aggressive there. I could only imagine that a lot of people who were displaced were not insured for their houses and could be extremely angry.”

Caroline found her dog Douschkam frightened but safe inside her house, but the fate of the family cat, Happy, is unknown: “Everyone’s cats have disappeared. They are either cowering and terrified somewhere, or have been whipped up into the tornado.”

For Anya, being a junior resident of tornado alley has brought her celebrity at school. “People come up to me and say, ‘Are you the one that’s died with your family?’ ” she beams excitedly. “And at assembly there was an announcement — ‘Rumours that Anya’s dog has died in a tornado are untrue’.”

Geraldine says that she is “philosophical” about the tornado strike and well aware that around the world far worse tragedies occur — and without the help of efficient emergency services.

On Friday night, in a sign that Crediton Road will hopefully soon be just another anonymous suburban street once more, a ginger tabby could be seen scuttling back into one of the houses — weather-beaten but doing fine.