The wife of a man who fell from a two-storey height has thanked their neighbours and an RNLI team for saving his life.

Ann Hamling's husband John had been working up a ladder outside their Deal home when he fell onto the pavement below.

Speaking of the moment he came off the ladder, she said: "I turned around just in time to see him fly through the air, and I heard the impact when he hit the ground.

"When I saw him lying there, I just completely went to jelly - I had no idea what to do.

"I felt for sure that he was dead."

Thankfully, not seconds after the shocking fall, the Hamings' neighbours flooded out of their houses to their aid.

"People arrived as if out of nowhere, it was incredible," Mrs Hamling, 60, explained.

"So many of them were wonderful, they all helped him - and me, because I had no idea what to do.

"You don’t know how you’ll react, in those situations, I consider myself pretty calm but I just couldn't think straight."

The ambulance was called, but it would be more than 40 minutes before paramedics arrived.

However, help soon arrived in the form of an RNLI lifeboat team, who had been at the lifeboat house nearby on the seafront.

"They arrived as a team with everything with them, there was one giving him oxygen while another was quite literally lying on his stomach for more than half an hour keeping John's head cushioned with his hand," explained Mrs Hamling.

'If all those people had not been there, I dread to think what would have happened to him...'

"If all those people had not been there, I dread to think what would have happened to him."

Thankfully 62-year-old John is now at home and on the mend after a stay at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford.

"He has a fractured skull and had a bleed on the brain, but other than that no broken bones – I have no idea how!" said Mrs Hamling.

"He also has a badly bruised torso and neck as you can imagine so can't move very well, but it could have been so much worse.

"I just feel so blessed that I’ve got such fantastic neighbours, they helped me afterwards as well, helping me carry on and doing things around the place that you can’t think of at the time.

"The lifeboat will be getting a big donation! They’re all volunteers, they are incredible people.

"I did tell him not to go up that high, but men do what they want to do."

Christopher Winslade, from Walmer RNLI, said: "RNLI volunteers are trained in maritime search and rescue medicine, which is a specialist field, to prepare them to deal with challenging situations while on operations.

"These hands-on treatments can be easily transferred to deal with situations ashore to provide a high level of care.

"We were only too happy to be of assistance in this incident."