It all started the day my mother received a letter from the Town Council, denying her application for an extension to our living room.
She was gutted. All her dreams of that longed-for extension, which would have added a good eight feet to our poky back living room, had gone to dust. My heart cried for her. I loved my mother, and couldn’t bear to see her like this. Actually, everyone loved my mother. Warm, funny, generous and endlessly sociable, she was the sort of woman who could charm the whole world.
What nobody realised was quite how terrifying she could be when crossed.
Our neighbours were the first to realise it, because as it happened, the Council’s refusal turned out to have been caused by them. They were the ones who had stated, in a previous letter to the Planning Permission Department, that any such extension would result in blocking sunlight from their back garden.
My mother found this out for herself when she marched along to said Town Council in full Brunhilde battle mode, accompanied by me, her timid teenage daughter who would have sacrificed anything, even our treasured Jacobean upright piano (more on that later – it gets worse) for the sake of the peace.
But not my mother.
When she entered the tall, forbidding building and stormed straight to the Planning Permission office, she minced no words in demanding to know why her application had been refused. No doubt she expected to have the horrible decision overturned there and then by the sheer force of her personality. (As an aside, I should add that my mother would have made an excellent politician – a socialist Maggie Thatcher, but with heaps more feminine umph. The thing is, when my mother wasn’t angry, she was Charm and Allure Personified: Vivien Leigh meets Marilyn Monroe.)
But that day, when she realised our evil neighbours were to blame, all her feminine charm and allure were swallowed up in one gigantic chasm of wrath. I longed to say, Oh come on, Mother, they aren’t EVIL, they just don’t want to be deprived of their fair share of sunlight! But there was no way on earth I would have dared voice my guilty little opinion to the Valkyrie woman sitting beside me in that stuffy Town Council office, her bosom heaving, her words pouring forth, her gleaming eyes oblivious to the beads of perspiration running down the forehead of the unfortunate bureaucrat seated opposite us.
Unbelievably, on this rare occasion my mother lost the battle.
As a result, she stopped speaking to the neighbours, but did at least gain planning permission to build a six-foot high brick wall to divide our neighbours’ back garden from our own, thereby providing more privacy than the meagre row of shrubs that had previously served as an apologetic division. Over the coming months, the Brick Wall was duly erected, rendering our neighbours invisible. (However, on those rare summery English afternoons when both sets of inhabitants – them and us – sat out in our adjacent back gardens, sipping our respective lemonades at our adjacent twee patio tables, the Big Divide did not extend to muting voices on either side of those sturdy bricks.)
Wall or not, the battle was not over. My mother had, after all, neither forgotten nor forgiven the original letter our neighbours had submitted to the Town Council. So when, on one innocent Saturday afternoon, we heard gentle knocking sounds coming from the other side of The Wall, my mother dashed upstairs to my bedroom (which afforded the best view of our neighbours’ back garden), and there, standing on a ladder, was Mr X, determinedly hammering a nail into the bricks.
My mother was round at their house in a flash. The conversation that ensued, which I overheard in trepidation, went something like this:
Mr X: Yes, how can I help?
Mother: Would you mind not knocking nails into my garden wall, and immediately taking down the one you’ve already put there?
Mr X: But we only want to put a couple of hanging baskets up, to camouflage the ugliness of the wall.
Mother: Firstly, it is not ugly, secondly, it is my wall, paid for entirely by me in lieu of the extension you deprived me of, and thirdly, hammering nails into the bricks will weaken the structure and run the risk of the entire thing collapsing.
Mr X (offering a feeble laugh): Really, I hardly think such a thing would ever–
But it was too late. My mother was gone in a puff of smoke. There was no further nail-knocking after that.
The final event, which also turned out to be the final straw, occurred about a year later.
I was preparing for my audition to music college and had thus increased my daily dose of piano practice to two or three hours during week days, and four or five hours on Saturdays and Sundays. Sometimes even six. Each practice session was preceded by an intensive run-through of just about every scale that ever existed – chromatic, diatonic, consecutive thirds and sixths, octaves, the lot – which can’t have been easy background listening to anyone nearby. And, of course, who should prove to be exceedingly nearby? Our unfortunate neighbours, no less! The thing is, our piano was tucked into an alcove in our living room that happened to be right next to the wall in their living room.
After a few weeks of suffering in silence, Mrs X came round, presumably because she was braver than Mr X.
Once again, I eavesdropped.
Mother (upon opening the front door): Yes?
Mrs X: I was wondering if you would be kind enough to consider moving your piano a little further away from the wall next to our living room? The sound is very intrusive, you see, especially all those repeated exercises and –
Mother: No, I would not consider. If the sound bothers you, then I suggest you move house.
And guess what? About a week later, when I came home from school one drizzly afternoon, there it was, standing proud and erect in their small front garden: a FOR SALE sign!
Within the year, they’d moved out. My mother bought a bottle of bubbly that day – and this is someone who hardly ever drank alcohol because it made her silly.
The reason this long-forgotten episode came back to me recently is thanks to a hilarious novel I’m currently reading: Sophie Hannah’s No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done. Hannah’s laugh-aloud depictions of pettiness, gossip, grudges and mountain-out-of-molehill arguments amongst neighbouring communities could not be better exemplified than the war of neighbours I myself was a casualty of, way back in the not-always-halcyon days of my adolescence.
Wendy Skorupski 