Snobbery and a vicious vendetta against the neighbour from a council house
WHEN Sue and Keithith Brookes moved into their dream home on a leafy lane they believed they’d also got lucky when it came to the neighbours. ‘We had my mum nearby and a nice elderly couple next door, so it seemed about as good as it could get,’ recalls Sue. ‘We thought it was the perfect place to enjoy our retirement.’
It turned out to be quite the opposite. Instead of indulging in pleasant chit-chats over the garden fence, one half of that ‘ nice’ couple — an apparently respectable pensioner by the name of Kathleen Neal — took such exception to the Sue and Keith that she launched a campaign of abuse against them.
Over the course of 12 long years they say she overturned wheelie bins, killed their plants and lit endless bonfires by their hedge — sometimes up to four times a day — choking them with smoke. Then came the series of silent phone calls to their house at all hours.
What on earth, you may think, could the Brookeses — a respectable, hard-working couple who raised two sons and are now the proud grandparents of five lovely grandchildren — have done to invoke such wrath?
The answer is absolutely nothing — except, perhaps, for happening to come from what Mrs Neal saw as ‘the wrong side of the tracks’.
Sue had grown up in the area. In fact, her elderly mother still lived in the council property backing on to their new home, which evidently brought out the snob in Mrs Neal, living in her own detached property next door.
A hate-filled ‘Get back to your council house!’ screamed at the couple, as well as a muttered ‘We don’t want your sort around here’, confirmed their suspicions.
‘It’s snobby, petty and ridiculous,’ says Sue. ‘We have worked hard to get where we are — nothing has been handed to us on a plate. I think that is something to be valued rather than judged in such a hateful manner.’
As childish as the verbal assaults may sound to an outsider, living with them day in, day out for 12 years was no laughing matter.
The Brookeses struggled to enjoy the home and beautiful garden they had worked so hard for, and their health suffered. Sue, 65, developed nervous eczema and high blood pressure while her 68year- old husband suffered from anxiety and bouts of depression.
Compounding their frustration was the agonisingly slow and toothless legal system — comprising both the police and local council — which seemed powerless to stop their neighbour’s hate campaign.
‘We just wanted some recognition in law and to feel protected,’ says Sue. ‘She made us feel like imposters who didn’t deserve to be there.
‘All we wanted was to enjoy our lovely home, but she did her best to destroy all that. She just didn’t want us there. It was downright nasty.’
Their story is enough to make any potential homebuyer shudder. As Sue puts it, neighbours are ‘a bit of a lottery’ at the best of times.
When they’d bought their house — a handsome, detached Art Deco property known as the Boathouse, sitting amid an acre of land on a leafy lane in Castle Donington, Leicestershire — there was no hint of trouble ahead.
Growing up in a council house with her parents, Alison, a school dinner lady, and Ray, a joiner, on a small estate which backs on to the property, Sue remembered the Boathouse well.
‘I always thought it was a beautiful house,’ says Sue. ‘We didn’t have much to do with the people over there and I can’t remember Mrs Neal. People kept themselves to themselves. As far as I know there were never any disagreements.’
Living in a house like the Boathouse remained a distant dream for the Brookeses who, after their wedding in 1970, moved into their own council house. That is, until 1980, when Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ came into force, affording council tenants the opportunity to purchase their own home. By then working full-time for the local council, Sue earned enough to help the couple climb the first rung on the property ladder.
THE couple prospered. Sue set up her own care business in the midNineties, while Keith worked as an engineer, and when the Boathouse came up for sale, Sue says ‘it felt fated’.
Initially, relations with the Neals — Kathleen, her husband, and their adult son — were perfectly cordial.
‘We didn’t exactly become friends, but we exchanged over-the-gardenwall pleasantries,’ says Sue.
Relations broke down when Sue learned Mrs Neal was objecting to them converting a derelict garage into a room, claiming it blocked their light. ‘It was ridiculous. It wasn’t an extension and in fact we made it look much better, replacing rotting garage doors with a nice window. It had no effect on them whatsoever and the council agreed.’
Then, in early 2004, events took a peculiar turn. ‘I was putting some plants on our little decking area when Kathleen called me across the hedgerow,’ Sue recalls.
‘ I trotted over assuming she wanted a chit- chat but she suddenly started to be hostile. She was basically accusing us of not taking our dog, Barley, with us when we went out.
‘We loved our dog dearly and I told her I didn’t understand what she meant. Then she said: “Are you calling me a liar?”
‘It was all very odd and out of the blue. Looking back, she just wanted to pick a fight.’
Sue put it to the back of her mind, but as the weeks went by, she and Keith started to notice that their garden tubs were being upturned overnight. ‘We thought we had foxes so we installed a camera.’
Then, one evening, Sue noticed movement on the camera.
‘I saw Mrs Neal creeping down the side of the garage. She went over to one of our big tubs and started rolling it over. She’d had to scale a 5ft fence to get over here. It was so ridiculous that instead of confronting her, it just made me laugh.’
Determined not to cause ructions, Sue wrote a letter to her neighbour. ‘I said I had seen her coming into the garden and I was worried she might fall climbing over the fence. It was my way of making a point, but trying to do it in a nice way.’
Alas, this only served to escalate matters. ‘Then the bonfires started,’
says Sue. ‘Every time Keith and I went out into the garden, Kathleen would light a fire so smoke would come over the fence. She would use accelerant — we could smell the petroleum — which made tons of smoke, and I even saw her wafting it my way with a big piece of cardboard.’
Their pleas for her to stop fell on deaf ears, meaning that finally, in despair, the couple turned to their local council, who sent a community support officer to their home to hear their side of the story. ‘The council also advised us to keep a written record and eventually sent an officer to speak to Mrs Neal,’ says Sue.
It made no difference: the bonfires continued almost daily, now joined by all sorts of other unpleasant, and bizarre, behaviour.
‘We would wake up to find our wheelie bins tipped over. Then one time I actually watched her come into the garden and start cutting our bushes down,’ Sue recalls.
Once, the couple returned from holiday to discover that fresh turf they had had professionally laid before they left had been pulled back, and plants were dying overnight.
Could the police and local council not do more? Apparently not.
‘They did try,’ says Sue. ‘She had countless warnings over the years from the council about anti-social behaviour but they fell on deaf ears.
‘The police could only advise us to not get into any confrontations but gather as much evidence of her in action as we could. But we had such a big garden that it was very hard.
‘Some of this stuff sounds petty, but over time it has a cumulative effect. We felt trapped in our own house, and it had a knock-on effect on my family, too. When they came over to have meals we would be sitting in the conservatory and the bonfire would start up and all our nerves would be on edge.
‘It’s bullying really. We just could not understand why she was behaving this way when we hadn’t done anything wrong.’
That is until one day around three years ago, when, out of the blue, Kathleen shouted ‘Get back to your council house where you belong’ as Sue was gardening. ‘It came from nowhere and actually it did shake me up, the nastiness of it,’ she says. ‘At the same time the penny dropped. She obviously felt we weren’t good enough.
‘Although I don’t remember her, she obviously knew I’d grown up across the way.
‘It seemed so snobbish and petty. We’re nice people, we get on with everyone else around us. I’d go so far as to say we’re lovely neighbours.’
In early 2015, the Brookeses started to receive a series of silent phone calls, at all times of the day and night. ‘The number was always blocked, but I knew it was her. For example, I could hear the same aeroplane noise in the background that was overhead.’ Proving it, of course, was trickier. ‘We started recording every single call and then passed them on to Leicestershire police,’ says Sue. ‘They traced the calls to a pay-asyou-go mobile and, when they paid her a visit and rang the number it went off in her pocket.’
Nuisance calls are a criminal offence, but the police held off from pursuing charges as, by then — finally, you might think — the council had enough evidence for a civil case against Mrs Neal.
It would take four hearings over seven months, but last month, a judge at Derby Crown Court handed Neal, now 76, a five-year injunction banning her from harassing her neighbours. She faces prison or a large fine if she breaks it.
Such was the couple’s relief that Keith broke down in tears when the sentence was announced.
So far, it seems to be working. There have been no more bonfires, although Neal still seems to be making her presence known.
‘When we are in the garden we can still see her watching us from the upstairs window,’ says Sue.
To this day, neither of them can fathom why their neighbour went to such lengths to show her disapproval. Mrs Neal declined to speak to the Daily Mail when we knocked on her door.
Sue ponders: ‘If she doesn’t like us that’s fine, but why not just leave us alone?’
It is a question which only Mrs Neal can answer.