‘Respectable’ neighbours who cost me my sanity – and my marriage
It began with a petty dispute over a driveway. What happened next changed this woman’s life for ever ...
WITH her baby gurgling happily in her arms and the sun streaming through her conservatory window, for a moment Mo Casillas felt content. Then the noise started. A loud, relentless banging on the side of the conservatory which adjoined her neighbour’s garden. Baby Leo jumped, startled, and started to cry. Mo, too, began to sob, praying for the noise to stop. Their rare moment of peace was shattered.
The noise was her neighbour, Carol Dickinson, hammering her hands on the side of the conservatory — once again deliberately, Mo believes, doing everything she could to make her life a misery.
Every time she saw Mo sitting in her conservatory, Carol would make sure her peace and quiet didn’t last, banging on the glass windows until she was forced, often weeping in fear, to move back into the house.
This certainly wasn’t the only cruelty she inflicted on Mo, 50, an NHS computer analyst. ‘Mrs Dickinson would purposely bang metal bin lids outside my door over and over again while I tried to get the baby to sleep. She barricaded her side of our driveway with barbed wire and bin bags.
‘My children, Leo, now 14, and Lewis, now 13, have never been able to play in the street. She would say nasty things to them, sometimes throwing stones at them.
‘Because of her, they haven’t had a normal upbringing. I can’t say I have enjoyed bringing up my children. The Dickinsons have always been there trying to ruin it. Whenever they tried to play in the garden, or we sat out as a family, she would light a fire on her side — even on the hottest summer day — meaning it was too smoky and we had to go indoors.
‘On another occasion, one of her sons let his Alsatian loose in our garden and refused to get it. It tried to bite me so I called the RSPCA.
‘One morning, I heard a noise in the garden. She was out there smashing my plant pots. Someone had tried to break into her car and she thought it was me.’
The situation became so fraught that Mrs Dickinson stabbed an elderly neighbour who tried to stop her sawing down a For Sale sign outside Mo’s house with a carving knife — a sign put up when Mo was trying to sell her home to escape from them.
Little wonder, then, that Mo’s voice breaks with emotion as she documents a 15-year campaign of abuse and harassment, which has left her on antidepressants, contributed to the end of her marriage, and made her and her children afraid to leave the house.
Mo has felt so trapped and helpless that she considered hiring a hitman to deal with her ‘neighbours from hell’.
But this was no home on a sink estate. Mo’s three-bedroom detached house was in a quiet, well-kept area on the outskirts of Stockport, Greater Manchester, with a garden backing on to acres of open fields.
And Carol and Frank Dickinson seemed the picture of respectability when Mo and her husband, also called Leo, arrived in 2002. Mo, then five months pregnant with her first child, was welcomed warmly by Frank, a retired businessman and ex-soldier, and Carol, a former childminder who said she would be happy to help look after her child.
But relations quickly began to sour and in the end devolved into a long and expensive civil court battle. The case has been so protracted that Carol, 76, and Frank, 82, may now have to sell their home. They were ordered by a judge to pay costs after he ruled that Mo should have access to her gas and electricity meters — which can only be reached by walking on the Dickinsons’ driveway. Mo’s legal fees alone amount to £200,000.
Trouble between the families began just a few weeks after Mo moved in. At the time, she was the main breadwinner as her then husband, who is now a college lecturer, worked as a waiter while studying for a degree in computer science.
The Dickinsons, who have two grown-up sons, started to complain about visitors stepping on their driveway when they got out of their cars to go to Mo’s. Instead of taking a path round the front lawn, some were taking a shorter route by walking two feet across the drive.
THE complaints became more insistent and, as far as Mo was concerned, more irrational, but she tried to placate them and apologise, explaining that not everyone was aware of the land boundaries.
‘At the time,’ Mo recalls, ‘we were very excited. We’d been trying for a baby for a few years and I was so thrilled to be pregnant. It was a happy time.
‘ Everything seemed brilliant at first, but then their grumblings about the driveway began and things became absolutely dreadful very quickly.’
Ten days after Mo gave birth in November 2002, the midwife came to visit for the first time.
‘Leo was assembling the pram and our son was in his little rocker. The midwife was asking me questions when there was a bang at the door. Mrs Dickinson was there, furious because the midwife had walked on her driveway.
‘I went to the door and she pushed it open, almost knocking me off my feet. She was lucky I didn’t have the baby in my arms. The midwife was horrified and said we needed to go to the police, which I did. It did nothing but aggravate the situation.’
Mo, who is of Iranian descent, says Carol would accost her whenever she left the house. She believes her shocking behaviour was partly racially motivated.
‘She would shout abuse at me about the colour of my skin. She called me a dirty Arab many times. She said everyone hated me, that people like me shouldn’t be allowed to live there.
‘I was just trying to raise my baby. I felt scared and alone.’
Speaking from the cosy sitting room of the house she now hates, her attempts to try to create a safe haven there are evident. But while the walls are adorned with cheerful family photos, this has not been a happy home for a long time.
When asked if Frank was as bad as Carol, she answers: ‘It’s mainly her but he will back her up all the way even when she’s being a demon.’
DEMONIC is an apt expression for the abuse Mo endured. In one year, she complained to the police more than 200 times about Carol, who was taken to court in 2004 for racial harassment but found not guilty.
Mo says the police then told her the best thing she could do was move out.
One of the main disputes between Mo and the Dickinsons has been their refusal to allow anyone access to the gas and electricity meters for Mo’s house, which are on their 8 ft driveway. Nor would they allow Mo to do any maintenance work on the side of the house next to theirs.
Mo admitted defeat in 2006 and tried to put the house on the market. Imagine her horror when her first estate agents pulled out after Carol wrote to them detailing her complaints and the problems any householder would have accessing the meter.
Another estate agent agreed to take Mo on. But the ‘For Sale’ sign outside her house blew in the wind so it hung partly over Carol’s land. Carol furiously went out with a carving knife to cut it down. When another neighbour challenged her, she stabbed him in the arm. His injuries weren’t serious so Carol was bound to keep the peace for two years rather than being sent to prison.
‘I thought I had no hope. I seriously considered hiring a hitman but I was given antidepressants and they helped. I realised that we were unable to sell the house so we were stuck here,’ remembers Mo.
‘Legally, all of the disputes and complaints have to be reported to any potential buyers. So who would want to come and live like this?’
In 2009, Mo turned to the civil courts for help. She needed access to the Dickinsons’ driveway to be able to carry out building work on her property and to read her gas and electricity meters — which was now behind a metal gate with fierce spikes on top.
The judge found in her favour in 2015, ruling she must be given a key for the gate and that the Dickinsons had to pay costs.
Judge Charles Khan said he found Carol’s conduct to have been that of an ‘ aggressive, spiteful troublemaker’ while describing Frank as ‘bombastic’, and revealed that he had served a prison sentence for VAT fraud.
He added that, although the
Dickinsons had tried to portray themselves as both decent and honest, ‘I am driven to the conclusion that their endeavours do not even demonstrate a veneer of the values of decency and honesty’.
Mo was given a key and, for the first time since she moved in, had her gas and electricity meters read. Meanwhile, she tried to ignore the festering resentment of her neighbours.
‘There was a time when I was too scared to go out. Whenever I did, Carol would stand there with her arms folded, giving me the evil eye all the way. Sometimes she would call me a bad mother for going to work and not being there for my children.’
Mo says the Dickinsons’ behaviour was a ‘huge contributing factor’ in the breakdown of her marriage, which ended in 2014, and has had a huge impact on her mental health.
‘I couldn’t cope. I had two kids, a full-time job and the Dickinsons to contend with.’
Mo is now wary of strangers, as well as feeling intense bitterness about all she has lost to the Dickinsons.
‘I try to bury the memories but I want to go and live somewhere where I don’t have to see anyone. It’s destroyed the years I wanted to have with my boys. I can’t get this time back.’
Mo’s legal fees have been covered in part by her building insurance — the rest is covered on a no-win-no-fee basis. Meanwhile the Dickinsons have launched a challenge at the Court of Appeal to have the ruling overturned.
They say they will have to sell their house, which is secured against the legal bill, to pay the costs of the case.
This week, they refused to answer the door when approached for comment. But speaking outside court, Carol said she felt ‘traumatised’ and Frank added: ‘I’ve got an appointment with a counsellor and my wife is on the waiting list.’
Judgment has been reserved on their appeal for ruling at a later date.
Mo doesn’t dare hope that the Dickinsons’ final legal challenge will come to nothing — and that they will be forced to move, leaving her free to live in peace.
‘I can’t even let myself think about that,’ she says. ‘After what she’s done to me? I’m afraid to dream that it could be over.’