Theme of the week

Have you ever made an enemy that you’ve never reconciled with?

That would be my ex neighbour, Norman. I didn’t want to be his enemy. I’m not a person who normally makes enemies, but Norman was determined to be one, or that’s the way it seemed.

Norman moved into the house next door when my eldest son was 18 months old and initially he seemed friendly. He came round to ask when the baby took his nap because he was going to do some DIY.

I think it may have been my husband who upset him. We hadn’t long moved here ouselves. When we came the front garden was simply a hillside running down to the railway line. I wanted to keep some of the hill as I used to love rolling down my aunt’s sloping garden when I was a child, so we decided to make the bottom part flat and leave the rest. This involved bringing barrow loads of earth around from the back which we needed to move anyway to make a turning space. Norman lent Hubby a rake to make a nice flat surface to sow grass seed and Hubby gave it to him back without cleaning it. Hubby is very disorganised and untidy. It would never occur to him to clean anything.

Maybe Norman took offence over that. I’m not sure, but he stopped talking to us around that time. I thought it was a bit of an over reaction, although I did ask Hubby to apologise. I’n not sure if he did. I wasn’t too upset. I thought it would all blow over in time, but he never spoke to us again.

The thing is it wasn’t just us, Norman turned against everyone. He didn’t like dogs and took a particular dislike to the lady at the end of the terrace who breeds dalmations. Once when one of her dogs got out and into the farmer’s field he rang the farmer not the neighbour and started a big row between them. He put big white blocks on either side of his part of the back access road which made it really difficult for another neighbour to get his van by. I don’t know why he did this, except that he had a thing about marking the boundary of his territory. He upset one family to the point they actually moved away. She told me he used to stare into their windows when he walked past. I can believe that, he did it to us, as well.

When I was expecting my daughter I couldn’t sleep until the early hours and stayed in bed for a lie in in the mornings. Norman chose then to knock out a wall starting about 7am. My husband explained and asked him if he could do it later, but the man who had once been concerned about the baby’s naps seemed to have turned into the devil and made more noise than ever.

Actually he didn’t seem to like people who had children either. He liked children, but not the parents. On one occasion my 3 year old son decided that it was too far to go to the toilet and watered the daffodils intead.
‘Do you teach him to do that sort of thing?’  Norman said on one of the few occasions he spoke to us.
‘You don’t have to teach them.’ replied my husband. Norman gave one of his looks and walked away.

The irritating thing was he was a traffick warden so you tended to cross him when you were out, too. Once he challenged me for leaving the kids in the car alone while I went to a cash machine. I was literally 8 feet away!

Once, when we bought a second hand car and had it delivered by the garage quite legally,  he called around and asked if we owned the untaxed car (our road is private so it wasn’t parked illegally). He just looked for trouble.

One Christmas, after a run in with him, the kids and I composed a silly poem about him. I don’t remember much of it now but it finished with –

‘A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
And wish you weren’t here.’

I was horrifed when my son, then about nine told me he and his friend had chanted ot outside Norman’s house. There was no hope of reconciliation after that!

A few years ago. Norman moved on and no one was sorry to see him go. Ironically, The dog hater sold the house to a man who keeps three dogs in little pens at the bottom of his garden and another half dozen on a piece of land down the lane. They bark and whine incessantly and it really upsets my daughter who loves animals.

I guess he’s an enemy, too, since we have tried in vain to find a peaceful solution.

Sometimes I feel almost like saying –

Come back Norman all is forgiven –

but not quite!