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It never rains but it pours

Update - July 2002

Hello reader

As I write this, I am camping out in my bedroom with my phone in my hand, watching for the arrival of a gang who have threatened to baseball-bat my next door neighbour, and listening to the beautiful sound of five industrial-sized dehumidifiers attempting to make the ground floor of my house habitable once again.

And how did this situation arise? How did I end up in a contaminated house, ready to phone the police over the kind of altercation that gets reconstructed on Neighbours From Hell?

It started with the rain. The kind of rain that sends you running to the window to admire the strength of nature. Then came the hail - hailstones the size of marbles that sent me running away from the window in fear of the strength of nature. Then more rain, and it started coming under my kitchen door, so I mopped it up. Four bucketfuls of water later, I heard a shout from the front of the house, and ran there to find water pouring under my front door and into my living room. I opened the living room window and was confronted with the kind of scene I expected to only ever see on the news, happening to other people. My street was no longer a street, but was a river. Cars were wheel-arch deep in brown water. People were hanging out of their windows shouting that they were trapped. The water crept higher.

At this point, I did wonder why I had never thought to invest in a stock of sandbags. Sandbags suddenly seemed like the most sensible purchase a householder could make. Not having sandbags, I decided to save my possessions. Being a good bibliophile, I saved my books first and worried about my TV and video after that. The carpet in the back room was starting to float and I had waves inside my house. It's very difficult to describe what it's like to see green waves washing around your furniture - it's just too unexpected.

Then the joyriders arrived, shrieking with joy as the water parted in front of their cars. The parting caused a wave. The wave spread across the street. I saw it coming towards the house. All of us neighbours were shouting but to no avail. The cars kept driving, the waves kept coming, and hit the houses with the kind of force you see at a jetty when a speedboat goes past. Water rushed into the houses, spraying under the doors, sending waves out across the carpet. One car did a handbrake turn at the end of the road and came back for another go - "No!" we shouted again, but this time the water washed over the bonnet of the car and his engine cut out. The driver tried desperately to restart his engine. My next door neighbour climbed out of his front room window with a baseball bat but the engine started and the car pulled away just as my neighbour reached him. He stood there, knee deep in water, waving the baseball bat. It could have been a scene from an action movie.

As far as I can see, owning a baseball bat in Britain has only one purpose. I imagine there must be people who do actually use them to play baseball, but just as the number of rizla papers sold does not reflect the number of people who genuinely roll their own cigarettes, so the sales figures for baseball bats can't be an accurate reflection of the popularity of the game. I am fairly certain that my next door neighbour has never used his baseball bat for playing baseball, but he certainly knows how to swing it. In fact, it was only the arrival of the Fire Brigade that stopped him demonstrating his swing on the next joyrider to risk coming up our street.

After the Fire Brigade pumped out the storm drains, the flooding subsided. Everyone emptied out of the houses and into the street. In my four years living in this street, I have never spoken to as many people as I did after the flood. I can imagine that the flood will live on in the folk-memory of the street; the day we were all flooded out and actually spoke to each other.

Of course, I'm insured. Being insured made me quite philosophical about the flood; I wanted new carpets anyway. Plenty of people were flooded worse than we were. My baseball-bat-owning neighbour wasn't insured. While the rest of us cheerfully got on with chucking out damaged goods, he stood in the street surrounded by his cronies (he has a lot of cronies, almost a gang of them) and bemoaned the arrival of the Fire Brigade just as he grabbed one of the joyriders.

Then he stayed up all night, vaxing his carpets in an attempt to save them. When I saw him the next morning he looked wrecked. We squelched around each other's houses, comparing damage. He moaned about the joyriders again. Then the people sent by my insurers to sort out the flood damage arrived, and he repeated the story of the joyriders to them, and they made sympathetic noises and started stripping out my carpets. My next door neighbour wandered off. Half an hour later he was back, with a black eye.

"I just got punched," he said, in disbelief.

"Oh," I said. "Who punched you?"

"The brother of one of those joyriders," he said. "He said I wouldn't be living round here for much longer." I felt almost sorry for him until he said, "All I said was his brother had better watch out, cos my mate cut their mate's arm off a little while ago. Then he punched me."

"Oh," I said again. What else could I say?

"But he's not getting away with it," he said, and fetched his baseball bat. I watched him stride away up the street, swinging that bat.

The flood people asked what was happening. I told them. They said, "It's like a soap opera round here."

I smiled at that, because I had been thinking the same thing. I didn't believe my neighbour would actually use the baseball bat on a person - there's a big difference between talking and doing - so I was happy to see what would happen next. One advantage of being a writer is that any experience can be seen as research for a book. That's how I like to think about it, anyway.

My neighbour came back a little while later, whistling and looking very pleased with himself. He hadn't found the man who had punched him, but he had found his car. I didn't ask any more. There's a fine line between watching something unfold and getting involved.

Later, though, when I was outside waiting for the flood people to finish installing dehumidifiers in my house, he sidled up to me and asked me to keep an eye out for a blue Vauxhall containing four people with baseball bats. "If they attack me, call the police," he said. What could I do - refuse? I expect they're as good at talking the talk as he is and won't actually call round, but I feel it's my duty to keep an eye out, just in case. After all, I wouldn't want anything to happen to my neighbour now I've finally got to know him. It would probably take another flood to get talking to whoever moved in after he had gone.

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