1991. Stanton Turns Really Nasty

The hedge
The outlook from our windows was the best for sixteen years, with light streaming over the fourteen-foot hedge into house and garden. In January I peered into the hedge and saw one-foot-thick, ugly brown stalks of the once-primary trunks, eight feet of them bare of foliage. Three years earlier I had sawed off six-foot lateral branches that were taking up my land, which caused this. The remaining wood was dead and, as with this species, permanently incapable of regrowing. It blocked light from my side and would eventually rot.
One by one I had silently sawed through three of these trunks with my one-foot pruning saw, working from a stool two feet above ground. Each took an hour of sawing in fifteen-minute spells over a couple of days, fitted around ordinary garden tasks, despite my arthritic shoulders. When a trunk was cut through, it balanced upright for a second before I pushed it away and it fell with a dull thud. The three-foot chunks went in the hatchback to the Council tip, where the men loved them for logs. Nobody on either the Jones or Stanton side noticed.
Below my cuts, powerful six-inch side trunks were growing on the Stanton side and held the hedge at fourteen feet with no change in height. The tree's strength now fed these side branches, which thickened the hedge in the new daylight. It was time to take out four more trunks, but three of the rest had to stay because the rising sap was keeping them alive.
The last Peace Festival
The ninth annual Selly Oak Easter Peace Festival was over, and I breathed a sigh of relief after a year's effort. No one realised it would be the last, which was entirely attributable to the Stantons. I couldn't find anyone to take over, because the unpaid, politically skilled work put off even our hardest workers. My involvement in a nasty neighbour dispute disqualified me anyway, since the head Peacenik couldn't be seen as a warring neighbour. All my emotional reserves had to go to our domestic survival.
It was a magnificent feat of organisation. No one else could have brought together all political parties, Christian faiths, atheists, trade unions and scores of single-issue campaigners. "Earth Day" was that year's title. The local free newspaper devoted its front page to us, and the Tories came. Their MP, Roger King, a car salesman by profession, spoke on the platform in "green" terms rather than "Tory, cold war" ones. Sadly for him, the political tide was turning and he was about to lose his seat.
I kept secret that behind the scenes, jobsworth hall staff, petty rivalry between groups and an hysterical animal-rights group had nearly wrecked it. I was exhausted and glad to be rid of it. As every year, I hid my tired desperation and said we would meet again in 1992.
Holland, and the hedge waiting
Maureen and I badly needed a break and booked the last place on the Holland coach. I hung up the hanging baskets, and against my better instincts we soaked the plants on the final evening, praying for a little rain. It rained every day, and on our return the plants were groggy. The holiday had its snags too: the coach was late, we missed the ferry and spent seven hours at Folkestone, and we arrived for a dried-up meal after midnight.
My heart was in my garden. The hedge would always be dominant and out of scale in that narrow part of the garden, but it wasn't mine and I didn't have the final say. Last week I had silently sawn three-quarters of the way through four bare trunks touching the Stanton side of the chain-link fence. My neighbour couldn't get near them because of six feet of thick, foliage-laden branches.
Terry Stanton's arrest
On the dark journey home I thought of Paul Terry Stanton. By now he should have appeared before the magistrate, been fined and acquired a criminal record. It cheered me, though it also reminded me that his old man had never been punished for his own assaults on me. The previous September Terry had barged into my garage and knocked me to the floor. Had the police pressed charges?
A couple of months before, Maureen had phoned me at the printers: the police had arrested Terry Stanton. They had been calling on him for months and he had refused to talk. So they waited until he came out to go to work, then took him kicking and screaming to the station. He kicked the police car and struck the WPC. When I finally reached the station (their new phone system had failed), the sergeant and WPC were in stitches. They had interviewed him at length and he'd said a lot of nasty things about me.
On our return, the police message annoyed me: Terry was pleading not guilty and my presence in court wouldn't be needed until September. The next day I sawed through the last of the three nine-foot trunks and they thudded to the ground. Each was cut into three chunks and taken to the tip.
Our driveway was being block-paved, so the skip stood on the road, to the inconvenience of neighbours. I had a couple of workmen carry the final trunk whole to the skip, which was a big mistake because it advertised what no one knew I had done. From our side nothing was visible. From the Stanton side, you would have to force branches aside, at some pain, to see where the trunks had been.
The injunction
On Saturday 28th June 1991 I received a letter from the Stanton solicitor:
"You have reduced the height of trees by 9 feet and in the last two days have cut about 6 feet from the trunks. Unless an undertaking is given that you will not persist in such behaviour by Monday 1st July an interlocutory injunction and/or damages will be sought."
My works were done for a year or two and the hedge was healthy and filling out. The letter amused me, because the trunks had been 8 or 9 feet and only one had been cut in the last two days. I could easily have complied, but the bullying tone made me photocopy it and send it to my own solicitor to deal with. On Monday he was taken ill with a hernia and removed by stretcher.
The next day a woman and a very heavy man picked their way over the unfinished driveway. She said:
"I represent Mr Stanton your neighbour and I am serving you a writ to appear in the County Court on Friday 19th July and also a temporary injunction to prevent you from touching my client's trees. Should you do so you would be guilty of contempt of court and liable to instant arrest."
Maureen, who knew nothing of the trunks, was terrified. She thought the visit was about Terry's arrest. The woman, an articled clerk from a prestigious inner-city firm, looked out of the French window at the hedge and said, in confusion, "Where are these trees?" She had just been in court with Counsel, and the judge had signed the order that morning. The package represented hours of careful work, begun two years earlier. Any undertaking from me would not have stopped it. The hearing was ex parte, so my right to be present had been ignored.
Stanton's affidavit described him as an 83-year-old retired engineer. It claimed I had cut his trees down by 15 feet and that replacement would cost £30,000. It said the police would not prosecute me, though Terry was to plead not guilty to assaulting me. The exhibits included a two-year-old tree surgeon's letter and photographs of the notorious 18-foot tower, labelled an "inspection platform". Two amusing photos showed the Stanton solicitor, who resembled Abraham Lincoln, pointing a white cane at a trunk. The Particulars of Claim were mostly wrong:
o (a) I had cut 10 feet by September 1989. In fact it was 5.
o (b) I had cut 5 feet around September 1990. It was 4.
o (c) I had cut 4 feet in the last week. It was nil, since I had been removing trunks without reducing height.
o (d) I had often cut beyond the boundary. In strict terms, correct.
I took copies to my solicitor's office. My own Counsel's opinion from two years earlier had stated that "the reduction in the height of trees is a trespass to which there is no defence." My poorly solicitor rang from hospital to say a colleague would take over. The colleague visited, couldn't see what the fuss was about, then swept aside the new foliage and found a freshly cut trunk a couple of inches over the Stanton side. "Oh my God," he said. He told me, "There is evidence here that cannot be denied in court." He asked me to write down everything, including the bonfires and assaults.
Life had changed. I could no longer enjoy my garden, and Maureen took over and cared for me too. I slogged away at the word processor, producing thousands of words. My son Ian read it and my weakness with the written word was clear. Trawling the past brought bitter resentment. Ian said, "You have suddenly aged." I slept badly and wished Stanton would die. An old devout neighbour told us she was praying he would die, and oddly it made me feel better.
My solicitor spent sixteen hours turning my wordy effort into an affidavit. It said that Maureen and I had complied with the Bournville Village Trust (BVT) Management Scheme. The cupressus had been attractive when small but soon exceeded the recommended 6 feet 6 inches and reached 35 feet, which the Trust Officer called the Berlin Wall. It admitted taking branches back to the boundary and removing the trunks, and it set out the assaults, the tower, the stone-throwing and the threat of a firearm. I was too ignorant and frightened to insist that this "demi-god" visit the site before taking a month's pension off me to represent me.
The County Court
On Friday 22nd July, a fine day, we walked to the court. Two men, one boyish and fair, the other dark and moustached, were chatting and laughing outside. The reception area was gloomy, oak-panelled and crowded with white wigs. The dark man turned out to be our barrister. When he asked for the deeds, my trembling hands spilled my briefcase on the floor. He glanced at the conveyance and said, "As I anticipated you have no right to light." We had never read the deeds. Why had he not studied the papers when we hired him two years earlier? He smelled strongly of curry and garlic. He said:
"The issue is simple. If this claim goes to trial you will lose and you will lose badly. There is no defence."
We had never imagined a trial. He went to see the opposition and came back with "very generous terms": a hedge at 23 feet, £6,000 compensation, their legal costs and a permanent injunction. I was so angry I swore. Ian asked whether he had read the Bournville Management Scheme. "Of course," came the reply, "but it is entirely inappropriate to these circumstances." Maureen shouted, "So we have got to put up with that nasty old man's Berlin Wall for ever?" He went back and returned with a hedge of 18 feet, an injunction still, and the £6,000 waived if I withdrew the charges against Terry. I asked about influencing a witness. He said, "He didn't really hurt you, did he? You could put a word in." I saw the look on my solicitor's face and exploded. Counsel said influencing a witness was "a very serious matter indeed." The solicitor said, "I concur with that but I am going to shut up."
I began to feel my lawyers were not on my side. I was led to a compartment labelled "Defendant" and felt like a criminal. I was handed an undertaking not to enter the plaintiff's land or damage his trees until trial, on pain of prison, and signed it in front of the judge, who warned me about prison. The case was adjourned. Afterwards, in a tiny conference room, Counsel said a settlement was the only option, and Ian again raised the Management Scheme, but both lawyers shook their heads.
The Scheme bound freeholders to keep hedges properly trimmed and forbade anything detrimental to the estate's appearance or amenities. Counsel's note two years earlier had said the Trust could force Stanton to remove the tower, but that we would fail if we sued the Trust to act on our behalf.
We went home raw and bitter. I thought of the two chummy chatterers outside court and of an elaborate, subconscious professional fix. Twenty years earlier, I had noticed a caste system in the village and challenged it by making a fuss about every nasty bonfire from neighbours of a higher caste. Maureen, a conformist who needs to be loved, was uneasy at my lack of deference. The Stantons considered the police of lower caste. They thought, "How dare they pick up my son," and chose the civil courts to ruin us.
The injunction felt like dictatorship. I phoned my solicitor and shouted, "Why did you not fight?" He replied mildly, "Because, if we had fought, you'd have lost." Years later I read his brief to the barrister. He thought I was a criminal, guilty as hell, and had convinced Counsel of it. The morning had cost six or seven hundred pounds.
The Trust and the decision to sell
My solicitor, without my approval, was moving toward a permanent injunction. I wrote to Secretary Thomson at the Trust. He replied that trees of twenty-two feet in any rear garden were entirely unacceptable. Trustee Clive Wilkinson took our cause to the Trustees' Annual Meeting, which was a hundred per cent on our side. But their Counsel advised that the Trust had no legal teeth, and as a charity they had to follow that advice. The Chancery Division would not allow them to compel Stanton. Meanwhile the Guidelines said hedges should be six foot six. This was a terrific blow. We decided to settle and sell the house, at a reduced price, since the dispute had seriously devalued it. It was a low point in the property market and negative equity was a familiar term. Our solicitor's attempts to find out what Stanton intended got nowhere, since Stanton wouldn't reply to his own solicitor.
The criminal trial
The WPC visited to say that Terry persisted in his not-guilty plea, but the police and the Crown Prosecution Service were convinced he had a case to answer. She had been struck or kicked during the arrest and wanted him done. My tree contractors had refused to attend court, possibly under pressure, and my evidence was vital. She took from me the letter in which Terry blamed us for his mother's death, which supplied a motive. I thought of Freda Stanton with some sadness and wondered why a line of trees should have blighted her last days.
I imagined Terry telling his father, "I didn't hit Jones," and his father replying that the clever firm of solicitors had stopped Jones in his tracks and there must never be a deal with that man. Surely most fathers would have settled. 13th September was not a lucky date for Terry: in 1989 it was his mother's funeral, the next year he lost his temper, and now he was in the dock at Birmingham Magistrates Court.
The Victorian court was imposing, with a vast pillared reception area lit from the roof. The Stanton group included the articled clerk, the "Abraham Lincoln" solicitor and several professionals. The WPC handed me my year-old statement to refresh my memory. It differed in small details from my memory, but in essence it was right: he barged into my home, put his fist against my jaw and pushed me to the ground. Before we went in, a policeman told me in the gents, "Oh, he'll get away with it, they all do," followed by a cynical diatribe against defendants and their clever lawyers.
The magistrate was a young to middle-aged Stipendiary, not the elderly aldermen I'd expected. Terry in the dock was pale and transparent-skinned like his mother, no longer the sneering man I'd seen at the County Court. I gave my occupation as "Retired, pastoral head of house, comprehensive school-teacher", which mattered because the Stantons had slandered me as never a proper teacher, and as a murderer, rapist and burglar. When I described the tree contractors "trimming the hedge", the defence solicitor shrieked that they took four feet off and used chainsaws (they hadn't). The magistrate reproved him sharply and extracted an apology. When asked what the defendant said, I gave the words in my statement: "You killed my Mother and I'm going to kill you." I mimed the punch to my right jaw. I felt a rapport with the prosecutor, who later told me via a third party that I was the most natural witness he had experienced.
The defence solicitor was eager to destroy me but undermined himself. He asked which hand Terry had used. I said "Right," which left him winded because the blow to my right side would more naturally come from a left-hander (the doctor had wrongly recorded the injury on my left). He then accused me of habitually pushing my head into people's faces. I replied, "No one has ever told me that before," and his case disintegrated as he got more frustrated. The policeman gave a devastating account of Terry's months of avoidance and his resistance at arrest, and the defence made no headway against his stonewalling. The CPS did not call the WPC. The defence called a Mrs Green, the lady in the car a year earlier, whom I had begged to get "that man" to a mental hospital. She was inaudible and the CPS established she had been too far away to see anything relevant.
Terry took the oath by affirmation, as Quakers do, though he was no Quaker. He spoke well and demonstrated how he had stopped me pushing my head into his face. Before lunch the prosecutor demanded audio playback of the police interview. The magistrate resisted, as he was ready to announce a guilty verdict, but he agreed. At lunch Ian and Maureen congratulated me, though a childhood guilt lingered: I was not allowed to cut those trees, and the courts would punish me.
In the afternoon the cross-examination was dreadful to watch. Terry said I had sat on a pile of logs. Asked where my bruises came from, he said from carrying branches. Asked when he got the bee in his bonnet that Jones had murdered his mother, he did not answer. Then the tape was played. We could hardly hear it, but the magistrate, the rattled defence solicitor and the white-faced Terry clearly could. His account in court was entirely different from the one on tape, and his credibility was destroyed. The summing-up was brief. The magistrate said, with relief, "I find you guilty," and ordered £150 compensation and £200 costs. After a two-second consultation, Terry nodded. Otherwise he faced a custodial sentence. Ian shook his head: "No need for any of it at all."
Aftermath
Terry never accepted his guilt. He once offered me £1,000 to make a public statement to that effect and claims I committed perjury. Four years later we were on the Esther Rantzen programme together. He argued with Esther, and when he and his father were offered places on stage with me, they refused and took front-row seats. I intervened with "He hit me", which was sheer show biz. The Stantons threatened an injunction but the broadcast went out in full. Five years after that, the BBC's Neighbours at War documentary again showed Terry denying the assault, which only publicised his criminal record.
The defence was so poor that it profoundly affected how I handled the litigation of the next few years. The fault lay with the initial advice. They should have told their client to plead guilty, or used the momentum of the civil case to settle. But ethically sound ideas do not pay. The wealthy client was a pot of gold, and the Joneses' small detached house and retirement savings were easy pickings. For a lawyer, every day is a good day. As we headed home, the defence team looked far happier than their clients.
The police were pleased too. The man said, "Most unusual, they usually get away with it." The woman gave us both a hug.