It Is Like Living Next Door to a War You Are Not In

The Wednesday arrangement had a rule, and the rule was made in about the fourth month.

Shona made it. They were in the café in town, and Deb had started a sentence with “Tony says the hedge—” and Shona put her cup down and said, “No.”

“No?”

“I’m not doing it,” said Shona. “If we do that, we’ll be at it in a fortnight, and then I’ll fall out with you, and I’ve got nobody else in this town.”

Deb thought about it for a second.

“Right,” she said. “Agreed.”

And in nine years neither of them broke it, except twice, and both of those were in the week of the bonfire.

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“It’s like living next door to a war you’re not in,” Shona said once.

Deb said, “You’re not next door to it. You’re in the house.”

“I’m in the house,” Shona agreed. “I’m in the house and I’m not in the war. I’m in the — what’s the word. Where they keep the people who aren’t fighting.”

“A neutral country.”

“That’s it,” said Shona. “I’m Switzerland. With a conservatory.”

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Both of them found the whole thing tiring in a way that they could only really describe to each other.

Deb’s version: “I’ve spent nine years walking round a subject in my own garden. I can’t say the word fence. If I say the word fence on a Sunday the whole afternoon’s gone.”

Shona’s version, which is slightly bleaker: “I stopped asking him about it in about year three. Not because he wouldn’t tell me. Because he would.”

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There was one occasion, in about year six, when they very nearly did something.

Deb suggested it, in the car park, at the end of a Wednesday.

“What if we just did it,” she said. “What if we got the pair of them in a room and sat there until they’d sorted it.”

Shona looked out of the windscreen for a while.

“And what happens,” she said, “if it doesn’t work?”

“Then it doesn’t work.”

“No,” said Shona. “Then it doesn’t work, and they both know we set it up, and then they can’t come to us about it any more, and then the only two people in this street who are still speaking to each other are also in it.” She started the engine. “I’m not risking Wednesdays on them, Deb. I’m sorry. I’m really not.”

Deb has said since that this was the single most sensible thing anybody said in nine years.

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In 2024, Colin decided to sell.

Not because of the fence. He was sixty-nine, Shona’s knee was not what it was, the garden was three-quarters of an acre of things that needed doing, and they had been talking about a bungalow near their daughter in Shrewsbury for about two years.

He says, and she confirms, that the fence had nothing to do with it.

He also says that the moment they decided, he thought about the fence within about ninety seconds, which he recognises undermines the point somewhat.

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The problem arrived with the buyer’s solicitor, in the form of a standard question on a standard form.

Please confirm the position of the boundaries and whether there is any boundary agreement in place.

Colin got the deeds out.

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There was a plan. It dated from 1961, when the estate was built, and it was drawn at a scale where the boundary line was, in real terms, about as thick as the garden was wide.

There was no boundary agreement. There had never been one. There was nothing on the title to say who owned which fence, no T-marks, no covenant, nothing.

There was, in short, no document anywhere on earth that said where the line was.

Colin sat at the kitchen table with it for a long time, and Shona came in and looked over his shoulder and said, “Well.”

“Nine years,” said Colin.

“Nine years,” said Shona.

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The buyer’s solicitor wanted it resolved, because the neighbour dispute question had been answered honestly — Colin’s own solicitor had been very clear that it had to be, given the letters — and a declared dispute with no boundary determination is the sort of thing that makes a buyer’s solicitor tighten up.

So Colin paid one thousand four hundred pounds for a measured survey by a chartered surveyor.

He did it partly to satisfy the buyer.

And he did it largely, as he admits without much prompting, because he had waited nine years to be proved right and somebody had finally handed him a reason to find out.