When we first moved to our flat in Bromley, the adjoining Victorian villa was divided into two maisonettes, one of which was occupied by a young family. The street was designated for redevelopment, and when the occupants moved on, the building was left empty. After a while, we began to notice signs of activity and realised that a squatter was living next door
Our new neighbour was a well-spoken man in his thirties called John, and he was not terribly well. He was undernourished and dishevelled, which was not surprising as he was living without electricity or gas. He did have running water. He was usually keen to have a conversation, but his speech was rapid, anxious and hard to follow. He was working, he told me, on a project to reconcile communism and capitalism, which would prevent the coming nuclear holocaust. The project involved recording long speeches on cassette tapes, and preparing elaborate but incomprehensible diagrams. He was building a structure in the back garden out of broken furniture and bits of junk that he reclaimed from skips.
I would sometimes offer our new neighbour a hot drink or a sandwich, and, on more than one occasion, he invited me into his accommodation. What had recently been a family home was now a ruin. He had a supermarket trolley in the living room, which he used as a brazier. He had ripped up floor boards and bannisters to use as firewood. He shared the house with an injured herring gull. He had rescued the bird from road after it had been hit by a car. It had a broken wing which he had splinted. There was sticking plaster around its beak to prevent it from attacking him. His hands were covered in cuts from his efforts to feed the bird.
Once in a while, his father would visit in his Jaguar, bearing boxes of canned food. Over time, John became increasingly agitated. We often heard him shouting after dark, apparently arguing with some ethereal presence. I bumped into him on the door step one morning and he talked to me at length about a forthcoming appearance at the Magistrates’ Court. He had been scavenging for food in bins at the back of the shops in Bromley High Street when two police officers spotted him. He refused to speak to them, so they charged him with attempted burglary. He had lost the paper work and he was not sure when he was supposed to present himself in court.
The nocturnal shouting mutated into screaming. Steve was so worried about him one night that he took a torch and a hammer, and went into the unlit house. He found John sitting on the floor in a distressed state. John apologised when he realised that he had woken Steve from sleep. Shortly after, he stopped me as I left our flat. He was distraught because he had lost the cassette tapes that he considered to be crucial to the future of mankind. He thought that they had been stolen and he was completely inconsolable.
At this stage, we felt that we had to do something. Not only was the poor man tormented, there was also a realistic possibility that he would accidently set the building on fire and incinerate us all. I phoned social services and asked that a psychiatric social worker should assess the situation. It was evident that John was well known to them, and two social workers visited a few days later. After they had assessed him, they discussed the situation with me, as the person who had made the referral. They explained that he had been like this for some time, he had declined to accept any help, and no action was to be taken. The social workers were dismissive of any risk to us, but a few weeks later, water started seeping through the wall into the flat beneath ours. It turned out that John had pulled some water pipes from the wall, with the result that water was now flowing uncontrollably through the building. The sequence of events was the first of many occasions where, in dealing with someone with a severe mental illness, I had cause to reflect on the consequences of reifying respect for personal autonomy. He was exercising his right to be distressed and unwell, and it was destroying his life.
Meantime, the girls’ school over the road had been closed, and one morning, without warning, work started to replace it with offices. This was very frightening, as it was only a few feet away. The late 1970s were times of renewed Cold War paranoia, compounded by the noisy nocturnal passage of nuclear missile on the adjacent railway line, heading for the Medway ports, where they were to be loaded onto submarines. On being abruptly awakened by the sound of falling masonry, it was only natural to suppose that a missile had gone off accidentally. Of course, considered rational thought would have told me that, in this eventuality, I would not have known much about it. Instead, I endured several moments whilst I came to and realised that this was an inconsiderate but conventional demolition. So it was that when, a little later, the construction company wrote and asked for a licence to operate a crane over a metre of our land, I naturally declined and very deliberately and unhelpfully suggested they move the building they were building a metre the other way, thus obviating the need for a licence.
One Saturday morning, we were visited by the site engineer and various other officials in hard hats. They wanted to reason with us. God knows what they thought. The four of us, Steve, Eileen, my wife and me, had gathered for our regular Saturday morning viewing of Tiswas, dressed in night attire and surrounded by duvets and the detritus of empty cider bottles from the night before. Although we argued very articulately, having checked the relevant law, we were persuaded to grant the necessary licence for £100 each flat instead of the initial offer of £25 each. We felt rather pleased about seriously annoying the site engineer as we had, after the demolition debacle.
In the end, John disappeared. His father came by and picked up a few of his possessions, and told us that he had had a short prison term for failure to appear in court. On release, he camped in a small tent by the Sidcup bypass, which was where he had been living before he moved in next door.