I was sent EIGHT angry letters by my nosey neighbour about my drive and my flower pots – calling the police didn’t help
A MUM'S life was made a nightmare after she received a barrage of poison pen letters from a mystery neighbour.
One note called Clare Campbell's front drive an "unattractive mess", adding: "You're letting the whole street down!"
Another said: "You should have stayed where you were."
And one had a postmark of a Royal Mail sorting office several miles from the road, meaning the writer gave thought to hiding their identity.
The writer, of Wandsworth, South-East London, said she received a letter like it every 18 months or so during the 14 years she has lived there with her husband, son and twin daughters.
She wrote in the "There were gaps in between each missive just long enough to make you think that at last they had stopped before — wham — another one would hit home.
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"They do real damage to the way you feel, not just about yourself and the safety and happiness of your family, but the way you feel about everyone else, too."
Clare found the first letter under their car's windscreen wipers. It said: "Why did you come here anyway? You should have stayed where you were."
The second said: "Haven't you go the message yet? We don't want you here." It went on to moan about the colour of their 14-year-old daughter's pink bike.
And a third demanded: "Do something about your eyesore garden!" Other houses had paved over their front gardens to make off-street parking but Christy's household had not done that.
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She told how the letters made her on edge and suspicious, questioning the motives of all her neighbours. They included bankers, doctors, and a judge.
The other letters complained about the noise their children made when friends were over, including laughter in the garden.
Clare said: "They knew details about us that began to worry me: that my parents were Irish, for example, and that I worked for a fashion magazine.
";It could only be someone who lived in the road, someone I smiled at when I passed. The feeling of being watched was deeply unsettling.
"The last letter one was sent from Croydon, ten miles from where we lived. This I found very disturbing indeed. Had they gone to Croydon especially to post the letter? Were they spending more time planning their hateful campaign?"
She eventually told her nearest neighbours who she trusted and word, and outrage, spread throughout the street.
They encouraged her to tell the police, which she did. And during a chat with a community police officer she had a light bulb moment about her retired civil servant neighbour called Helen who had told them off several times before.
But she didn't want to accuse her without being 100 per cent sure. So they waited until the Christmas cards came and they realised the handwriting was a perfect match.
When she next saw Helen she mentioned about the letters and that she had got the police involved, but didn't say she knew it was her.
Clare said: "She looked flustered, and for a moment I felt a little flicker of victory. We never received another poison pen letter.
"I did report the outcome back to the police, but said that in the circumstances, I didn’t want them to take any further action.
"Helen died a year or so later. With our children grown up, Christy and I moved to Suffolk, where we have plenty of foxes and cats and no close neighbours. Those Festival of Britain pots moved with us.
"The lesson, for me, is that you never really know what people are like, deep down. What they’re thinking and feeling — and writing — in the confines of their own home.
"People can keep up appearances very successfully, and in leafy neighbourhoods they do it all the time.
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"But beneath the smiles and nods and ‘how are yous?’, there may be something darker lurking."
You can only hope you’re never the one who finds out what it is.