I closed the door in my neighbour’s face after they complained about my children playing

HAVING a feud with a neighbour is never an ideal situation to find yourself in.

And this is exactly what happened with one mum, who took to TheLondonMum to tell her story. 

The anonymous mother explained that her feud with her neighbour started on one of the first days of the summer school holidays. 

She said that it was a warm day and so she had opened all of her windows and doors and let the kids play a game of hide-and-seek with one of their friends.

The mother explained: “I was frankly too busy rearranging some furniture to take them to the park when I met a new neighbour standing at the top of our stairs.

“I hadn’t seen him before and didn’t know what he wanted, so I put down my boxes and asked him if I could be of any help.”

But the man’s reaction was not what the woman expected.

She continued: “He said ‘Yes, could you stop your kids from making noise? Some of us are trying to rest; all I can hear are their loud voices and some screaming.’

“Now, once upon a time, this sort of thing might well have seen me apologise and usher the kids into one room, closing the windows and doors behind me and pleading with them to keep it down by way of a silent Lego-building session.

“Perhaps I’d be buying the guy some Tesco flowers for the aural inconvenience he had so clearly suffered.

“But I’ve been a fierce crabby mother for too many years as well as being a bit pregnant and therefore too buoyed up by alien hormones to take this kind of thing lying down.

“I leant back against my door frame and smiled, and told him that I was sorry but it was perfectly normal for kids playing at home in the early afternoon, with their friends on school holidays, on a warm day, to be audible.

“I told him that, additionally, he would most likely continue to hear my children at some times of the day all through summer, but that because they all go to bed early and that winter and school would eventually return to our Fair Isle, it wouldn’t last forever.

“He asked me why they weren’t out in the park, and I told him it was none of his business.

“I bid him goodbye and closed the door, triumphantly sweaty and shaky from the adrenaline which turned quickly into fury, humiliation, and finally into morally-outraged crying at the unreasonableness of it all.”

The mother was left in shock at the situation, but explained that this wasn’t the first time she has had to deal with such a complaint.

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She continued: “Over the years we’ve seen other neighbours complaining about children’s noise.

“We got asked to vacate a basement flat by an odd bachelor landlord who lived above us when I was first pregnant.

“We suspect he had noticed my swelling belly and wanted us out before a baby could interrupt his night’s sleep.

“Two flats later, we battled with problem neighbours because of our buggy being folded up and left in the communal hallway.

“They cited their worry about it blocking their path in an emergency, but we think they were just not up for living next door to an unpredictable toddler and a new baby.

“Our next flat – our current one – has been trouble-free until a few years ago when we had a young woman launch a campaign to get the boys silenced.

“She went from door to door asking other neighbours to help her get us out because she could hear the boys playing (summer again).

“She didn’t like the way they played with a soft football near parked cars.

“She didn’t like them running around in our communal garden.

“She hissed at them to shut up as she walked past them on our street and wrote letters to our managing agents about the horror of it all.

“She shouted at me from the top of my staircase that I was the most irresponsible mother she’d ever come across in all her years as a paediatric dentist (gulp) and that my kids were the most revoltingly behaved.

“We finally called the police about the harassment campaign – and we never saw her again.”