Living In East Butterwick

A Memory of East Butterwick.

January 2010 I came back from spending Xmas and New Year in Portsmouth. It was still snowing.
I had to stay indoors most of the time because I couldn't cope well with walking in the snow. When I had to go to the shop I noticed that there were scratches along the offside door and back panel of my car. It was a lot of damage to the paintwork on my new car. I remembered seeing the boys at my car and their footprints and bike prints were still there in the frozen snow. I reported this to the police but they didn't bother coming to look for about a week or so. They went to speak to the boys, and of course they denied doing it.

The police gave me a notice to put in my window, stating that the premises was being monitored by the police due to antisocial behaviour. Well, they weren't really monitoring it of course. They also brought me a cctv camera to fix up.

It was the woman at number 3 across the road who had put the kids up to this. I saw her calling them on her cellphone and they had come straight away. They regularly threw stones at my windows, and snowballs when it was snowing. Sometimes they would come in the garden and bang on the windows.
I realised that she was telling them when I wasn't looking out because she could see into my bungalow from her windows.

I suffered with them scaring me for 2 years. I grew the hedge higher over 2 summers so that I was less visible. That seemed to help. At least they couldnt tell whether I was looking. I was living in terror and felt I had to watch them all the time to save my car from any more damage.

I knew I could never live here in peace so I started looking for somewhere else to live. I was desperate to get out of here before the winter arrived. I had extra problems in winter. The walls would get damp and mouldy from condensation and possibly a fault in the damp course. It smells like a sewer in winter. The new central heating did not work. It just didn't provide any warmth. The men had been in to repair it time after time, but still there was no heat.

I finally found a new place to live..... a wonderful place! I will never look back and have no fond memories of East Butterwick. I hope it gets flooded so bad that it never gets rebuilt.