The Fascination of Disputes Between Neighbours

When I describe to other people what I do as a mediator I am often asked about neighbour disputes and what they, in particular, involve.

Strict confidentiality means I never share details of what I hear in mediation. So what examples can I use without giving away the secrets and private information that I am regularly entrusted with?

Fortunately, the universal obsession with friction between other people means that not only is it a source of fascination about mediation but it is also the backbone of sitcoms and soaps.

So, to satisfy your curiosity, I am going to tell you a story about a neighbour dispute which is there for all to watch: “The Windbreak War”, my favourite episode of the 1970s sitcom The Good Life (starring the late great Richard Briers).

Let’s set the scene: Margo and Jerry live next door to Tom and Barbara. Jerry is professionally ambitious: he has his eye on the managing director’s job at the large company where he works. Margo shares these ambitions and is interested in their status and social standing. Tom and Barbara are far less motivated by material wealth and appearances. Tom used to work at the same company as Jerry, but quit his job in favour of a life of self-sufficiency. He and Barbara have turned their whole suburban garden over to growing food and raising animals, much to conformist Margo’s horror.

The latest kerfuffle (there have been enough for several seasons of a classic comedy) happened because Margo erected a windbreak on her side of the shared boundary, blocking much-needed light from Tom and Barbara’s soft fruit beds.

Let’s suppose that this is the final straw that brings them to the point of dispute that needs mediation….

It began, as so many of these things do, with a problem in communication. Or, as I would be told at first, an absence of it.

Margo had just been elected Chairwoman of the local Music Society (a fact which Tom and Barbara had congratulated her on). What Tom and Barbara hadn’t realised was that she had decided to renovate her garden so she could better host social gatherings and musical performances. This presumably took some preparation. She must have booked the contractors, drawn up plans, taken deliveries. What she didn’t do was to explicitly tell her neighbours.

In the other mediation room, I would hear how Tom and Barbara never consulted or informed their neighbours at all before they first dug up their whole plot, which included the front garden and so ruined the look of the frontage. If Margo and Jerry are particularly frustrated by this stage, I might hear about driving house prices down…

It may only come out after some encouragement, but I would also explore whether the fruit beds and their location had ever been mentioned to Margo.

And here is something that I often find when communication has fallen short. Some facts which are implicit to the person giving information are not at all obvious to the person receiving it. Margo knew that Tom and Barbara had heard about her new status within the Music Society. To her, the logical next step was to create a musical venue in her garden. She had probably had it in mind and been talking about it with Jerry and with members of the society since before she was elected. It was so ingrained in her thoughts that it hadn’t occurred to her that others wouldn’t expect it, or that it could be anyone’s business but her own.

To Tom, the optimum environment for growing fruit and vegetables was his constant focus. Whether he had had a conversation with Margo about his new beds or whether he considered them obvious to her from her upstairs windows, he probably believed that she knew that they were there. To him, that led logically to where their light came from and understanding how important that light was. The excess fruit was intended as a much-needed source of income for Tom and Barbara, a concept which would be alien to Margo who had the security of Jerry’s salary cheque.

It is not only neighbour disputes where this happens. In many commercial claims the breakdown of communication has happened because a professional has sold their expertise and has forgotten that they themselves are just that: an expert. Aspects of what they know in detail are simply not obvious to the customer. The customer makes natural assumptions in their ignorance (if they knew this stuff they would not have needed to buy in the knowledge) and things quickly go awry…

But back to the windbreak.

The difference between a sitcom and a soap is the amount of patience, empathy and forgiveness that the characters display. In real life, most of us sit somewhere in the middle.

If this had been a soap it might have escalated at this early stage into antagonism and open conflict. However, being sympathetic characters in a feel-good comedy, Tom and Barbara did the sensible thing and went round “to be charming”. Even though their different sense of humour meant they actually ended up offending Margo (another common theme when unravelling such misunderstandings), she still instructed the contractor to change the location of the windbreak.

But you just know that isn’t the end of it…. Instead of having a real-time and interactive conversation (or, as we often call it, speaking to him in person), Margo wrote a note to the contractor.

The contractor, Arthur, was slightly resentful of the whole job and the management of the company that sent him. He found Margo haughty and snobbish. For whatever reason, he did not read the note she left.

Here is another theme of all disputes: written vs spoken communication. Spoken communication contains a whole lot more nuance than written, and that is both its blessing and its curse. Because there is a lot more detail in our voices and even more in non-verbal parts of communication, there is more information but also more that can be misinterpreted. That makes us shy away from having difficult conversations face-to-face, and we resort to writing down our message in the hope that limited data and the time to think it out will make it more clear. If it’s written then there is also a record and it can be reread.

Unfortunately, time does not stand still in the hiatus between sending a written message and it being received, and things can happen which change the situation. You cannot know who will read what you write, the state of mind of the person who reads it or even if your intended recipient will read it at all. Your intended tone is likely to be entirely lost in favour of the reader’s own mood, and they will read it according to the present status quo, not in the context of how you understood things when you wrote it.

In this case, nobody had read the note at all.

When Tom and Barbara discovered that the windbreak was still in the wrong place for their needs, they assumed that Margo had taken offence at their jokes and that she had decided to leave it to overshadow their fruit out of “spite”. In the privacy of a mediation I would test that assumption and ask what history she had of spitefulness.

Did Tom and Barbara wait to hear Margo’s point of view and find a resolution? Of course not. They decided to “retaliate” by moving their entire fruit bed. It wasn’t objectively retaliatory, since Margo and Jerry didn’t really care at all where in their own garden Tom and Barbara’s fruit grew. We all tend to place ourselves at the centre of things, so the assumption was that Margo really had specifically set out to harm Tom and Barbara. If that were true they would have now resisted it. From a different perspective, this solution could have allowed Margo to have her windbreak where she originally wanted it. Barbara said later that she had thought of burning the windbreak, which would have been more effective retaliation for spite but would have made the whole episode far less comic. Tom wanted a “moral victory”.

Having worked solidly to dig up and replant their crops, Tom and Barbara had gone away for some rest by the time Margo came home and discovered Arthur’s mistake in her garden. It was not obvious from the windbreak side that the fruit had been moved.

Knowing nothing about the work next door which had already overcome the problem, Margo made Arthur move the windbreak. The new location now overshadowed the new fruit beds so when Tom and Barbara returned from their nap they found what they saw as a counter-retaliation.

When Arthur saw Tom and Barbara approaching again and realised there was going to be more trouble he made a run for it. And who could really blame him?

This is where I would have been called. My job is to gently and kindly, but also robustly and fairly, explore communications, misunderstandings, assumptions, retaliations, interpretations, motivations, intentions, and coincidences. Unlike a TV show, I need to find the practical answer of what to do after the credits roll.

And if you want to avoid needing me too often: assume that you are in a sitcom not a soap in your approach to the conflicts in your life. There will always be misinterpretations, errors and poor timing. Use compassion, curiosity and understanding to step out of your own perspective and find what an external audience can see, and seek the funny side.