Quality Street

It was a bit like the road Mr Benn lived on. Terraced houses stood next to little semis, then another set of slightly different semis, and more terraced. All different but from the same street.
Most houses on the left had their own driveways, enough to squeeze in a car or two.
To the right, one in two homeowners had knocked out their little front gardens and turned them into concrete car-ports. They weren’t really big enough to park in, but they were big enough to give the impression that they might be. Homeowners could park on the road in front of their own place without worrying whether others might be tempted to sneak into their spot for a while.
One morning, just as Mrs Paniche from 108 was squeezing past a tight set of cars parked awkwardly on her way back from the local newsagent (skimmed milk and Daily Mail), a guest of number 68 drew up and parked his Escort right in front of number 72’s car-port. Moments later, the driver of the Escort and the male of 68 were whisked off in a taxi for their two-week fishing holiday in the Dordogne.
After four or five days of being blocked from his car-port, the man from 72 got drunk and kicked the Escort’s wing-mirror on his way back from the pub.
Although he’d done the right thing by parking in the nearby pub car park all the time the guest had been there, he had become a resentful homeowner. He knew only too well that every other parking place on the road was assigned to someone.
About a week later, 72 came out of his house and noticed that someone had scratched the Escort’s recently beaten and sprayed ‘prestige-blue’ side-panel. It was a telling scratch, perhaps more of a scrape, long and clean in a downward stroke, as if the perpetrator had fallen in the process. 72 enjoyed a brief smile before he realised that the blame would surely be pinned on him. It was, after all, his piece of road.
A couple of days later, 68 and his guest returned and discovered the damage. The guest surveyed the car, cutting icy glances to windows where guilty parties might be watching, and then said his farewells to 68.
That night, just after closing-time, 68’s guest returned and parked in the pub car park. He had convinced himself that his man was from number 72 and, after calling his insurance company only to find that he was not covered for ‘malicious damage of this nature’, decided to exact revenge by scratching the bonnet and side of 72’s Mondeo with a Kitchen Devil ‘Rasher King’, small but perfect for the job.
He also scratched the side of 70’s Vectra in an attempt to make it seem like a random scratch from a teenage tearaway or maybe a neighbourly scratch from close quarters.
Next morning, 70 and 72 knocked at 68’s door and became embroiled in a verbal altercation that led to the dual condemnation of 68.
70 and 72 vowed never to speak to 68 again, and asked for the address of their guest, who would now be seen as their prime suspect.
After four years of vehicular harmony, the parking arrangement between 68, 70 and 72 had been cut down in a moment of mutual anger. The bubble had burst between them.
That evening, 70 and 72 parked one foot across 68’s piece of dropped kerb, disallowing 68 his normally allocated space.
As 68’s car was a Volvo estate, too long to park in his own driveway, the male of 68 returned from work that night, tired and angry, and decided to park on the opposite kerb outside 65. He’d left ample space for 65 to pass into her driveway, but that counted for little on this street. Unspoken laws were being abused.
Shortly after 68 and his wife had settled down to a microwaved Lasagne in front of Watchdog Healthcheck, two teenagers who lived way up at the far end of the street approached with menace and fun.
Still too young for a licence, they resented cars that blocked their path on the pavement. One of them took out his mini pen-knife and scratched 68’s Volvo as they sauntered by casually, their laughter increasing as the scratch took shape.
The next day, 68 broke down in the street and began ranting, urging the perpetrator of this heinous act to come out of his house and fight like a man, or woman.
No one came and after two more minutes of spitting fury, 68 screeched off to work in his newly damaged Volvo.
68 thought 65 must have done it, so, late that night, unable to sleep, he tip-toed into 65’s driveway and scratched her gleaming M3.
The young upwardly mobile woman at 65 only realised what had happened when she arrived at work. She was fuming, but quickly simmered down to concoct a sly way of exacting revenge upon 68.
By contacting her brother, an alcoholic shoplifter, she secured his services to smash all of 68’s front windows for £50.
68 couldn’t believe his eyes when he got back from work. Every pane of glass had been broken. Neighbours came to see him and sympathise.
Those who had seen 65’s brother do the job gave a description of the man, but no one recognised him. He was unknown to the residents.
The police came and took four statements. Armed with a poorly written description of most thirty-something down and outs, the police advised 68 to call his home-insurance company and, as a gesture of goodwill, slipped him the telephone number of a 24hr window replacement company.
The only near-certainty they could offer 68 was that, with such flimsy evidence, there would be a miniscule chance of finding the window-smasher, and implied that people sometimes did this sort of thing for no reason, hoping that he’d take no further action (more police-time).
But the fever had caught on in the street.
106 wrote a letter that was published in the local Advertiser about how her Mazda had been scratched, bumped both ends, lost both its wing-mirrors, had eggs poured down between the door and the window with the aid of a bendy ruler, only revealing the extent of the stench when the trapped eggs had rotted sufficiently. Her car had been graffitied and spat on. In the seven months she’d lived in the street, an enormous £2,500 had been spent on putting the Mazda back together. She’d had enough, and decided to put her house on the market.
Her letter was read by all the street’s residents, some who had lived there all their lives.
‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ said Mrs Paniche at the church meeting that weekend. There was an unusually large congregation that night to hear Mrs Paniche speak out against the community for the first time in forty years.
‘Cars!’ she said scornfully. ‘They’ll be the death of us!’ She’d never owned one.
Now, long simmering car-resentments, which seemed to be the only problem in the street, began to bristle in the wind between people as they passed by each other.
People couldn’t get 106’s letter out of their heads. They started gazing from their windows, making mental records of which neighbour passed by their cars, wondering whether those with a burning resentment against them might carry out their evil deeds.
The state of humanity became a serious health risk when the lady from 106 got tipsy and decided to go out scratching with her boyfriend. She’d sold the house quickly and had nothing to lose but pride, legal fees and a couple of grand.
In the silence of night and without so much as a whisper or a moon to shine upon them, they scratched 78’s Escort, 72’s Mondeo, 94’s Skoda and 80’s Mercedes.
This had the tumbling effect that 106 had hoped for. Aside from the fact that her insurance company had quickly offered her malicious damage cover up to the cost of her vehicle after reading her letter in the Advertiser, nobody would think it was her doing.
So, 78 did 75’s Granada, 72 (who’d endured a seven-year silence with 14) did 14’s prized Austin 1300, while 94 did 22’s Toyota and 24’s Nissan, just for the hell of it. 80 did 84’s Fiesta and twisted off its wing-mirror, pretending to trip up to hide the deed.
Everybody watched out from now on.
26 nailed up a banner over his ‘For Sale’ sign to inform residents that he’d set up a homemade surveillance system that covered the street’s length and breadth, but, by ten that night, two teenagers had catapulted the camera with stones from a hidden vantage point.
The dead of night saw people scurrying from car to car, then shouts of ‘Oi! Get away from my car!’ would see them off back into their cages.
Next day, 26 demanded to know who had smashed his cameras, but no one said a word.
Although 26 camped out in the street the following night (filming from on top of his Scenic), mysterious cloaked shadows could still be seen scurrying from one car to the next in what turned out to be Britain’s biggest car-harming marathon over a single night.
By morning, every car on the street had been damaged in one way or another.
People came out of their homes with phones stuck to their ears waiting to speak to their insurance companies or the police, but the volume of calls was too great and the police couldn’t cope. There weren’t the officers available.
That day, having spent the most part on the phone to family, police call-centres and insurance companies, hardly anyone had gone to work. They stayed on guard, wondering what action to take and how to even up tallies.
Some eventually went out drinking and returned lairy and loud, shouting obscenities to no one in particular and laughing at the state of the cars.
The night drew close and curtains jittered in the TV lit rooms of the street.
Needless to say, the fight went on throughout the night.
The police, having been called there every night for almost a week, had taken the night off and refused all calls from the street.
By six-thirty, as the sun brought forth a brand new day, the place grew in the light to reveal a bomb-site, a place no one should go.
Virtually every window of every house had been smashed, every door defaced, every wall graffitied. Most of the cars had been torched.
But there was one house that had not suffered the ravages of this suburban war.
Up towards the end of the street, Mrs Paniche from 108 had been spared and her house looked like a jewel among stones. People liked Mrs Paniche. She’d lived in the street for as long as anyone could remember, and when she came out that morning with the church tea-urn trolley and placed it in the middle of the street, people gathered and started talking about the madness that had consumed them for so long.
If only they’d known how many cars she’d scratched in her fifty-year reign.