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Driving us bonkers!

My neighbour's noisy sex made more than the ground move...


Published by: Laura Hinton
Published on: 8 September 2011

There were raised voices in the back garden. I peered out of the window, and saw a young woman and two little girls standing by the trampoline in our shared garden.
It was a small concrete area, but it was somewhere my son Oscar, five, could play. ‘It's our new neighbours,' I said to my daughter Sophie, 17. ‘Let's say hello.'
‘Hello, I'm Siobhan,' I grinned. ‘Your girls are very welcome to use our trampoline.'
The woman looked me up and down. ‘No thanks,' she sneered. ‘I've got a bigger one inside.'
Before I had a chance to say anything, she was barking orders at the girls. ‘Amy, Lauren, inside,' she spat, turning on her heel.
‘I'd hoped we might become friends,' I confided in my eldest daughter Lauren, 19. ‘If she's a single mum too, then we'll have loads in common.'
It didn't take long for me to learn her name. That night, I was woken by a man shouting ‘Kirsty' in the street. Bleary-eyed, I stumbled to the window and looked out. ‘Bit late for visitors,' I mumbled.
Still, I didn't want to make a fuss. But Kirsty's initial cold shoulder didn't thaw. A week later, I saw her. ‘Hi, Kirsty,' I waved. She didn't even acknowledge me!
Yet it was hard to ignore her. I constantly heard her yelling at the kids, and her music thumped through the walls. ‘I'll have a quiet word with her,' I told Lauren one night. ‘It's affecting Oscar.'
He was autistic, and craved routine. When he came in from school, he watched cartoons. Now though, he'd stand with his hands over his ears screaming.
And things just got worse. A few nights later, I was in bed when I heard banging from next door.
I blinked at my alarm clock. 2.30am. Then it clicked. The banging noise was the sound of a headboard slamming into my wall! Kirsty was having very noisy sex.
Every night seemed to be the same, her cries of passion vibrating through the walls.
Then, a few weeks later, we heard a racket of a different kind. This time Kirsty decided to have a spring clean - vacuuming at 3am!
‘What the hell is she doing?' Lauren grumbled. ‘I've got exams this week!'
I put a note through her door, hoping that would do the trick. I'm not sure if you realise, but we can hear quite a lot of what you're doing...
‘I'm sure she'll understand,' I told Sophie and Lauren. How wrong I was! It just started a personal war against me.
When I passed her in the street, she called me names. She'd have friends there, drinking and shouting. And our shared garden was left littered with bottles, rubbish and broken toys. I couldn't let the kids play out there any more in case they got hurt.
‘I feel like a prisoner in my own home,' I sobbed to Sophie.
So I called the police. But they told me they could only break up her parties and install specialist sound equipment in my room so I could record the nuisance noise.
One day, Oscar had got home from school when Kirsty's music started. The walls were shaking. As I tried to cook dinner, there was a huge party outside.
I kept worrying about Oscar. I'd had calls from his school about how tired he'd been.
Looking out, I saw one of Kirsty's friends weeing on my doorstep! That was the final straw. Fuming, I called the police. Minutes later, I heard the police breaking up the party.
Relieved, I snuggled down with the kids to watch TV. But the peace was soon shattered by the roaring of motors outside.
Peering behind the curtains, I saw Kirsty and her mates. They were walking towards our house, hurling abuse and looking menacing. The door thudded as the mob hammered on it. ‘Don't panic,' I spluttered to the kids, who looked terrified.
‘They're going to get in!' Lauren shrieked. I reached for the phone, dialled 999. We huddled behind the sofa, me clutching Oscar's little baseball bat...
Thankfully, the police were there in minutes. But I couldn't take any more. The next morning, I called the council. ‘Please get us out of here,' I begged. ‘We can't stand it.'
The council offered us a new home. The first day after moving into the new place, there was a knock at the door. ‘Welcome to the area,' my neighbour Karen said. ‘I've brought a cake.'
‘You don't know what this means,' I gushed.
Still, it wasn't right that Kirsty had forced us out of the home we'd lived in for three years.
I went to Colchester County Court this July, and gave evidence as part of an eviction order against her. Kirsty didn't show up, but the eviction notice was granted anyway, and she was ordered to pay £1,000 in rent arrears, too.
Let's hope she's learned her lesson, and she's changed from a hellish neighbour to a heavenly one! 


Kirsty Bloomfield, 18, says: ‘When I first moved in we might have made a bit of noise, but that was only because my sister was staying. When she thought I was vacuuming at all hours and keeping her up, it was just me putting up the air bed.
‘I'm not a sex pest like Siobhan's made out. She didn't like me from the start. When we first met she was rude to me about the trampoline, and from then on it went downhill.'


Siobhan Duke, 36, Colchester, Essex