by
tadpoles
@ 2006-08-22 - 11:53:27
NEIGHBOURS COME TO BLOWS OVER GNOME BLOWING
A neighbourhood row over 'nuisance' explosions ended in two people being arrested last Saturday evening.
Police were called to Scrimshaw Close, Withering, after local residents reported seeing two people fighting in the road outside their houses.
Jerry Donohue, 37, and Tobias Whipple, 31, were both released with a caution after being taken to Froghill police station at around 8.30pm.
The dispute centred on Mr Whipple’s habit of detonating homemade explosives in his front garden.
Said Mr Donohue; “It all started about a year ago, when the wife and I were awoken one Saturday morning by a loud bang. We rushed to the window to see a hole in next door’s front garden.
"Smoke was issuing from it and there was a strong smell of cordite in the air.”
This was to be the first of many such occurrences and the beginning of a period which would reduce Mrs Donohue to a state of nervous exhaustion.
“After the second bang, a week later, I went round to see him,” continued Mr Donohue.
“When he opened the front door, I noticed that his house was stacked from floor to ceiling with garden gnomes. When I asked him what the bangs were all about, he told me that his hobby was blowing up gnomes.”
Things continued in this way, with a bang occurring once every week, for about four months. Typically, Mr Whipple would place a single gnome in the centre of his front garden and then remotely detonate a small explosive device which he had inserted into its rear end.
Though irritating, the routine was not unbearable and the Donohues tried to live with it for the sake of social harmony.
Until, that is, Mr Whipple decided to get more a little more adventurous.
“Around Christmas time he built a nativity scene on the front lawn,” said Mr Donohue. “There were two gnomes dressed as Mary and Joseph, a straw-filled manger containing a toy smurf and several plaster farm animals. The smurf was dressed in swaddling clothes and had a halo.
"The scene remained there for about ten days and people passing by used to stop to admire it. Then, at about six o’ clock on the last Saturday evening before Christmas, there was this almighty boom.”
Mr Whipple had blown up his nativity scene, leaving most of Scrimshaw Close covered in straw and bits of plaster.
“I found the charred remains of the smurf in my ornamental pond,” added Mr Donohue, “and a donkey’s private parts in my rosebed.”
Upon complaining to his neighbour, Mr Donohue received an unconditional apology and, on Christmas Eve, a magnum of champagne as a present.
The Donohues toasted each other and quietly hoped that this would be an end of the matter.
Things remained detonation-free until February of this year, when the Donohues awoke one Saturday morning to find a recreation of the 1966 England World Cup squad ranged in front of Mr Whipple’s house.
“I was just saying to the wife how one of the gnomes looked uncannily like Geoff Hurst," said Mr Donohue, “ when the whole bloody lot went sky high.
"The house fairly shook with the force of the blast.
"Nobby Stiles’ head came flying through our open bedroom window and damn near had the teasmade off the bedside table.”
On that occasion, Mr Donohue took the step of speaking to the other residents of Scrimshaw Close.
"Most of them seemed to think that the explosions were just harmless pranks," said Mr Donohue, "and Whipple's nearest neighbours on the other side are deaf and didn't even know that anything had been going on."
He also complained to the police, but was told that unless he could prove that any physical damage was directly due to the explosions, there was very little they could do.
He was further informed that explosions did not come under the category of noise pollution as the sounds created were not of a constant nature.
As the months went by, Mr Donohue continued to complain, and Mr Whipple to apologise. And explosions, sometimes large, sometimes small, continued to rock the neighbourhood.
By the end of spring, Mr Donohue’s wife’s health was beginning to suffer. “She’d become very jumpy and would dissolve into tears for no reason,” said Mr Donohue.
“One day we were out shopping, when a small child burst a paper bag nearby. My wife started screaming and had to be physically persuaded to release her grip on the boy’s throat.”
It was last Saturday morning that Mrs Donohue finally decided she could take no more bangs from her neighbour. Yet as she left home to go and stay with her sister for a while, she walked past the biggest creation hitherto seen on Mr Whipple’s lawn.
It was a tableau of several hundred gnomes, all dressed in mid 19th century garb, seated in rows across the grass.
The composition remained there, untouched and undetonated, throughout the course of the day.
Despite repeated knockings at both front and back doors, Mr Donohue was unable to gain any response from his neighbour. He spent most of that afternoon staring uneasily out of his sitting room window.
At 8pm precisely, Mr Whipple emerged from his house, dressed in a frock coat, bow tie and prosthetic pointed beard. He strode into the centre of his lawn and, with much clearing of the throat, proceeded to deliver the Gettysburg Address to the assembled company of gnomes.
As he closed with the celebrated lines ‘for the people shall not perish from the earth’, the whole assembly suddenly disappeared in a deafening roar of flames and smoke.
“It was then that I went for him,” a still distraught Mr Donohue told the Observer last Sunday morning. “I just couldn’t take any more. I just couldn’t.”
As part of the conditions of his release, Mr Whipple has been made to promise that there will be no more explosions. He has also been forbidden to purchase or hire garden gnomes within a fifty mile radius of his home.
When asked by why he had taken up such an unusual and destructive hobby in the first place, Mr Whipple told our reporter that he ‘just got a bang out of it’.
He then presented her with a garden gnome as a gift.
