Most people don’t like their neighbours for various petty reasons. But most people don’t live in Eccleshall.
In 2012, a raunchy novel about a fictional village packed with anecdotes of bed-hopping and romps in the garden was published.
Rotten Row was written by a vegetarian housewife Lesley Cleary (pen name Angela Hargreaves) from Eccleshall – a quaint village in Staffordshire.
And despite being advertised as a fictional tale about ‘living in close proximity to some neighbours’, residents of Eccleshall felt the book rang a little too true.
At the time, her neighbours were furious at the portrayal of an in-fighting, sex-obsessed bunch of cranks and Mrs Cleary insisted the similarities were pure fiction.
But MailOnline can reveal that Mrs Cleary, now 70, and her husband Martin – a retired mine surveyor – fled Eccleshall to live a a quiet life in the seaside town of Ilfracombe in Devon.
Two years after the book was released, the couple settled down in a pretty detached Victorian home close to beaches and museums for £220,000.
It appears the move spelled the end of her literary career with Mrs Cleary now preferring dog walks and gardening.
The Amazon page for Angela Hargreaves still shows just the two published titles.
Rotten Row was written by a vegetarian housewife Lesley Cleary (pictured), pen name Angela Hargreaves from Eccleshall – a quaint village in Staffordshire
Despite being advertised as a fictional tale about ‘living in close proximity to some neighbours’, residents of Eccleshall felt the book rang a little too true
Rotten Row published in 2012 and Hard Times, published in 2013, the cover of which shows a naked couple doing the hoovering.
Set in the fictional village of Upton Green, it promised, according to its Amazon entry, a tale of ‘petty spitefulness and complexity of living in close proximity to some neighbours’.
It was compared with E. L. James’s saucy bestseller Fifty Shades Of Grey, and is packed with stories of bed-hopping, romps in the garden, and gossipy accounts of drunken debauchery.
Unfortunately for residents of Eccleshall, everything about the book – from the names of its characters to their bickering over damsons – rang a little too true.
That, at least, was the claim of Lesley’s neighbours, who were furious at the portrayal of an in-fighting, sex-obsessed bunch of cranks – or, to use the book’s description, the most ‘bossy, gossipy, hissy, humourless, competitive bunch of Hyacinth Buckets one could ever wish not to encounter’.
Lesley, however, insisted any similarities between her book and life in Eccleshall was pure coincidence.’It’s fiction,’ she says, matter-of-factly. ‘All I know is what was in my head. Some people just want to be in the book, I don’t know why. I’m the one who’s upset – my characters are being hijacked. It’s silly.’
The saga started in 2012 when Lesley told her next-door neighbours Emma and Kevin Williams she had been writing a novel to be published online in September.
Emma and Kevin shrugged off the book as a pipe dream. It wasn’t until a few months later, once the book had been published online, that they heard the book’s title, Rotten Row, and decided to look it up.
‘I had no idea it would seem to be about life here – or that it would be so revealing,’ said Emma, who had lived in Eccleshall for decades. ‘It’s a little village and we all get along well. Or we did.’
Neighbour Brenda Chatterjee who believes she is character ‘Babs’ with friend Rob Johnson who believes he is character ‘Bob
MailOnline can reveal that Mrs Cleary, now 70, and her husband Martin – a retired mine surveyor – fled Eccleshall to live a a quiet life in the seaside town of Ilfracombe in Devon
The cover image, drawn by Lesley, shows a pretty row of cottages at the end of a village High Street. With their pastel-coloured walls, picture windows, and sloping slate roofs, they are remarkably similar to cottages at the end of Eccleshall High Street, one of which is Lesley’s home.
‘It’s definitely our street – you only need look at it,’ she concluded at the time.
Lesley claimed the cover ‘could be a row of terraces anywhere in the country. It may look like here, but it isn’t meant to be here,’ she says, crossly. ‘If you look closely you’ll see there is a road continuing round a corner, which doesn’t happen here. And the windows are different.’
She said she’d been writing the book since 2006.
‘I’ve kept a file over the years with all sorts of snippets and bits from my life. My idea was just to write a little book that would sell a few copies – not to cause a fuss like this. I thought I’d get a few royalties for dog food.’
But it wasn’t long before her novel became the talk of the village.
One Friday evening, a group of locals gathered in the cosy, red-walled sitting room of Brenda Chatterjee, a glamorous widow who lives in the white-washed Old Bakery next door to Emma and Kevin, to read the book on Brenda’s Kindle.
Soon they were compiling mental check-lists of everything that sounded familiar.
The book’s narrator, Louisa, enjoys interior design, and moves to Upton Green having lived in London and Hampshire – both of which apply to Lesley.
Her cottage, like Lesley’s, is at the end of the ‘Georgian High Street’ and has a pretty wrought-iron fence and side entrance.
Meanwhile, the book is packed full of events that villagers say have really happened, and conversations that they’ve really had.
They include such pulse-racers as an argument about damson-picking rights, a row over a leaking loo, and a dispute with the florist over past-their-best roses.
‘It’s as if she’s been following us,’ says Brenda. ‘I feel like she’s been looking at us through binoculars the whole time.’
Many of the lead characters have similar names, physical characteristics or jobs to Lesley’s neighbours.
Brenda believes she is the inspiration for the character ‘Babs’, and her good friend, former company director Rob Johnson, the inspiration for Bab’s lover, ‘Barbour Bob’.
Their neighbour Martin Ratcliffe an architect, is certain the fictional architect Declan is based on him. And Emma and Kevin, who keep chickens and grow vegetables, believe chicken-loving, veggie-growing Lucy and Jeremy are their mirror images.
Gordon Dale is sure parish councillor Reg is him – they both even have matching gold teeth.
Amusingly, when it came to the book’s racier passages, the villagers deny any similarities at all. The book has architect Declan engaging in an illicit romp with Babs (Martin insists ‘I’ve certainly never broken any antique beds!’) and Louisa the narrator receives a sloppy, unsolicited snog from a stranger in the supermarket.
Are the villagers sure they weren’t imagining the similarities, and a tiny part of them rather liked being immortalised in print? ‘Not at all!’ says Brenda, horrified. ‘I just want a quiet life. This is all so awful – it’s upsetting.’
At the time, her neighbours back in Eccleshall were furious at the portrayal of an in-fighting, sex-obsessed bunch of cranks and Mrs Cleary insisted the similarities were pure fiction
It appears the move spelled the end of her literary career with Mrs Cleary now preferring dog walks and gardening
Nobody answered the door at the immaculately renovated five-bed home when MailOnline visited this week.
Neighbours described Leslie and Martin as a ‘friendly and charming couple’. None knew of her literary past or had ever heard of the pen name Angela Hargreaves.
One told MailOnline: ‘I had no idea she was an author, they are nice and we’ve said hello a couple of times but keep themselves to themselves generally.
‘I don’t think there’s much danger of my life being in one of those books, it’d send readers straight off to sleep.’
The couple appear to have regularly visited Ilfracombe – famed for its stunning coastline, historic harbour and 66ft tall Damian Hurst statue – regularly for years before moving down.
In 2008 – while she was writing Rotten Row – Leslie wrote a testimonial praising the town in the local newspaper the North Devon Journal.
She wrote: ‘Ilfracombe is a beautiful place with wonderful historic architecture, a museum that shouldn’t be missed and the Landmark Theatre is fabulous.’
Martin meanwhile has ventured into local politics, serving on the Harbour Board as well as being a site representative on the Ilfracombe Allotment and Leisure Gardens Association.
In 2024 he stood unsuccessfully for the town council under the Ilfracombe First party.
Meanwhile, back in Eccleshall her old neighbours have ‘moved on’ and brushed past the topic of their former resident author.
But the original ‘stars’ of the novel still live on the same charming street, including Brenda Chatterjee who she believed was inspiration for the character ‘Babs’.
And while life in Eccleshall now seems uneventful… who knows what’s going on behind closed doors.
