Lobby

Just outside Formby on the bank of the River Alt there is a World War 2 pillbox. It's an ugly concrete structure standing on a triangular wedge of ground cut off from the main field by a branch of the river. Some time ago (he says 12 years) a local man , an ex TA soldier moved in to the pillbox. It was full of rubbish as you can imagine and infested with rats. The ex soldier cleaned it up, got rid of the rats and turned it into a fairly serviceable home. A friend fitted windows and a door. The local paper ran a feature on him and his unconventional domicile last week. The pictures made it look very nice indeed. The walls were whitewashed; it was furnished with what looked like cane garden chairs and Lobby, as the man is known, looked really happy there. (See picture which is courtesy of The Formby Times so I hope they don’t mind me reproducing it) He caught rabbits, fish and eels to sustain him and claimed no state benefits at all. It's not a life many would choose for themselves I know but as far as I can see he wasn't causing any harm to anyone.
That didn't stop the owner of the land, Lord Leverhulme, from seeking a court order to evict Lobby.
OK, I know the land didn't belong to Lobby but I didn't see the good Lord aching to use it for anything either. Even if he argued that he wanted to grow crops or whatever in the main field the pillbox is, as I said above, physically cut of from it, effectively on an island. Why couldn't he let the poor guy stay there? It strikes me as just bullying. I wondered whether the paper was going to run a campaign, it might have made a nice human interest story and I was looking forward to this week's issue. Just this evening as I drove past the spot on the way to a meeting at my son's school I noticed that the windows were smashed, the frames ripped out and the place looked abandoned.
This morning I took a walk up there for a closer look and yep, he’s definitely gone and he’s torched the place-or rather the place has been torched – so no-one else can use it... I don’t know why but this case has really bugged me. Why was the land so desperately needed after Lobby’d been living there undisturbed for 12 years?