GROUND TO A HALT: THE GREAT ELSENHAM SIEGE AND THE HELICOPTER DREAM OF DELIVERANCE

Image by Martin Foskett / Knelstrom Media

​It was one of those mornings when sunlight hits your eyeballs like a tax bill. Golden, mocking, and full of empty promises. I was herding the kids to school, past hedgerows twitching with gossip and birdsong so chipper it made you want to slap a robin. Have you ever tried to explain to a six-year-old why they can't go to school because the roads have declared war on basic civilisation? It's like trying to justify jazz to a badger.

We weren't late because someone forgot their shoes or poured Ribena into their cereal again. No, we were late because the village had finally given up pretending to be part of the twenty-first century.

Grove Hill: shut for ten bloody weeks.

Old Mead Road: shut for "roadworks," which in council-speak means Geoff's mate Derek's got a new digger he fancies showing off.

And now, brace yourself, Fullers End? Shut. Entirely. Like someone's slammed the gates on our little corner of England and tossed the key into the Thames.

We're now residents of the People's Republic of Elsenham.

This is no longer a village. This is a hostage situation with lovely gardens.

Delivery drivers now enter the perimeter with fear in their eyes, like they've just parachuted into Helmand. The Tesco blokes had to park three fields away and finish the job on foot like a bread-based pilgrimage. Yesterday, I saw a DHL van abandoned at the crossroads with hazard lights flashing like SOS signals. Probably airlifted the driver out on a stretcher, traumatised by his encounter with the "Diversion" signs, which now resemble a Choose Your Adventure novel written by Kafka.

I stood by the boarded-up phone box, now a local art installation known as "Monument to Communications Past", watching a man in a BMW scream into his hands as his satnav begged him to make a U-turn for the fifth time. He'd somehow driven the same loop three times.

There's no logic to it anymore, just cones. Endless cones.

They say this is all part of "infrastructure improvements," which is a lovely phrase that sounds like it means something, but it just means you're-you'll never get to The Range again.

Some reckon it's deliberate. That the Council, bored and slightly tipsy, spun a big wheel marked "Screw 'em" and let fate do the rest. You don't need a conspiracy Theory when bureaucracy is this incompetent.

And I'd believe it. I've seen the laminated notices flapping in the wind like dystopian bunting. I've read the laughable "timeline" for completion. Ten weeks? Ten years, more like. My grandkids will fly hover-buggies over these potholes while we wait for the tarmac to dry.

We've gone feral.

Tesco is on rations. Milk comes in drips and whimpers. I caught old Margaret at the tills, hoarding Scotch Eggs like they were the last remnants of civilisation. "For emergencies," she hissed and vanished into the fog with the agility of a thirty-year-old woman.

Even the kids have adapted. They now consider "school via hedge maze" a valid form of education. They know the back alleys, the goat paths, the secret tunnel behind the allotments where Dave once buried a freezer full of corned beef in 1987.

And if it weren't for the constant growl of aircraft overhead, I'd think we'd been forgotten.

But there's hope in those engines.

Although our roads may be closed, our airspace remains gloriously open.

Stansted roars above us like a fat, winged guardian angel, and the fantasy has begun to set in: helicopter salvation.

Picture it, Chinooks descending like airborne postmen, dumping Andrex, Hobnobs and Red Bull parcels onto the village green. Locals swarmed like shoppers at a Boxing Day sale, elbowing pensioners aside for tins of beans and batteries.

Barry from Number 14 has already cleared his greenhouse to make room for a landing pad. He reckons that if he paints an "H" on the lawn with leftover fence paint, someone from NATO might mistake us for a forward operating base and drop a care package.

But while the skies may be our future, we haven't ignored the old ways either. The real work, the desperate, dirt-caked hope, lies underground.

Deep below the village, a secret operation is underway.

Three tunnels, dug by hand, with spoons, trowels, and sheer rage, are snaking outward beneath the soil. We've named them Tom, Dick, and Harry, not after blokes in the pub, but in solemn tribute to our wartime spiritual ancestors.

Tom is headed towards Stansted to intercept the bacon convoys and re-join modernity.

Dick Burrows for Takeley, seeking the promised land of kebab shops and functioning WIFI.

And Harry? He's aimed at Henham, God help him, a bold move involving clay, badgers, and three near-miss encounters with a septic tank.

The tunnellers work in shifts. Retired postmen. Disillusioned teens. Blokes who once dug out their patios and still proudly talk about it. There's a rota pinned to the back of the bus shelter and a periscope built out of two old Pringles cans and a shaving mirror.

It's slow work. Mud in the boots. Earth in the lungs. Occasional worm in the tea flask. But it's ours. It's real. It's resistance.

We may be boxed in above ground, but by God, we are burrowing like moles on meth below it.

To the clipboard goblins in the council offices, still fanning themselves with "diversion plan" spreadsheets, be warned.

You may block our roads.

You may laugh as we wander your maze of closures like caffeine-deprived Minotaur's.

But you can never block our spirit.

Above ground, the Chinooks.

Below ground, the tunnels.

In between? Sheer British bloody-mindedness.

And when those three tunnels breach the light, and the first villager crawls out into a functioning postcode, we shall not forget.

We'll salute the air.

Light a barbecue.

And could you possibly get arrested for emerging in someone's conservatory?

But we'll be free.

END.

​#elsenham #grovehill #siegeofelsenham #henham #stansted