In my early twenties, I became briefly obsessed with Toughest Villages in Britain, a slice of prime mid-noughties cultural effluence that originally aired on Sky One and has since attained a minor cult following on YouTube. The five-part series documented life in several of the nation’s most isolated and deprived communities, from Skinningrove on the North Yorkshire coast to Grange Villa in County Durham to the extremities of rural South Wales. Potential viewers expecting hard-hitting social-realist documentary will be disappointed. The tone is one of bawdy disgust at the uncouth or downright violent humanity on display.

In Yorkshire, a gaggle of teenagers cluster around the camera. One offers up the story of his birth, with some goading from the unseen production team: “Me mam thought she needed a shit, then I popped out.” In Durham, locals mutter darkly about the area’s reputation for violence and vigilante justice. According to a particularly florid middle-aged drinker, troublemakers and transgressors could expect to finish up with broken bones. The viewer is presented with a front-row invitation to a hyper-stylised, crudely parodic vision of working-class English rural life. It’s hard to argue that the source of its humour isn’t simple cruelty; it is equally difficult to pretend it doesn’t contain several moments of unimprovable farce.

For all of its self-delighted absurdity, I’ve always thought the programme carried the germ of an interesting thought. For those of us who don’t live in them, which is to say the majority of us across the UK, thoughts of “village life” are often a tangle of unquestioned assumptions and clichés formed from occasional visits and holidays, or scraps of dimly recalled sentimental poetry. Village life is here considered as a collection of virtues that are evaporating elsewhere. A state both simpler and more honest than the degraded existence offered in our decadent cities and larger towns. Places where the sky is bluer and the river free of industrial slop. Where generations of the same families have lived and worked in harmony, reasonably untroubled by outsiders. Places with their own quaint, if proudly guarded traditions: the cheese rollers of Cooper’s Hill, Gloucestershire, and straw-bear baiters of Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. Places where it still might be possible to leave your door unlocked at night without fear. Where everybody knows everything about everybody else. Where secrets are never truly private, but rather collective property.

I suppose these fantasies are what some politicians mean when they appeal to “community”. If these imaginings are supposed to provoke a feeling of comfort, then their concomitant horror is never too far from the surface. “The surface, of course, is what community is all about,” wrote John Burnside in his 1998 review of the late, great Gordon Burn’s book Happy Like Murderers, the nightmarish account of Fred and Rose West’s crimes. “We go to great lengths to preserve appearances, not only for ourselves but for others.” He then quotes Burn’s famous, or rather infamous, meditation on the social life of Fred West’s home village in Herefordshire:

Community strangles. Girls used to be run out of the village because of being pregnant. Their mothers ran them up the Marcle Straight, right out of the village. If a girl was expecting, then she wasn’t wanted in the village. That was another thing that got him with village life: how hypocritical they could be. He had a strong inclination to be private and unobserved. Community throttles.

These lines occurred to me when I came across reports of an outbreak of poison-pen letters in Shiptonthorpe, a reasonably well-to-do village of around 500 in East Riding, Yorkshire. The national press picked up the story last autumn, with the BBC, the Independent and the Guardian dispatching reporters to dutifully canvass residents and parish councillors about the menace that had plagued their community since December 2022. Indeed, it was the Guardian’s correspondent who helped at least partially satisfy my own curiosity around the case, as the only source who would speak to me on record. For two years, the good people of Shiptonthorpe, invariably described as an otherwise “sleepy” or “peaceful” rural idyll, had been terrorised by distressingly vulgar or personal anonymous correspondence, delivered by the Royal Mail and officiously typed. One would-be ward councillor told the BBC that she had been accused “of being a loose woman” who could only make headway in local politics “if I was to perform unspeakable things to men”. The author added a final poetic flourish: if she had any decency, she would turn herself out “on the Beverley Westwood pasture with the rest of the cows”.

Others received notice about their partners’ alleged infidelities, about how they should be honest with themselves and acknowledge their own humiliation. That they should refuse to turn away from the knowledge that could set them free. These were the letters signed from “a caring friend”. Not everyone was so lucky. One resident received a Christmas card simply labelling him a “cunt”. Another, a lengthy prayer that “climate change and Yorkshire weather will deliver lots of rain so your house can be flooded again and again”. Some were more violent still, their Joycean word ordering carrying previously unseen levels of vitriol: “You are an ugly fat old cow who nobody likes”; “most find you revolting”; “Everyone agrees you should rot in hell”; “You use up oxygen better used by Decent [sic] people”; “Kids are frightened when they see you”; and “Hope cancer finds you very soon.”

This sickness did not confine itself to a few unfortunately localised households. Local Facebook groups provided a forum for speculation as to the author or authors’ identity and a means of bolstering solidarity, or at least something like it. For a time, it seemed as if no one was safe, that the terror would never cease. Victor Lambert, the parish council’s venerable chairperson, received his own barely veiled threat. Its author hoped that Lambert would soon be “run over by a bus” on the A1079, the road that cleaves through the heart of East Riding. If local police initially wanted nothing to do with the outbreak of ugliness and local ill feeling, the longer the campaign dragged on, the more impossible it became to ignore. Last September, they announced that an investigation had been launched. Royal Mail provided statements to the press of its shock and solidarity, pledging to aid law enforcement in any way it could.

“A cloud of vitriol has fallen over Shiptonthorpe,” one resident told the BBC. “It is a wonderful village with wonderful people but someone has brought poison to the village.” People moved here for community, he continued. A community that had been poisoned by “one or two devilish people”. If self-evidently dire for the people of Shiptonthorpe, the situation presented an equally obvious opportunity for a writer with an interest in the squalid undercurrents that run underneath the skin of “respectable” Britain.

I thought of obvious questions about the identity of the modern perpetrators and their presumed tangle of motivations. I wondered idly about “solving” the scandal with all the condescension of a London writer rocking up to the village to save the day. Yet such a project seemed futile. Even if it were possible, a grand unmasking was not what drew me to the tale. It was instead the fallout and suspicion, the ease with which the veil of respectability had been torn away. A message board comment from an ex-resident captured it succinctly. “Normality” was something strictly enforced and patrolled; deviance would not be tolerated: “That paradoxically creates some real weirdos – as in the malevolent type, because they quite literally have nothing better to do. And because everyone knows everyone’s business, they’ll always have something to have a go at you about.”

In early November, I wrote to Victor Lambert. Considering his previous interviews spread across Britain’s national news media, I naively hadn’t really expected anything other than enthusiastic participation. “We cannot accommodate your request,” came his prompt, polite reply. “The council have a media policy that we will not comment further on the subject matter.” Leo Hammond, the village’s Conservative ward councillor, had also received letters to his constituency office, written by someone with an apparently keen interest in his sexuality. The letters alleged that Hammond was secretly gay, an accusation “which me and my girlfriend find quite funny”, he told the Guardian. Hammond had developed a theory, faintly chilling in its humdrum plausibility: the letters addressed to him were likely from a different author. Their relatively harmless, essentially childish content simply didn’t compare in menace or vitriol to previous batches. It was likely, he surmised, that they were the work of a fledgling copycat, emboldened by the failure to catch the initial perpetrator. Hammond had another theory. “I’m pretty confident I know who’s sending mine,” he mused. The only snag was that he had no means to prove it.

I emailed Hammond an interview request more in hope than expectation. If Victor Lambert had been shackled by East Riding council’s media engagement policy, it was likely that Hammond would too. I was instead surprised by his prompt reply. “Hi, yes I will speak with you,” he wrote back, an hour or so after my initial message. My excitement was not unreserved. What did I really suppose the disarmingly youthful-looking local politician – the Guardian’s photographer had captured a muscular, bequiffed fellow in a sharply pinstriped blue suit – would have to offer that he hadn’t already divulged to the newspaper? What revelations could I possibly hope to extract regarding an oddly disarming, if hardly inexhaustible local scandal? I could have spared myself the bout of self-reflection. On the allotted day and time, I punched in Hammond’s phone number to send him a text, which received no reply. My cheery WhatsApp messages and chasing emails were swallowed by the same cavernous silence over the following days and weeks.

Although irritating, it was a silence with its own imaginative possibilities. Perhaps Hammond had been muzzled by shadowy high-ups at the local authority, worried about what any further press intrusion might reveal. Maybe he had received a fresh batch of the most appalling threats and accusations in the post, which required nothing less than the most urgent police attention. I let these fantasies marinate for a few days before confronting the most likely explanation for the steadily lengthening radio silence. That Leo Hammond, the boyish Tory local politician, just couldn’t be bothered to rehash the threadbare facts of the case to another rubbernecking writer suffering from a bad case of morbid curiosity. I began to half-jokingly picture these rejections as evidence of a mild conspiracy of silence, with the village closing ranks on itself to ward off preying outsiders after the increasingly unwelcome glare of press attention.

In early December, I spoke with Robyn Vinter, the Yorkshire-based reporter who had been dispatched to Shiptonthorpe by the Guardian. She was happy to discuss the story, for which she had amassed a vast amount of material that could not be included in the original piece for reasons of both length and potential libel. She told me she was reasonably sure she’d come across one of the perpetrators early on. It was disarming to be invited into their living room, speaking amiably of alternative theories. Soon, it became apparent that they were not the type of person to confess and they were “much more valuable being able to vouch for us to victims in the village, which they did, because they knew them well”. I began to picture the woman as a kind of off-brand Miss Marple, one that had torn out their superego and trampled it underfoot. As for the victims, Vinter described a series of eerie encounters. One was “incredibly skittish”, as if there was another, deeper issue just under the surface of the conversation. “I had heard someone else in the village say this person ‘enjoyed playing the victim’ but I don’t think that was right,” Vinter told me. “It felt more to me like they were used to being the victim, like this was not the only scenario in which they were being victimised.”

This wasn’t all. Another villager spoke to Vinter at length about a friend who had received a spate of letters. Later that afternoon, she called back to say she had been mistaken; her friend wasn’t a victim after all. What had prompted such an eerie retraction? Had the woman been warned off speaking to a journalist? Or had she been swept up in the excitement, inventing victimhood when none existed, simply for the sake of furthering the story – of inventing her own little subplot to satisfy an outsider’s imagination? During another, otherwise light-hearted, conversation with a man, Vinter jokingly asked whether he was going to confess. The man’s face dropped. He said he didn’t like words like that being used; they felt like a threat.

As for theories, Vinter had several. She believes there were three perpetrators. The two responsible for the ugliest material were likely working in tandem. They were probably related and very likely pensioners, or thereabouts. Anyone younger, Vinter reasoned, would have carried this campaign out online. The waters were muddied, she continued, “because I also don’t believe there are as many victims as claimed. I suspect not everyone who said they got a letter actually got one, instead making it up to deflect suspicion, which explains why there was no clear thread connecting the victims”. It was odd when several villagers declined to show her the letters they’d received, even in the strictest confidence.

Hinted confessions. Scattergun accusations. Disappearing or backtracking victims. The more Vinter divulged, the less I felt I understood. I had wanted a neat story of a community under invisible siege. Where suspicion could be neatly apportioned, the line between victim and perpetrator easily drawn. Perhaps this was a city dweller’s arrogance at work. Why would life in Shiptonthorpe be simpler than any other variety of existence? I had fallen into the obvious trap of underestimating or misunderstanding the weirdness and intensity of village life. The local characters were no less inconsistent and inscrutable than those found anywhere else – it seemed the only difference was proximity. A proximity that meant grudges could so easily metastasise into ugliness, and that ugliness could then spread so rapidly and corrode so deeply. Proximity explains how the nearness and closeness of village life could suffocate its inhabitants. Community can shift from comfort to wrapping its hands around your throat.

The truth, when it comes to the Shiptonthorpe scandal, isn’t likely to take the form of easy illumination, if it can ever be revealed at all. There was too much strangeness and animosity for that. If there was any relief, it was in the fact that life had begun to drift back into something like normality. Old certainties were gradually being re-established, though it would take time for the wounds to scab over entirely. On the surface, life had begun to move forward. And what, when it came to it, could be more important? The surface, of course, is what community is all about. .