Words by Louis De Bernieres. Photograph by Jason Bye for the Daily Mail.

The Surrey village where I grew up seemed to breed eccentrics. My boyhood memories are peopled by a parade of them.

We had a neighbour who kept a menagerie in her house and drove round the country lanes with a piebald goat on the back seat of her antique car – a 1927 Swift convertible with a leaking hood, which had lost its wooden dashboard, exposing all the wiring.

Then there was the elderly retired general who, after the death of his wife, abandoned the bothersome habit of wearing clothes and walked around stark naked. I remember, too, a formidable old girl who’d once played cricket for the England women’s team.

Her customary mode of dress was tweed plus fours; she also, if my memory does not deceive me, wore a monocle and smoked a pipe.

She was the sort of woman a decent chap could rub along with; none of that damned female nonsense about headaches and manicures.

She also had a disconcerting habit of shooting squirrels in the woods with a 12 bore shotgun when you were out walking the dog. The shot filtered down through the leaves, pattering like rain.

So many years later, these characters still loom large in my memory when I recall the childhood I spent from the late Fifties to the Seventies in a wonderful, rambling half-tiled house with a large garden and orchard in the village of Hambledon.

I lived there with my father, a leading figure in a children’s charity, my mother and my two sisters.

These days, of course, my former neighbours’ wildly idiosyncratic behaviour would be less tolerated. Our liberties are being eroded by panic and paranoia; our freedoms curtailed by fear that we’ll endanger ourselves or others.

That lady would not be permitted to carry her livestock in the passenger seat; neither would her car be considered roadworthy enough to pass an MoT.

Today, the general would doubtless be forcibly dressed, heavily sedated and incarcerated in an old folks’ home in case he scared the children or harmed himself. And as for the lady cricketer, she would probably get a visit from the firearms officer.

In many ways, this is a shame. I regret the fact that our rural communities have been tidied up, sanitised and made safe. I’m sorry that people aren’t really allowed to behave oddly any more.

The landscape is also more tame and orderly than it was when I was a child. I mourn the passing of cottage gardens, rampant with weeds and colourful perennials.

I miss the towering verges dotted with wild flowers and bright with crimson rosehips, which used to flank every country lane.

Now the hedges are vigorously clipped and pruned, often at the wrong time of year, so the birds don’t have a chance to snaffle the berries that grow in them before they are cut back. They need those berries to get through the winter.

The common at Hambledon used to be covered in waist-high bracken in which we children made dens. Now it’s been planted with heather, which apparently is more ecologically sound, but which is of no use to den builders at all.

When I was a boy, some of the cottages in our village were pretty filthy, chaotic places. Today’s health visitors would have been appalled by their outside lavatories, I’d imagine.

As children, of course, we loved the opportunities we had for traipsing around in the mire, prodding at things with sticks and generally getting filthy.

My little sister and I have fond memories of losing our wellies in a dung-heap that just seemed to suck them off our feet.

Hens pecked, rabbits bred and pigs still occasionally foraged in people’s back gardens. Now coops, sties, hutches and all their attendant muck have been swept away.

They have been replaced by decking, slate chips and potted box-trees beloved of in-coming city dwellers, who are ousting the real country folk from their village homes without even meaning to.

The indigenous rural people can’t afford to live in the communities where they were raised any more: the houses are too expensive and there simply aren’t any jobs.

In the vicinity of the Hambledon of my boyhood, there was a walking stick factory, brickworks and brewery, all with proud traditions of employing locals. Sadly, they have long gone.

So, too, have many of the farms that provided jobs on the land for armies of agricultural workers. Small farms get swallowed up by big ones, and the work is done by contractors.

What’s more, whenever some enterprising soul suggests setting up a business in the countryside, there’s a self-righteous furore on the part of the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) brigade.

Of course, we don’t want our lovely rural vistas besmirched by sprawling industrial sites, but if we thought hard about where we were putting them, what would be so wrong with building the odd factory to provide jobs for local people?

The countryside is the ideal location for light industry, and can provide employment for young people who would otherwise migrate to towns. So many of our villages have become dormitories for commuting townies who play no part in country life.

I have a suspicion many of them don’t even like the countryside much. Even as a child, I remember being outraged when a family from London moved into our village and complained about the noise of the cockerels.

We all thought: ‘What the hell are you doing here, then?’

er I left university in London, I travelled widely before settling in the capital. But ten years ago, after my novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin had been made into a film, I moved out of the city – where I’d always felt like a visitor rather than a native – and back to the country, my natural milieu.

My home is a Georgian rectory in a Norfolk village and I try to give my two children – Robin, six, and Sophie, two – the sort of upbringing I enjoyed.

I want them to grow up to love their village as much as I loved mine and to enjoy the same freedom and pleasure I got from roaming around unfettered, losing my wellies in those dung-heaps and building dens in the bracken.

I am desperately anxious to give them a training in having fun outside. We go out for walks together – fresh air and sunlight are infallible cures for unhappiness – and search for bugs and identify wild flowers. (Robin already knows that ladybirds have exoskeletons and a combined thorax and abdomen).

I’d like the children to learn about the practicalities of rural life, too, so I am trying to get them interested in the idea of working with their hands. Sophie bangs nails into bits of wood with a tiny hammer.

Robin bangs nails into a piece of wood with a slightly bigger hammer, and is just old enough to begin to be helpful with such things as putting up fences. I feel guilty when they bang their thumbs, but you have to start somewhere.

I’m guilty of letting Sophie jump into my arms from the nappy changing table, which doubtless would appal the health-and-safety brigade, but she is a confident little thing who already knows how to do a forward roll, and it never goes wrong.

I hate it that so much is prohibited. I detest signs on village greens that say ‘No Fishing’ in the pond or ‘Keep off the Grass’.

I deplore the culture of litigation that has put paid to harmless rural pleasures, such as cheese rolling (has anyone ever been injured by a runaway round of cheddar?). One Hampshire village banned a procession of floats in its annual carnival – participants had to walk – because they were frightened that someone would sue the organisers if they fell off.

I’d love to think that we could keep alive such country customs as dwile flonking. It differs in every village, but near us it was a game in which a rag (the dwile) was soaked in beer and passed round a circle, with everyone saying ‘Flonk’ as they received it.

Someone had to drink a whole chamber pot of beer before it got back to the beginning, and if they didn’t, the rest of the beer was poured over their head.

In another place, it might be a mad, messy and utterly pointless game in which two teams take turns to dance round each other while attempting to avoid a beer-soaked cloth thrown by the non-dancing team. I admire anyone barmy enough to take part in it, and am glad that I don’t have to.

I think we should pay more attention to enjoying and passing on our national folk dances and tales and I think our children should take part, as was once customary in old rural communities. I also approve of singing in pubs.

I love English fiddle music, it’s just as good as Scots or Welsh or Irish, but we’re shamefully unpatriotic and uneducated in our own culture. We never celebrate it, so it’s in danger of being forgotten.

I confess that I like tragic ballads with 22 verses sung without microphones, which is why I abhor the fact that pub landlords have to apply for licences if they want live music.

There are ways of circumventing this stupid law: we should all just get up and stage impromptu singsongs round the piano in the bar – if we’re still lucky enough to live in a village with a pub.

So many have gone the way of village shops and post offices, but if I had my way, every rural community would have two pubs: one a spit-and-sawdust selling warm beer and lousy food and another featuring good food and wine, so that all tastes are catered for.

TV is so bad these days, and computer screens have so lobotomised us, that it might be time to start going out again.

Not enough villages these days are proper communities with a real sense of fellowship and neighbourliness.

Families are scattered and fragmented, there’s little sense of ‘belonging’ and the elderly – who were once cared for by relatives who’d never moved beyond their native village – are shipped off to care homes.

Fortunately for me, my own village has a group of public-spirited residents who organise the social events that keep communities such as ours alive.

When I was a child, we accepted that maypole dancing, flower shows, fetes and harvest suppers were perennial fixtures of the village calendar because everyone shared an enthusiasm for preserving them.

Now there is less continuity, less sense of one generation succeeding the previous one, and less sense that we have a duty to preserve time-honoured country traditions and, just as importantly, invent new ones to pass on. So the village life of my boyhood has all but vanished.

For many people in the past, life was extremely hard, but I am often tempted to look back on it as an idyll. Just as the rural dialects that added linguistic richness to our language have been weathered away by Estuary English, I feel that the countryside has suffered a kind of erosion.

There are still great characters, but fewer of them, and we have become tamer. Everything is more orderly and clean, but we seem to be more dull and predictable.

How wonderful it would be if our grandchildren could look back on us and say that we were quirky eccentrics in the good old traditional style, but I fear they won’t.

Words by DAMON SYSON pictures by JASON BYE

You’ll never guess what the neighbours have done now… Live joins the police as they raid a suburban semi and uncover a secret cannabis factory

Dawn has just broken as we snake along a quiet street in Peterborough, a long row of modest Thirties semis.

Inside, families are waking up and curtains being drawn. It’s almost a cliché of sleepy suburbia, and it’s hard to believe that a house here could be an outpost of a Far Eastern drugs syndicate.

At 7.20am, a convoy of police vehicles comes to a halt. Three uniformed policemen creep past the side door of the house and into the back garden ? with an operation like this, maintaining the element of surprise is vital.

Should anyone inside realise they are trapped, they might do something silly, such as arm themselves.

One of the uniformed officers picks up a red one-man battering ram ? a 2ft, 40lb cylinder of epoxy-steel with two handles ? and smashes the door in with three hefty blows.

The team charges into the house shouting “Police!”, their black boots crunching the mothballs left strewn on the floor of the entrance hall to mask the smell of cannabis.

They move swiftly from room to room.

The whole thing has happened so quickly that the officer in charge, Detective Constable Shanie Nayar, is still only just getting out of her car.

“I told you to knock first!” she shouts, running towards the front door.

“Just be careful of people jumping out of wardrobes,” she adds.

As we rush forward, an officer calls to Nayar: “It’s a positive. It’s a cannabis factory.”

“Thank f*** for that,” she mutters under her breath.

A few minutes later another officer emerges, informing Nayar that the house is clear.

“Have you got anybody?” she asks.

“No ? but there’s a small forest in there.”

Television cop shows may lead us to believe that an operation like this is minutely planned and painstakingly choreographed.

The reality is that few of the team know anything about it until 20 minutes before they go in, when we gather at 7am in the operations room of Peterborough’s Bridge Street Police Station.

DC Nayar briefs the officers: they’ve had a tip-off that a house is a cannabis factory.

She instructs the 16-strong team of officers ? half in plain clothes, half wearing uniform and bulky stab vests ? to proceed with caution.

“If interior doors are locked, don’t go mad,” says Nayar. “There’s no point breaking the door down. We’re talking about cannabis plants here ? they can’t flush them down the toilet or eat them.”

She adds that they should be extra-vigilant about booby-traps.

As well as the police officers, there are two electricians from EDF Energy in our party.

They are here for two reasons: to check the electrics in the house, which are invariably tampered with and may pose a threat of fire; but also to check that the door has not been electrified.

It is increasingly common for gangs to booby-trap these properties, wiring up doors and windows to the mains.

One such factory in London was found to have sharp spikes on all the window ledges, disguised with cardboard.

“They don’t use booby-traps to harm the police,” Nayar explains.

“It’s to protect the stash from rival gangs or local lads who might consider stealing it.”

Once the property is deemed to be clear, the tension disappears.

The police officers stand in the front yard, cracking jokes (“I thought I said knock”?

“he did knock ? with a big red thing”) and discussing their appearances on various reality TV programmes (“I was on RailCops the other week”).

Meanwhile, the two men from EDF head inside to make the property safe.

A few seconds later, one of them emerges.

“Er, sorry to bother you,” he says.

“But there’s someone hiding behind the bathroom door.”

Three officers run inside to investigate the embarrassing oversight. A few minutes later they return leading a young Vietnamese man in handcuffs. He’s about 5ft 4in tall and wears faded jeans, a grubby T-shirt and a denim jacket.

“Poor little fella,” says the man from EDF.

“He looked petrified. He was cowering behind the door, shivering.”

Once the EDF men have confirmed that the property is safe, I’m allowed to enter, though Nayar warns me that the plants are at the stage of their growth cycle when they can irritate your lungs.

She hands out disposable face masks.

What we find inside is indeed a little forest.

There’s an overpowering damp smell but no telltale pungent odour of skunk, the highly potent strain of cannabis that many argue causes a higher incidence of schizophrenia among those using it.

Although from the outside everything looks normal, with net curtains visible from the street, inside every window has been taped up using bin liners and there are heavy curtains, backed with plastic, on every doorway.

Each room is filled to capacity with plants.

Above them hang rows of powerful 600-watt sodium lights with reflector panels. There are thermometers in every room and large fans to keep the plants cool.

Part of the ceiling has been cut away to accommodate a silver extractor pipe fitted with a carbon filter at the outlet to prevent passers-by smelling the cannabis.

The Vietnamese do not employ hydroponic cultivation systems, where plants are grown in gravel, but use soil.

How they shift that volume of compost into a house without attracting neighbours’ attention is anyone’s guess.

As always, the gang has bypassed the electricity meter and tapped straight into the mains.

In some cases, this causes fires.

For this reason, as soon as police receive a tip-off they have no option but to act immediately.

“You can’t leave it,” says Nayar, “because you know they’re bypassing the electricity and if it caught fire and somebody died you’d be negligent.”

The EDF men survey the rows of fuse boxes crudely bolted to the walls.

It looks like a deathtrap.

One of them shrugs. “Actually, the electrics are pretty good. They obviously know what they’re doing.”

The “gardener” ? often a minor brought into the UK illegally for this work ? inhabits one room in the house, the kitchen, leaving the maximum floorspace in the rest of the house devoted to horticulture.

He has no possessions or clothes.

There is just a bed with a bare mattress and a dirty duvet, a bookcase holding 20 packs of Marlboro Lights and a stack of pornographic DVDs.

The portable TV is currently being used for something else, though ? to show CCTV pictures relayed from a tiny camera trained on the front door and side passage.

Hence the fact that he was hiding ? he’d spotted the policemen in the back garden.

The only personal touch is a neatly kept Buddhist shrine with bowls of fresh satsumas, water, flowers and candles.

“There’s always a shrine in these places,” one of the police officers says. “It’s quite sad, really.”

The gardener has a detailed chart of instructions written in Vietnamese pinned to the bathroom wall.

They tell him when to water the plants and exactly how much fertiliser to use.

Police find tubs of fertiliser worth £100 each and a long hose leading from the downstairs bathroom up to the cultivation rooms. Although Nayar can’t confirm that this is skunk until it has been tested, she is 99 per cent certain it is.

The potency of this type of homegrown cannabis is a serious concern for the authorities.

British-produced skunk contains more THC ? the psychoactive component in cannabis ? than imported varieties. Some homegrown seizures tested have been found to contain THC levels as high as 20 per cent, compared to four per cent typically found in imported hashish.

But why Peterborough? The answer is simply that this unassuming Cambridgeshire town has plenty of affordable rented accommodation and a large transient population.

In the early hours, immigrant workers huddle in groups waiting to be taken to temporary jobs as agricultural labourers.

It’s the kind of place where nobody asks too many questions.

“This is a prime spot for this sort of thing,” explains Nayar.

“We’ve done about five or six in this area. We found out about this one because I put something in the local paper giving the public telltale signs to look out for.

“A neighbour mentioned to one of our community support officers that this particular house was being rented out to oriental people, the windows appeared to be taped up and there had been drilling at 3am.

All the hallmarks of a cannabis factory.”

Does she ever get it wrong?

“No more than four times in 18 years,” she says. “If I do, we have to pay for the door.”

With 193 plants, this seizure has a street value of £70,000.

Given that the growth cycle of the plants is around 12 weeks, despite paying the gardeners £500 a week and as many cigarettes as they can smoke, the whole operation is highly profitable.

Even though the electrical equipment they use is expensive, costing about £7,000, the gangs can afford to take a few hits.

“The Cambridgeshire police’s clampdown has had a quantifiable effect,” says Nayar.

“After last year’s raids, the street price of cannabis in Peterborough went up from £20 an eighth [of an ounce] to £25.”

Raids like this have become routine. This is the 40th such operation Peterborough police have carried out since May 2006.

All have been connected to Vietnamese gangs, probably based in Hackney, east London, and possibly with international links. The next raid occurs three days later, resulting in the seizure of 492 plants.

Left unchallenged, a factory of this size is capable of generating well over £750,000 a year.

Two weeks later, police have another bumper harvest, with five raids in one day.

They seize drugs with a potential street value of £700,000, entering one property with 550 plants and another with more than 600.

Typical sentences for those convicted of running cannabis factories are between three and four years.

It’s a scene which is being played out all around the country. A clampdown on their metropolitan operations is forcing drug syndicates, predominantly Vietnamese, to spread out to rent converted family homes in the home counties and further afield.

The Vietnamese have come up with an impressive business model for producing cannabis ? and the factories are spreading more quickly than Starbucks.

While big business goes global, the skunk trade is going local.

What is most extraordinary is that it has all happened in the past five years.

Ten years ago, only around ten per cent of cannabis sold was grown in the UK ? now it is over 60 per cent.

And the demand is certainly there ? the UK has two million regular cannabis users.

But with cannabis some way down the list of harmful substances, should police be directing their resources elsewhere?

“What we’ve seen in Canada is that if you’ve got a Vietnamese cannabis factory problem, you’re soon going to get a methamphetamine problem,” says Nayar.

“That’s why we take it so seriously and stamp down on them quickly. You need to nip it in the bud.”

The man arrested today has left a mobile phone.

The calls will be checked and enquiries made, which may lead investigators to the gang behind the factory.

In the meantime, scene of crime officers will turn up and photograph the plants as evidence.

Once that has happened, the plants will be loaded up on a van and taken away to be incinerated. I leave with the smell of cannabis still on my clothes.