My mother, the novelist Joan Brady, was sitting in the kitchen, tired, and near the very end of her reserves. “I’ll tell you what this illness is like,” she said. She picked up a toothpick and began jabbing her leg. “You get dead spots.” “Sharp, sharp, sharp,” she said, working slowly down her shin. “Nothing, nothing, sharp, sharp.”

Last week she won a settlement of £115,000 after suffering a degenerative nerve disease allegedly caused by toxic fumes from an “environmentally friendly” shoe shop in Totnes, Devon.

The shop, Conker (“a quiet little workshop”, according to the company website) was a typical Totnes business. Housed in a Grade II listed former theatre, it had a façade enriched with swags, decorated scrolls and painted 18th-century masks. But step inside and you’re in Earth-mother land. Conker made bright, squishy shoes – the sort you see squelching though mud puddles near the bean-stew stall at Glastonbury.

Pinned to the noticeboards on buildings near by were posters advertising “a seminar to bring out the inner child that is in us all”, “a barefoot dance for universal peace” and “a workshop on sprouting pulses”. My mother’s claim was that toxic fumes from chemicals used in the manufacturing process leaked into her house behind the shop. In its setlement Conker, the former owners of Conker Shoes, denied liability.

If it weren’t for the fact that she was gradually being crippled, my mother’s battles against Conker’s shoe factory and the district council’s environmental health and planning departments would have made a splendid sitcom – a mix of Tom Sharpe and Kafka.

Conker’s grinding and stitching machines made so much noise that the vibration hummed through the struts of the staircase and trembled in the Elizabethan beam above my mother’s writing desk.

My mother ripped out her back staircase, which linked her house to the factory and transmitted the vibrations. The council threatened to imprison her for damaging a listed object, only it turned out that it was getting the staircase that she’d removed confused with another staircase that no one could find and which was perhaps in another building. By this time, as befuddled as everyone else as to what was going on, they threatened to imprison her anyway.

The fumes started to trickle in through a vent that Conker had built just above her studio. The smell was “similar to grip fill”, said one friend. “Acrid pong,” opined another. “In the back stairwell, the air was so saturated that it made my eyes sting,” wrote a third, in a letter to the district council.

My mother’s throat felt constricted; when the gluing was at its worst, she choked; the skin on her face felt cold and sweaty. An industrial chemist, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, who had acted for a similar case in Wales, repeatedly asked councillors and the planning committee to take her case seriously. As for trying to get Conker to understand her concerns that it was consistently abusing classified neurotoxins – that was, said the chemist, “like trying to nail jelly to a wall”.

Conker insisted that the chemicals were “dangerous only if you drink them or bathe in them”. My mother rang building specialists, fire chiefs, companies called things like Odournet, other shoe factories, politicians, pressure groups, law firms.

“I am not St George,” wrote her MP (Anthony Steen, Conservative) in exasperation, “and there are an awful lot of dragons to slay!” Even I, I’m ashamed to admit, wondered at times if she was getting carried away; I helped her to set up a website, and hoped that the problem would disappear.

Meanwhile, her symptoms became worse. She felt lethargic. Her sleep became disturbed. In the words of the Guys Toxicology Clinic, she was being crippled by the “onset of bilateral parasthesia and numbness progressing to mid-shin”. They would, they added, be “perfectly happy to provide testimony as to the above if future actions may arise (especially legally) regarding the continued activity” of the company. When her novel, Theory of War, was published, my mother’s work was compared with that of Steinbeck, William Golding and Jack London. She became the first woman to win the Whitbread Book of the Year prize with that novel, which was acclaimed as a “work of genius”. A few years later she had difficulty even feeling the keys on her typewriter: the weakness began to take over her hands.

Finally, after a year and a half of pleading, the council did a test. The results were staggering. The safe limit for household exposure to butanone is in the region of 2 parts per million (ppm). The maximum limit for 15 minutes of industrial exposure is set at 300ppm. Floating down into the stairwell were the sort of concentrations that turned workers in Third World sweatshops into paraplegics. Over 600ppm. The council said that there was something wrong with the equipment and the tests were unreliable. The council declined to test for the really dangerous poison, n-hexane, even though another study showed that “inhalation of an adhesive agent” led to motor neuropathy and quadriplegia in 7-30 months – exactly the range in which my mother started to experience symptoms. “The sleepy molasses of local bureaucracy,” as my grandfather used to say.

“You’ve got your fortune made here,” remarked one visitor. “Just charge the local schoolkids 10p a sniff.” The local printer and binder was drop-jawed with envy. “How did they get the permission to use those adhesives? I’d love to have access to them.” Driven to desperation, my mother decided to block up the vent. Combining visceral courage with an almost childlike respect for fairness, she went to the shoe shop to explain her plan and give the day and hour at which it was going to be done. Two storeys up a ladder and despite her weakening limbs, my 63-year-old mother reached out to press a large, glued piece of wood against the vent. At that point that things got scary.

“I felt this ‘thunk’. Someone on the other side was shoving a large stick through the grate to push me away. Every time I’d get the board into position, ‘thunk!’ on the other side, and I’d go swaying back on the ladder.

“Each time you poke that stick out, it’s trespass,” shouted my indomitable mother as she toppled among the clouds. And “I have a witness!” pointing at her local builder far below. The ladder swayed back again. This time, no ‘thunk’.

After that, things started to go her way a bit more. Conker set up a smoke stack. Two of the chemicals were taken out of production. The smell disappeared. Mother’s symptoms immediately started to improve. It was not a very tall smokestack – not nearly high enough for the job, according to the industrial chemist – but it at least sent some of the fumes away from her house.

This was a good thing: a protest movement started. Articles appeared in the local newspaper. An ancient man with a Zimmer frame, the president of a residents’ association, inched a quarter of a mile across town and up my mother’s long gravel path to give her support.

When the wind was blowing in his direction, he claimed, the “nauseating and dangerous fumes” seeped down chimneys and through windows. The Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate wrote a powerhouse letter to the environmental officer and came round for a cup of tea.

The woman next door, who ran courses on “Earth Wisdom” and “Genesium” (“healing of the generation of the energies of the Archangel”), turned out to be viciously practical when it came to beating up shoe shops. “We need a leaflet,” she observed. “It must be in nauseating green.” Finally, 18 months after her first complaint, the council put an abatement notice on the company. Gluing was halted altogether. My mother’s symptoms diminished to a tingling in her feet and hands.

But toxic neuropathy, once started, never vanishes. When the poison levels fall, it simply retreats back to where the nerves are permanently destroyed in the extremities and waits for the next dose of pollution. Then it returns with vigour.

A month later the gluing started again. The council insisted that my mother’s illness was “possibly” due to other causes. Still, the council declined to test for n-hexane. Still, they would not request that Conker (“one of our ‘best’ businesses”) do its work in the industrial park instead of in the midst of the residential area of this ancient and otherwise kindly town.

Once again, she had to seal off her rooms against Conker’s production line. She abandoned her next literary novel, was forced to sell her home, where she had lived for 35 years, and started work on a violent thriller in which the corrupt, brutalising prison, run by bullies and cowards, is called, in honour of the council, South Hams.

This was five-and-a-half years ago. My mother still suffers the physical damage. In addition to the nerve death, she has developed multiple allergies, in particular to petrochemicals. When she came to see me for Christmas, she brought a 21-page document prepared by her lawyer, detailing every step of her battles with the shoe shop and the council. I could not read it. It was too appalling. I gave her a cartoon I had done showing her as a mythological hero slaying the dragon “Conker” and running off with a cheque. I’d used bits of fabric for the colouring: she had difficulty feeling their texture.

“It has been a Herculean battle,” she agreed, “over something that could have been solved in a week. All they had to do was install a proper ventilation system for toxic chemicals, and they wouldn’t. I’ve lost a lot. A hell of a lot.”

The shop says:

The statement from Guy Metcalfe and Prem Ash, former owners of Conker Shoes (it was sold two years ago):

Insurers and solicitors were fighting the case on the former owners’ behalf and have recently made an offer out of court that has been accepted by Mrs Brady. This offer was made purely on economic grounds because of the escalating legal costs, without any admission of liability. Following extensive research, tests and expert advice, it has not been proven that any ill health experienced by Mrs Brady was caused by emissions from the workshop.

For the past ten years Conker Shoes has made between 35 and 70 pairs of shoes a week (depending on the season) employing three people in the workshop, with glueing (using low toxic rubber glues) taking place for a maximum of ten hours per week. The operation is craft-based and could not be described as a “factory”. Apart from a six-year period Conkers has been making shoes in Totnes High Street for more than 30 years. In that time there have been no other complaints about fumes, health problems or smells from any other neighbours or employees.

The local council did tests for the constituent parts of the glue (using the approved carbon absorption method) in all of the living accommodation around the workshop. These tests were unable to detect any harmful emissions. Mrs Brady has recently referred to earlier tests where she claims the readings were “off the scale”. These early tests were found to be grossly inaccurate and unreliable by both South Hams District Council and the manufacturers of the instrument used.

The former owners are sorry that they will not be given the opportunity to defend the reputation of the business that was founded on good, sound principles both ethically and environmentally. The Conker Shoe Company is very proud of the way it operates, blazing the eco trail long before it was trendy, and remains committed to these ideals.

South Hams District Council statement:

It was in the interest of local heritage that South Hams District Council investigated unauthorised works to Mrs Brady’s property. The local government ombudsman conducted a full and extensive investigation into Mrs Brady’s claims against the council in 2003. The council was found to have acted appropriately in all counts put to the ombudsman by Mrs Brady, except for the wording of a single planning condition that was found to be “imprecise and ineffective”.

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