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People do not live in St Leonards, Buckinghamshire, for the buzz. Huddled along a single winding road with a church at one end and a pub at the other, the tiny village is hemmed in on all sides by the wild of the Chilterns. There are no shops. There are no loud-mouthed yobs. There is no traffic.

But increasingly, people do not live in St Leonards for the peace and quiet either. Like much of southeast England, the skies above St Leonards rattle with the omnipresent drone of aircraft. And, with the proposed route change for Luton airport’s departing flights, things will only get louder for the residents of this formerly tranquil community.

“It’s just terrible,” Richard Phipps said as he left his cottage to post a letter of protest against the expansion of Heathrow to Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary. Ms Kelly can expect further letters from Mr Phipps in the coming weeks.

“I will certainly be protesting,” the 60-year-old illustrator said. “I feel really bad about it. Plus, we’re 700 feet up here so we'll be even closer to [the aircraft].”

In the White Lion pub at the north end of the village indignation was mixed with resignation.

“We’ll just have to drink more beer,” the pub's landlady, Michelle Stratton, 48, joked with a wry smile. “It’s not great. No one is going to be happy about it,” said Gary Hart, a 49-year-old postman as he hunched over his beer.

“But what are you going to do? If you fight against it then it just gets pushed over somebody else’s house.”

“It’s horrible having all these planes — especially in the summer,” Paul Jackson, 60, said. “But the thing is, I’ll be on one of them in three months.”

Angela Dance, 57, was similarly realistic. “If there was a petition against it going round, I would sign it. But I don’t think it would make any difference.”

Everyone in the pub said that if someone created a petition they would sign it. But no one, it seemed, was willing to be that person.

“Nobody wants to lead the fight,” Mr Jackson said.

But, at the other side of the bar, slurping his pint through huge gaps in his toothless mouth, one man remained unapologetically furious about the prospect of yet more aircraft.

“The planes are killing the blackberry brambles in my woods,” muttered the 65-year-old, who refused to give any other name apart from “Gunny, Agro Gunny”.

“My life revolves around hunting and now these planes are making my undergrowth disappear and it can’t keep the pheasants in.”

This is one wrong that even the grumpiest of old men cannot right.

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