Everybody needs good neighbours - it feels like my little street is now its own republic

Sophie White

Lockdown Diaries

Resident of Canon Mooney Gardens Michael Larkin organised a game of social distance bingo at his flat complex, with his 14-year-old DJ daughter Hollie, and his niece Jodie.

May 05 2020 02:30 AM

There is a block of flats near us that is constantly going viral for doing cute, socially-distant group activities. You may have seen the bingo numbers being called from a PA system while residents checked off their cards out the windows, for example. Or their fantastic choreo to the song Saturday Night. It's the kind of good-news story that'll buoy us until the next grim tally on the radio.

I will have lived on my street for seven years this September. It's a small lane of terraced red-brick cottages. My first baby was born the Christmas after we moved here and we knew no one. We brought him home to a house that smelled of fresh paint and was still slightly makeshift.

A knock on the door stirred us from our rising panic of the "What do we do with this baby?" variety. It was my neighbour, the man from Number 10, bearing nourishment - homemade soup and brown bread; it was our first meeting. I'd grown up with parents who were known to ignore the house phone ringing and cross the street to avoid being embroiled in unwanted small talk. We hadn't particularly known our neighbours.

A few days after this food package, it was New Year's Eve. At midnight, I was sitting milky and bleary, struggling with my impossibly tiny new baby, bitching about the "bloody fireworks", when I heard a different sound. Singing.

I went down to my front door and opened it to reveal most of the street out on the lane roaring Que Sera, Sera skyward. When the woman from Number 3 spotted the baby in my arms, she was thrilled and the whole gang turned seemingly as one to serenade my baby and I. It was utterly surreal, like a scene from a Richard Curtis movie.

I learned in time that that's just how the lane rolls. The street parties and New Year's Eve hooleys can and do escalate. In summer, the north-east side of the street sit out in front of their houses, while we, on the south-west side, lounge smugly in our sunny yards.

It was on one such evening last weekend that I lay in my hammock listening to the bingo numbers drifting over from the flats and contemplated how, as we near the end of a second month in lockdown, it has started to feel like my little street, always close-knit, has now become its own republic.

Leaders have emerged, alliances have formed, goods and services are even available in our small stretch of houses. The currency is currently rhubarb, which is being traded like cigarettes in prison. The market's going to take a hit when the season ends. We even have a bookstore now.

Now, with hardly anyone driving in or out of the lane, my boys are kings of the road. They're like the two-boy local sports heroes. Last week, my oldest did his first bike ride without stabilisers down the centre of the road.

By dinnertime, the whole lane knew and the mood was festive. The six-year-old made several laps to receive adulation, while the three-year-old trotted in his wake.

While they play on the road, I sit on the chair knitting and supervising them, but mainly chatting to anyone who happens by. Small talk. The weather. The virus. The restrictions. Someone is dispatched for ice creams.

We chat on. Some of my neighbours raised their kids on the lane. They don't bat an eyelid at the endless screaming, shrieking and wailing out of my kids. These women know what's up.

One family - local celebrities, really - have lived here since the street was built in 1906. Five generations of their family have sat out here chatting. Small talk. The weather. The war. The rations. Births, deaths and strikes, and on and on.

James Joyce gave our lane a shout out in Ulysses, though I'm not sure cranky Joyce would have tolerated our more sentimental Richard Curtis moments. And the current restrictions certainly wouldn't have worked for his wandering protagonist, who travelled far beyond his 2k radius.

Ah, wandering. You'd miss it. When every day feels divorced from purpose and clouded by uncertainty, it is hard to wander aimlessly - aimless is now our baseline.

"One wants to wander away from the world's somewheres, into our own nowhere," wrote DH Lawrence in Women in Love. Right now, it feels like we are all caught in our own nowheres, doesn't it?

On a glum day, this can pull you down, but never underestimate the power of small talk with a familiar face

And that's why, while it may be too big an ask to love thy neighbour (that planning objection of 2014 may still be too fresh for that), you should certainly know them.