Category: People

I made another cake yesterday for my lawn-mower, not my lawnmower. He was out fishing all day but came round later to say thanks for the cake, we had a chat about the landlady about to move in next door (between us). He let slip a gem or two – his wife Candy is a Mason – (oh gosh)  the Landlady found out and asked to be nominated, she was desperate to join. She got her way and was inducted into the sisterhood. Not long after that her trouble-making character worked its way to the surface and she accused Candy of slashing her car tyres. Hard to imagine as Candy is fairly round and doesn’t bend in the middle easily, so she would have to use a long-handled knife to reach down to slash.

When I awoke this morning, it was quiet, no-one else was awake and it was silent next door. I remembered that Stomper had gone from number 45, he had saved up his empty bottles to throw into the recycling at 1:21am the night before last and I had seen him cross his back garden in the late afternoon yesterday but no goodbyes, I was up a ladder painting the bathroom ceiling and couldn’t have run down in time. I had hoped to wish him well, thought he would knock to say goodbye but I guess he had plans.
All the pots of dead plants have gone from the garden, if you can call it that, its more like a car park really, 5 years ago the Landlady had every blade of green removed and replaced with pink concrete car park, reaching from the house to the garage at the end and from fence to fence, side to side. Not a good look for a suburban back garden but mercifully the pinkness is less shocking now, lichen, dust and moss have arrived and made it their own. Although now there are numerous circles and squares of brighter pink where the pots once stood, to remind me of his time there, that and the welcome silence in the small hours.

Its Jubilee Weekend, so in traditional British fashion, the weather has turned grey, damp and cold. All plans to strim the 3ft long grass in my back garden have been put on hold and I have retrieved my winter cardigan from the back of the wardrobe.

On Saturday I went to a party and met a woman I hadn’t seen for 30 years, she had been a spinster whilst we were all marrying and having kids. Dilys looked almost the same, at 25 she had looked 50, now at 60 she looks comfortable as though she has reached her proper age. Later I found out that for 15 years she’s had a lover, with whom she doesn’t socialise but keeps entirely to herself. He is a one-eyed Jamaican ex-convict.

I felt around in my bag for the  turquoise rubber pod that keeps the keys from scratching anything. At midnight, there I was at my door, worse for wear after more than a few glasses of red wine, no-one at home, the neighbour with my spare set always retires at 10:30pm. I tipped the contents of my bag out onto the lid of the rubbish bin, whilst waving my hand above my head to get the PIR sensor to turn on the porch light. No keys to be had, which of my neighbours could I approach for shelter, the Shouters wouldn’t hear, the “Widow” would be petrified to open the door, I didn’t want to wake the newborn twins, I was  too wary to ask the Assassins even if they had been there. Stan would still be up but I think I’d only go there as a last resort. I found my mobile phones, called a friend who I knew would still be awake, a 10 minute walk and I was tucked up safe and warm. In the morning  my daughter and I found the keys lying on the side-table just inside the door.

At the corner near the flats, there is a lamp-post, it seems out of place standing alone in the corner of the lawn, a while ago, maybe two years back, someone tied a child’s lost scarf around it, hoping that the owner would come past again and find it there. It too was bright pink like the paving at number 45 but has faded and greyed over time. My daughter and I see it most times when we walk past and feel the urge to just untie it and throw it away but hesitate to actually do it, somehow it would feel wrong.

Chatting to a friend about my theory of the Assassins, explaining how they each have an eye that looks odd, she suggested “maybe they spend too much time peering through telescopes  or down the barrels of shotguns, watching and aiming and their eye muscles have become contracted causing each of them to squint”.

The quiet of Thursday afternoon was broken by a flurry of noise and motion. The Landlady had turned up with her kind, quiet husband and was shouting about something, we couldn’t make out what exactly. My daughter noticed that Shouter was out there too, ‘minding his own business’, kindly cutting the hedge of the father with the broken shoulder, as a cover for eaves-dropping on The Landlady. The gap between the hedges has been improved but now that it rains everyday, the pink flowers of the opposite hedge spray you with water if you get too close.
My dog-walking friend called today asking if I’d like to join her on a walk. We set off and on the next corner met the very short man coming back from a run in a gaudy orange and black track-suit. Despite many attempts I have never managed to engage him in conversation. Today was no exception, the tersest of nods and he was gone. My friend had challenged me to stop and ask him about his overgrown hedge but I didn’t have the nerve.

When Ken came to thank me for the cake, I mentioned that I was nervous about getting embroiled in confrontation with The Landlady, she can be difficult, we have adjoining gardens and my fence is very dilapidated, I’m waiting for a friend to help me replace it. The thought of trouble brought out Ken’s macho New Zealand  character  “If she gives you any trouble at all, just let me know and I’ll sort her out” Ah my knight in shining armour.

On Wednesday morning as I left the house I met a woman walking past, we grumbled together about the hedge. She lives around the back and across the road on the ground floor of some council flats. It used to be filled with couples and a few families who’d all been there for years, they kept it clean and filled the beds with flowers and helped each other out. Now she, at 86, is the only one who clears the drain so that the tarmac area doesn’t flood. And it is she who puts up with someone from the flats above throwing nappies out of the window aiming for the communal bins – and missing. Her parting remark, typical of that generation who suffered the hardships of WW2, “I feel so sorry for all those people who lost everything in the floods last week.”

There’s a man I often see out walking, he walks with an odd gait, very short steps, almost a shuffle. He has only a few teeth and habitually smokes roll-ups, in rhythm with the puffing on the fags, he puffs out his chest like preening bird. He is a jolly man always happy to pass the time of day with a smile and a toothless chuckle.

The Assassins keep themselves to themselves pretty much all the time, I think if you asked one of the neighbours to point them out in a crowd, they would fail. They don’t look around them as they come and go, it seems important to get from the street into the house without being noticed. I suspect that they have hypnotic powers, when you look into their eyes, you forget everything about them. I know I have asked their names several times but still don’t know them and I have never seen them anywhere except within 20ft of their property, not on the bus, in the shops, or anywhere.

Shouter Candy used to have a fancy man, who sometimes slept in her house or in his car out the back, if Ken  was away. Ken didn’t know about him and I was sworn to secrecy.
Candy tries to get me in her clutches so she can read my horoscope, tarot cards and tea leaves, I learned the hard way not to get caught. A two hour visit left my head full of far-fetched prophesies and a sore spot on my shoulder, as she has the most curious habit of prodding me to re-inforce every point she is making in each sentence.
I asked her to feed my cat for two days while I was away but she said she didn’t know how.
Ken and Candy upset the “Widow” next door because they built a conservatory, she felt it would stop her sunlight, it doesn’t but it was 5 years before she would speak to them again, even though Ken cuts her lawn too.

The Stomper gets his lawn cut as well, even though he has a mower and an alright back. Earlier this week I heard a mower out the front and thought that my lawn was being cut but no, it was the Stomper, cutting his own lawn but not returning the favour and cutting the Shouter’s, or mine.

Dawn, the purple and turquoise wearing absentee wife used to live here in numbers 20 and 22 all the time and taught at a local school. She was very energetic and gossipy. Now she rarely speaks, just nods and goes quietly about her business. I spoke to her a while ago, she’s been very ill with cancer in one eye but she is recovering and philosophical and there is a vestige still of her energy.

In our little pedestrian area there are thirteen houses and two flats, laid out in an L-shape with odd numbers 39 to 50 on one side and even numbers 18 to 24 on the other, the two flats in the corner. No-one knows where the other numbers in the series are.

In the upper flat, lives the German Walker, she’s out all the time striding purposefully, dressed for English weather. She is friendly but shy, so we stick to weather comments as required by the British Stiff Upper Lip Society. She grows flowering plants on her East-facing balcony whilst dreaming of English lawns rolling gently down to a slow green river, bordered by cottage garden plants staked out with twigs to keep them upright during summer showers.

Number 50 had a new porch built a few years ago with a luxurious downstairs bathroom for the elderly lady friends who lived there. As is the way of these things, one of them died quite soon after – the one who could no longer climb the stairs. They and their husbands had met as students in the 50’s and they had spent their whole lives living near each other, holidaying together, retiring together, the two wives moving in together when their husbands died. One of them was called Phoebe, we had a cat called Phoebe, they loved our cat, she loved them. Our flirtatious cat would watch and wait each morning for the two ladies, to be made a fuss of as they passed by to run their errands. Later she would follow them home for afternoon tea. Now our Phoebe has gone and the other Phoebe lives alone with her luxurious downstairs bathroom.

Around another corner from there, in the proper street lives the Man with no Nose, actually he does have a nose, he just can’t use it for smelling, he lost his sense of smell on a hillside a long time ago. Tall and skinny, he wears a battered old leather hat with a wide brim, some kind of stetson maybe and he carries two miniature dogs around in shopping bags. He told me his sad tale – ‘walking in the countryside one summer’s day on a hillside I nodded to the walkers passing by, “lovely spot for a walk” “yes but  a shame about the smell, we won’t be coming again” – “what smell?”  “the pig farm, down below” He had  turned and looked down on a vast field of pigstyes and it dawned on him that he no longer had a sense of smell. Just occasionally though he can smell shampoo when his daughter blow-dries her hair.” He is wistful but surprisingly not angry.

Stan from numbers 20 and 22 is the kind of man who leans slightly forward as he walks and doesn’t put his heels down to the ground, he looks tense and alert, at the ready to jab or to run. He comes and goes with a furtive look, as though he might have something to hide. When the weather is good he hangs out his washing on the line in his garden, which runs right across the view from my sitting room window.
Today it is seven pairs of mid blue heavyweight Y fronts, yesterday it was blue shirts and a purple vest, though there is never any of his intermittent wife’s laundry

The Man who cannot smell used to have the same kind of car as I did, a blue Renault Megan Scenic, he parked it on a corner one evening, quite close to a house with a wooden fence. During the night, his car spontaneously ignited, the fire spread to the fence and into the corner house. No-one was hurt . Later I heard the happy ending – the neighbours opposite invited the elderly man, who was terminally ill, to live with them so that they could look after him whilst his burnt out house was rebuilt. How ironic that the man with no nose whose car had caused the fire, was the only person in the area who couldn’t smell the acrid after effects that hung all over the neighborhood.

On a far corner to the south, lives a Japanese woman who has built a Oriental garden where each part and plant is tended with patience and purpose, it is calm and decorative, a place for contemplation. Her black and white cat sits on a shed roof and waits for my daughter to walk by, they have a mutually beneficial relationship of cooing and purring, stroking and rubbing.

The Sri Lankan boy who seemed to grow 2ft overnight and his petite sister lived at 24 for a while, once I heard them laughing loudly and looking out of my bedroom window to see them in their back garden, the two of them spinning the rotary airer around. What was is making them laugh so much? Then I saw their cat up inside the wires, clinging on and terrified.

Stomper is moving out this week, he just told me that the new people are moving in straight away, except that they’re not new – SHE, the landlady from hell and her husband are moving in, in order to do it up before selling. There is also some suspicion that she is giving this house as her usual abode in order to sell it without incurring CGT – I hope that’s not true but its really none of my business!

The Assassins worked in the back garden again today, lots of noise of stone cutting equipment, shifting of gravel and general noises of bodies being buried. I’m surprised they didn’t wait until dark but I suppose they can just about do it without being seen as the shrubs are well-placed to conceal most of the garden. How does one broach the subject of a contract I wonder, this is highly theoretical of course, I could never really ask them to dispose of the Landlady – could I?

Meanwhile the hedges which were 18 inches apart are now only 16 inches apart as all the lovely pink flowers have bloomed, its very pretty but now too narrow to allow two people to walk side by side or to pass each other. How can I muster the courage to ask him to cut it back? Perhaps I should start a “Petition on the Restriction of Hedges” after all there is a clause in our Leasehold document that states “The frontage of each property is restricted to be laid to lawn with a single small tree allowed in the centre of each plot, no other plants or surfaces may be allowed.”