In Honour of My Nameless Neighbour

To Adventures Untold

A few weeks ago one of our old London neighbours passed away. He was an elderly gentleman who must have been in his late 80s.

We never knew his name. He had a strong wash of white hair. He had red cheeks and he was fiercely independent. There was a wonderful inertia to him. Even latterly when he took to a Zimmer frame you got the sense he was unstoppable. He had an intense, juddering gait. Tanks would part in his slipstream.

Our relationship with him was complex. He didn’t like us. He used to glare angrily through a crack in his curtain whenever we were outside gardening.

He also, I’m fairly sure, tried to get us in trouble. When we first moved into the house the sellers hadn’t removed their deceased relative’s possessions. Every room was full of her items and it was desperately sad. Very personal items just left ransacked all over the place.

In London if you have a thing which someone else could use the common practice is to put it outside your house for a few hours for someone else to pick up. There were some items which we didn’t need but which could be used by others so we put them outside.

It was great. We met a few dozen people that day. Lovely neighbours and passers-by who were excited to pick up free stuff. One chap came back to our house 3 times to pick up all the commodes we’d found. There was a little boy who literally danced down the street with his new leather briefcase.

It was a happy thing and it was a very London thing for a few hours on a Saturday.

However at about 2pm a council car appeared and two friendly officers asked what we were doing.

We explained and they said they had had a complaint from a neighbour. They couldn’t tell us who it was but when I looked over to the old fella’s house he was peering at us from behind the curtain.

While technically we weren’t allowed to leave stuff in front of our house they said they could see that we’d just moved in and were giving it away for free. They would go away and pretend they hadn’t seen anything and wouldn’t be back.

It was a slight dampener and felt like another gentle nudge from the old fella. “I’m watching you”.

Our response to ill feeling, after getting it wrong plenty of times over the years, has been to try and kill anger with kindness.

We saw him most days on our road and always smiled and said “hello”. Almost every time he would pretend he hadn’t heard us and grimace. It became absurd, like we were desperate for his approval. I like to think he also started to see the humour in it.

I am perhaps painting myself in a Zen-like, benevolent light here. We used to grumble about the old bugger. Why is he so MEAN? We’re not bad people! I could also be childish. Sometimes, when I caught him glaring at us when we were gardening I would glare directly back at him and wave, glassy eyed, like the clown from IT.

A few years after settling in we had some work done on our house. Part of this involved restoring a path to the front door. When we got back to the house one day our builders told us they had to redo the cement under the tiles because an old man had gone through our gate and stuck footprints all over the cement when he thought no one was looking. Another little shot fired.

We’d never done him an unkindness, as far as we knew. We were mouse quiet neighbours and tried to be friendly but we were new. We represented change.

It hit me when I spoke to my other neighbour.

Sometimes I would pop round to help her manage things in her garden when it got out of hand. Sometimes the self seeding sycamores and weeds were overwhelming. I used to enjoy these visits. She knew everyone and everything that went on in this road and had lived there for over 40 years in the same house.

The old man came up in conversation and she told me about him. It turns out he had been married, for over 50 years, to the warmest, brightest, most light-spirited lady. Her eyes glistened when she described her. She was a nurse and she described the outfit she used to wear. It’s not like the ones you wear today she said. It was starched and perfectly ironed. Everyone loved her she said.

But when she passed away he drew into himself. He had always been a quiet sort of fellow but now he completely withdrew.

He used to be a great traveller. They used to go all over the world and he had all these amazing photos, books and books full of photos. This piqued my interest. I felt quite emotional hearing this. We are not so different I thought. I love travelling and photography and I am introverted.

Like so many introverts I’ve developed shorthands and strategies for small talk and social situations. Maybe for him, when the light of his life passed and his working days and routine came to an end, he no longer felt he had to connect with people. Maybe she was the spark that helped him cope.

As she was talking to me I thought about what a loss it was that his stories, experiences and photos were going unseen and unheard. There was never anyone who came to visit. I imagined one day we would spark up a conversation. I would try to steer it onto the topic of travel and he would invite me in and we would pore over his photos. Of course it didn’t happen.

I feel it even more keenly now.

While we were moving to our new house in the countryside he passed away. No one knows exactly what happened, because he never spoke to anyone, but there was an ambulance. Then one day a team of guys from the council came by the house and unceremoniously threw all of his personal possessions into the back of a cage. It was one of those removal vans which has a rectangular latticed cage at the back. Two strangers going back and forth through his house and flinging everything he owned into this cage. A man’s life manhandled and abused. Everything on display.

Then 6 or 7 hours later they were gone.

Any traces of the man who had remained silent since his wife died had vanished. A man who saw his environment as that bit dimmer and more suspicious since her passing.

Two different neighbours told me about this unprompted. Both felt quite emotional. Everyone had had a similar experience to what we had had. He was the grumpy old guy who never said hello or spoke. But we all felt a sharp sense of loss and sadness at his passing.

When we first moved into that house he would spend hours pruning his roses and tending to his garden. He had the most beautiful magnolia tree which would come out in spring and which always made us smile.

As age caught up with him the garden took over. Sycamore trees (which cursed all our gardens) left unchecked became weed trees, bushes grew out of hand and his beautiful garden was overrun. The magnolia was smothered. The usable area in his garden shrunk more and more until it became a postage stamp with no flowers and he never ventured outside. At the front of his house a sycamore sapling had steadily grown unwieldy and was now too big and impetuous for him to remove.

I was too anxious to offer him help. I think we all were.

My partner and I got to a stage finally, after 7 years, where he would grunt a hello. Not always, but sometimes, and it felt like a connection. We never had a conversation, only that occasional ‘hello’ but it felt like something.

That week when we had to go back to the old house to get it ready for its new owners we found out about his passing. As I was in the loft room clearing out some of our stuff I looked out of the window across the gardens and to his house on the left.

There for the first time in several years there were beautiful red roses. Peeping through the undergrowth having finally found their way clear of their prison. Not perfect. Mess everywhere. The chaos of life. Some decaying but definitely a bloom. Here’s to you, old man.