I’ve written before that when we moved to
the UK and I first opened the door to our modest end-of-terrace, my then
four-year-old son immediately asked where the rest of our house was. He
genuinely couldn’t understand why we’d left his spacious home in South Africa and travelled
across a continent to live in a tiny half-house in Windsor. He kept saying: “But why? I just don't understand why.” I did what I always do as an emotional cripple mother when I don't know what to say and the cracks start showing, I fobbed him off with a distraction. But actually as is often
the case with the unwitting wisdom of the fledglings, he touched a nerve. And not the emotional cripple mother one. That's another nerve. For another day.
As I've mentioned craploads a few times, I was raised with a blue horizon that
stretched as far as the eye could see. Hills and valleys formed the
backdrop of my day. Every day. This supreme sense of space framed my reality. It’s a part of who I am. Losing it still feels rather unnatural. More unnatural than having
shite weather for 10 months of the year. It’s one of the most
difficult adjustments to life that I’ve had to wrap my head around. It’s
something that you never quite get over either. You just try to learn how to deal
with it. Like fat corrupt incompetent politicians stealing from the people to line their pockets and the curtains for their mansion. A screwing from Sars. Inflation at 6.3%. Forking over a small fortune to DSTV every month for 400 channels
when you only ever watch four.
Properties sprawl in South Africa and a terrace is a flat grass or paved area built up alongside a slope. In the
UK urban areas, properties are stacked like dominos and a terrace has a
completely different meaning. Terraces are a row of mirror-image houses that share
side walls. Built as a means to provide high-density accommodation for the
working class in the 19th century, terraced houses remain popular
today. By 2011, a fifth of all new houses built were terraced. They’re
easier to convert as few are listed (which means they're architecturally or historical important and therefore protected from major alteration) making planning permission unnecessary. And, according
to The English Heritage Trust, they're 60% cheaper to maintain on average than semi-detached
or detached homes.
As a person from the South, life in a
terraced home takes some getting used to. Before moving to the UK, we knew our
neighbours in that we knew they existed. There was a house next to ours. People
lived in it. We exchanged numbers for
security purposes, but we rarely saw or heard them. Here, it’s rare not to see
your neighbours. Or your neighbour’s neighbours and theirs, and so on. You see
them parking their cars in the street. You spot them over the fence in their
garden. You hear when they come home late. You hear the scraping of chairs on
their patio. The sound of bins being dragged on to the pavement on bin day. You
smell when they crank up the gas braai. You’re aware of people around you.
All of the time.
Just as aware as we are of them, they must be of us. Unless they’re stone deaf or blind, there’s no way they don’t
notice us. They hear when my kids bawl in the bath because the one clubbed the
other over the head with Dora the Explorer and the third has rubbed an entire
bottle of shampoo onto their genitals. They hear the shrieks of delight when
their dad chases them around the garden or I come outside carrying ice-cream cones. They
see my eldest climbing a tree buck-naked, my daughter watering the walls,
buck-naked. They see when my toddler son, yep you guessed it... buck-naked, squats
and poos on the decking and then uses a plastic spade to smear it all over the
outside furniture. They see me hose him down and dash inside for the
disinfectant. They hear both of our howls.
We share a space simply divided by two walls.
Side by side, we raise our children. We deal with the drama of the day. We dream for
the future. We lead our lives in such close proximity, and yet we’re strangers.
I have a friend who uttered the first word to her neighbour after a decade of living alongside one another. How utterly bonkers. A space oddity indeed. When I'm a grown-up, I'm going to find a field and build a house. With no up-close view of another house. Where my kids can crap unnoticed on a lawn that takes longer than 10 minutes to mow. Our neighbours will be cows. Of the bovine variety. Not the other kind. I'll happily swap Costa Coffee, Tesco and Gap on my doorstep for a space to call my own. When I'm a grown-up... so in a few years yet. But you saw it here first. Our neighbours heard it first of course. They hear everything.
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| I'm coming for you. |
