The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
October 17 1988
Outside the monkey house at Washington Zoo one day, I heard these people talking about their neighbours. It seems there was a family in their street whose children kept a pet rabbit. This family went away for a couple of nights and in their absence, the people who lived next door were horrified to discover their dog sitting down the end of the garden with the neighbours’ much-loved rabbit between its paws. The rabbit was obviously dead.
Desperate with embarrassment, the dog’s owners took the limp bunny and gently laid it down in its hutch next door and waited nervously for the reaction to their animal’s sin. A day or so later, their neighbours returned.
Oh, yes, they reported, they had had a lovely holiday and it was so nice to be back but there was one thing which had rather shocked them. The guilty family hung their heads and waited, as their neighbours explained that, just before they went on holiday, their rabbit had died of old age, and so they had given it a dignified burial in a little box in one of the flower beds, but now the strangest thing had happened…
This is deeply embarrassing stuff anywhere in the world, but particularly here. Being a neighbour is a serious business in America. Only the other day, it nearly got me arrested. Then a little later, it nearly got me killed.
You have to understand, first, that the very concept of a neighbourhood brings out the core of the whole American self-image – that people should scrupulously respect each other’s rights and make a conscious effort to live in orderly harmony with each other. That is what the constitution is all about, and Americans believe it and want to live by it. Most of them.
At its best, an American `neighbourhood’ can be a wonderful success – friendly, helpful and protective. When you move into a new house, people come round with vegetables from their gardens. They stop their cars to give you the big Hallo and tell you what a fine neighbourhood they have. But the very seriousness with which all this is taken can also cause terrible complications.
For a start, issues which in other societies are regulated simply by social custom are here formalised into law – a striking departure from the standard American dislike of all things statutory. So, for example, when it snows, the sensible step of clearing a path in front of your house is a matter of legal obligation. Those who fail to clear their patch of sidewalk are liable to be reported and may be fined.
The 48 hours after a snow storm are, therefore, a period of revelation. The professional prize-winning all-American neighbours are out there while the flakes are still falling, shovelling their sidewalk from edge to edge and winning extra bonus points by scattering salt; the show-offs, who want to win approval without making too much effort, come next with their electric snow blowers roaring and puffing and zapping everything in their path. The sinners are then plain to see: white blankets of shame neatly laid out in front of their doors.
But snow melts and the winter sinners usually escape without punishment. Not so in summer, when a failure to mow your lawn or cut your weeds can quickly cost you a $200 fine. The local departments of environmental protection employ inspectors who sniff out transgressors. They hurtle from one garden to another, spurred on by relentless digs in the ribs from neighbourhood informants, who identify targets in anonymous notes and phone calls.
A young couple in a nice residential area on the outskirts of Washington DC attracted a swarm of neighbourhood inspectors this summer by deliberately and provocatively leaving their grass to grow as tall as it wanted and allowing plants in their garden to grow over 12 inches in height – thus exceeding the maximum which is clearly set down by local law.
The whole neighbourhood was quivering with rage. Anonymous notes showered down not only on the inspectors but also on the couple. “Please cut your lawn. It is a disgrace to the entire neighbourhood”. That kind of thing.
But the couple were not loose-living crazies who were too idle to push a lawn mover – or, as is more often the case, too poor to hire some black people to come and push the mower for them. Nancy Stewart is a lawyer with the US Justice Department and her husband, Walter, is a research scientist. When the inspector came to call, the Stewarts were not impressed.
They told him that they were growing a “meadow garden”, free of pesticides and untainted by the ear-splitting noise of a mower, and that they hoped to attract birds and small mammals. When the inspector threatened them with a fine, the Stewarts went to court to challenge the legality of neighbourhood laws. So tightly argued was their case, that the inspectors have backed down, at least temporarily.
The neighbours, however, are still raging, raising their angry chorus in the local paper:”It’s just awful…They’re making a mess out of the street…They are not conforming to a pattern set by every other person in our district.” In New York State, in a parallel case, the angry neighbours engaged in guerrilla action, whipping out a mower while the offending household was away and levelling every blade of grass in sight.
You begin to see the fragility of the neighbourhood dream. Respecting each other’s rights turns out to have strict limits, defined by the standard American middle class ideal of the way that life should be lived. If you break through the limits, you start a war. As I discovered.
My own trouble was nastier than most. Some of the conflicts are mere slapstick comedy, caused by limits which are not quite clear enough. In Spring, for example, Washington waits for the annual invasion of gipsy moth caterpillars which come like a wriggling, rolling plague consuming anything green in their path, sometimes stripping every leaf off the trees they pass.
The conflict here arises because the local authorities supply helicopters which come swooping out of the sky to spray insecticide over the caterpillars. But some people prefer the caterpillars to the prospect of a poisonous drenching. This spring saw the conflict break out in a local civil war in the normally genteel neighbourhood of Hillbrook just outside Washington.
Residents were told that if they wanted to avoid a spraying they should tie brightly coloured balloons on their garden fences to alert the helicopter pilots. But helicopter spraying is not a fine art; missing out one garden means missing out those on each side as well. So those who wanted their property sprayed started to stage commando raids into the gardens of neighbouring objectors to burst their balloons.
New balloons were hung out in their place, only to be burst again in night-time raids. Verbal abuse followed. One family threatened to kill their neighbour’s pets – “You kill my trees and I’ll kill your cat.” Others banned their children from playing with enemy families. The helicopters finally moved in and drenched almost every garden in the area in a pre-dawn strike when the few remaining balloons were invisible in the dark.
My own trouble started with a dog or, to be more fair, with the family of squat, hairy, ugly and unpleasant people (no, I don’t like them) whose contribution to neighbourhood harmony was to leave this animal chained up in their garden day and night. Barking. Or sometimes yelping. Or just whining. But always causing maximum distress to the family next door – mine.
We tried all kinds of polite requests and suggestions. They just shrugged their squat and hairy shoulders. The normal neighbourly limits meant nothing to them. One afternoon, slaving over a hot word processor, I went round to beg for peace and quiet and was met by a squat, hairy eleven-year-old boy who told me to bug off and leave the neighbourhood. I grabbed hold of his collar and gave him ten seconds of ear-warping abuse.
Unfortunately, this broke through a limit which turned out to be precious to the squat and loathsome ones, which is that if you touch any member of their family you must die as rapidly as possible. Things soon got out of hand.
They called the police who told them I had done nothing wrong. Three particularly muscular and ugly male members of the family then stood in the street and watched the police car leave before turning on my house. “You gonna die. We gonna kill you.” I opened the door and said a lot of mild-mannered middle-class things. Two of them lunged for me while one held them back. My partner appeared on the door step with her pregnant belly. This did not impress them. “You attacked our boy. We gonna kill you.” The one who was doing the restraining decided to join in the lunging and we slammed the door and called the police.
Squad cars and flashing lights soon descended on the house. Large men in blue shirts spent half an hour threatening the squat and ugly intruders with jail if they came near our house again. “Are we safe?” we asked. “Probably,” said the sergeant. “But lock your doors and windows. And don’t go out.”
The next day, we moved away. As we hurried off like refugees, I saw the man opposite. He had seen it all, he said. He had no sympathy – it was our fault for complaining about the dog. “You should leave the dog alone. All those squad cars. You know, that could depress the price of property. This is a nice neighbourhood.”
