Cynthia On Neighbours.

Letter From The Other Side from Cynthia.

Dear Del,
How have you fared in the great lottery of neighbours?

Everyone I know seems to have at least one they would delight in seeing a ‘For Sale’ notice adorning their front yard.

One acquaintance of ours has a neighbour living opposite who seems to have developed a fixation about her small innocent dog which lives mainly indoors and is asleep by 8p.m. and not allowed out until 8 a.m. Her neighbour is convinced however that the small dog, one of many other assorted breeds and sizes in the vicinity is to blame for all the barking and disruptions to her sleep. She is firing off letters of complaint to the council every other week and the council officers dutifully come rapping on the door regularly. The officers at last seem to believe she has an obsessive problem of some kind which appears to stem from years back when their husbands worked together in the same bank.

Another acquaintance is robbed of her sleep by a party animal beside her. Her walls vibrate with the pounding and the heavy thump, thump of music combining with the raucous voices of the many unsavoury types who gather to booze and stomp their nights away until the dawn.

Yet another friend moved to Ballarat to be closer to her family. She settled into a pleasant group of single story units each with a lovely little garden around them. Ballarat is noted for its cool climate and lovely gardens.
My friend’s luck ran out with her neighbour. She is an elderly widow. After years of living on a farm her children settled her into the town unit but the old lady is still terrified of fires. Because of this fear she cuts every plant in the garden down to knee level. The problem is she doesn’t just cut her own plants she hacks everyone else’s too with her blunt old kitchen knife leaving them with the appearance a Beaver has moved into the neighbourhood.
It is a constant battle for my friend to keep her away from precious young roses, camellias and crepe myrtles which have already been reduced to stumps at least once since she has been there.

Teddy and I have decided after the most recent arrival in our court we have won the wooden spoon.

In the past we have had very difficult neighbours. One in the country threatened to bulldoze the local hall flat when he became enraged with jealousy; another would pick up his rifle when he had forgotten to take his medicine and begin to take pot-shots at anything moving in the paddocks behind our homes. No innocent bird, lamb, steer or cyclist riding along the disused railway track road was safe. The police eventually took both of them away.

We moved back to the town to find we had a woman living beside us who would spend hours talking about ‘Bobby’ her weasel faced son who lay about on her couch all day in some chemically induced haze and from whom she appeared to believe the sun and moon only existed to shine on him.

When I ventured into our back garden I would creep along crouching low to keep my head down below the fence level. No matter how hard I tried, she would sense I was out there and I would be assailed with the inevitable stream of “Bobby’s’ latest gormless doings. I came to detest the sound of his name and was at the point of seriously contemplating purchasing an army camouflage suit when we moved once more.

We’ve endured the type of character who feels free to walk into our house without knocking and during the 1960’s and 70’s a couple of terribly superior know all English migrants who complained about everything they found displeasing about Australia. The complaints were aired often. This behaviour usually stems from homesickness which can really only be cured by returning from whence they came. A relief for them and those of us they leave behind.

Times have changed but neighbours haven’t. Now we have a gentleman, a retired car salesman and who still tinkers with old cars to get them just sufficiently roadworthy to be put back out amongst the unsuspecting public. He takes up sixty percent of the parking in the court with his vehicles. Endowed with a salesman’s penchant for speed talking he is always willing and able to pass on the daily gossip bulletin to any unfortunate he can corner.

Our immediate neighbours on one side are sisters who have a major drinking problem. We are often woken in the middle of the night by the flashing lights of an ambulance, police or fire brigade. They don’t seem to care which one they call they just enjoy the fuss. Mostly it is for false alarms but occasionally the ambulance drivers take them somewhere to dry out and we have a certain amount of peace for a few days. We are becoming used to them because when they are sober, they are very pleasant; they just aren’t sober very often and it is a worry when we smell gas and we know they have passed out somewhere in their unit.

In addition we now have a family who in the three months since they arrived have turned their nice tidy house, a house supplied by the government, into a rubbish tip and a few of us suspect various items of our missing garden lights, birdbaths and garden ornaments could be found amongst the accumulation of objects littering their yard. The father decided to enjoy his weekend last week and setting the sort of example to his three sons I suspect he will set for the next few years, went on a drunken rampage along the road, tossing bins into gardens and kicking and jumping on the cars a few unfortunate owners had, in their naivety, parked on the street.
The police were called by at least three of us but of course they came too late to catch him.

I hoped I wouldn’t grow into the sort of old person who would think the world is going crazy but having thought about it overnight while listening to the drunken girls next door squealing and shouting as they frolicked in the moonlight on their back lawn, I think it is too late to stop myself. I do think our part of the world is going crazy.

As Teddy has said in the past many times ‘the whole world is mad except thee and me…and I tend to wonder about thee sometimes.’

I heard this week the television show ‘Neighbours’ will turn twenty- five this year. I’ve never watch a single episode of it but I wonder if it has followed the degeneration of our neighbourhoods faithfully or if it puts a nice shiny gloss on Australian life in the pretend neighbourhood the actors live in?

Where did our dreams of love and peace go? Maybe it is our decade which is to blame for this awful spiral of descent into such ugliness. Do you think it will ever be undone Del, I hope so?
‘All the world needs is love’, we sang. Bother that, we need more law enforcement, respect for each other and self control.

Love from perplexed ‘flower child' friend
Cynthia.