I lived in a,1960's terrace when I was married, one neighbour was lovely, but the other side had an old man in when I moved in. He was one of those who you couldn't open your front door without him being outside wanting to know everything. My back garden was a wreck when I moved in, I had a skip booked & my family came & helped strip it back to bare earth ready for someone to come & put a fence all round & pave it, my mum looked up & noticed him stood at the window trousers round his ankles having a wank. Not long after ds was born, he really stepped up the being at the front door every time we arrived or left the house, I couldn't even go to the bin without him commenting. One day I had been to Mothercare to buy a travel cot & baby walker, it was a boiling hot day, ds had been up half the night teething, I had had to queue for ages to pay & was absolutely shattered & wasn't in the best of moods. When I arrived home he was at the front door again & commented something about I must have plenty of money because I was always out shopping. On a normal day, I would have just ignored it, but I flipped & gave him a mouthful, said hadn't he got anything better to do than spy on me & to mind his own fucking business, threw everything I had bought in the door & slammed it so hard the door nearly came off it's hinges. I never thought anything more of it until after tea I went to put all the packaging in the bin, opened the front door & there was a policeman stood in the doorway of his house. I tried to ask what had happened but as usual he wouldn't tell me. Our kitchen was at the front of the house & as I was loading the dishwasher saw an undertakers van go past, we lived on a walkway with just a path separating us from the houses opposite, some time after me giving him a mouthful he must have died, his daughter lived on the other side of the estate but couldn't have had a key & when she couldn't get in contact had rung the police who had broken in & found him dead. I spent a week expecting a knock on the door to arrest me for causing him to die.
When I was a kid, we lived in an old terraced house, four houses to a yard, I loved it, I was the only child in the yard & was spoilt rotten by all the neighbours. My mum & dad had moved in not long after they had got married & everyone had taken them under their wing. One neighbour was a painter & decorator & taught my mum & dad to wallpaper, another came & checked my mum had cooked the turkey enough the first time she cooked a Christmas dinner, they were proper neighbours. At one house there was a lady who had never married & her mum, she was like a second mum to me, she babysat if my mum & dad went out, was a fantastic dressmaker & made me lovely dresses, I even went round nearly every morning for breakfast. She had a caravan at the seaside & her & another friend who was on her own took me & her niece away for the weekend, she was my mum's best friend. When I was one I was diagnosed with hip dysplasia & spent nearly a year in spica pots, her & her mum helped my mum during the day when my dad was at work keeping me entertained & playing with me. It was more than just a yard with four houses, it was like an extended family, at Easter & whitsuntide it was tradition that I always had new clothes & went round all the neighbours to show them who all gave me 50p, they bought me birthday & Christmas presents. When my brother was born, he was really poorly & spent a month in NICU, all the neighbours looked after me so my mum & dad could go to the hospital to visit him & for my mum to learn the best way to feed him ready for coming home. The old saying that it takes a village to raise a child is true, I had everything I needed in that yard, it was my world, I had love & security that there was always someone looking out for me. We moved to where my mum lives now when I was seven, it broke my heart leaving there even though my mum & dad continued to be friends with everyone who lived there & I saw them regularly. Even now fifty years later when I think about my childhood the house we moved to was just a house, that little terraced house was home.