The case which has occupied the courts recently of the man who beat a
tin can as a way of retaliating upon a neighbour who strummed the
piano touches one of the most difficult problems of urban life. We
who live in the cities all have neighbours, and for the most part
"thin partitions do our realms divide." It is true that, however
thin the walls, we seldom know our neighbours. If the man who has
lived next door to me in a northern suburb for the last half-dozen
years stopped me in the Strand or came and sat down beside me in a
restaurant I should not, as the saying is, know him from Adam. In
this vast whirlpool of London he goes his way and I go mine, and I
daresay our paths will not cross though we go on living beside each
other until one or other of us takes up a more permanent abode.
I do not know whether he is short or tall, old or young, or anything
about him, and I daresay he is in the same state of contented
ignorance about me. I hear him when he pokes the fire on his side
late at night, and I suppose he hears me when I poke the fire on my
side. Our intercourse is limited to the respective noises we make
with the fire-irons, the piano, and so on. When he has friends to
visit him we learn something about him from the sounds they make, the
music they affect, and the time they go away (often unconscionably
late). But apart from that vague intimation, my neighbour might be
living in Mars and I might be living in Sirius, for all we know, or
care, about each other. Perhaps some day his house (or mine) will be
on fire, and then I daresay we shall become acquainted. But apart
from some such catastrophe as this there seems no reason why we
should ever exchange a word on this side of the grave.
It is not pride or incivility on either side that keeps us remote
from each other. It is simply our London way. People are so
plentiful that they lose their identity. By the Whitestone Pond at
Hampstead not long ago I met my old friend John O'Connor--"Long
John," as he was affectionately called in the House of Commons, of
which he was for so long one of the most popular members--and he
said, in reply to inquiries, that he was living in Frognal, had lived
there for years, "next door to Robertson Nicoll--not that I should
know him," he added, "for I don't think I have ever set eyes on him."
And I should have expected to find that Sir William was no better
informed about his neighbour than his neighbour was about him. In
London men are as lonely as oysters, each living in his own shell.
We go out into the country to find neighbours. If the man next door
took a cottage a mile away from me in the country I should probably
know all about him, his affairs, his family, his calling, and his
habits inside a week, and be intimate enough with him in a fortnight
to borrow his garden-shears or his bill-hook. This is not always so
idyllic as it seems. Village life can be poisoned by neighbours
until the victim pines for the solitude of a London street, where
neighbours are so plentiful that you are no more conscious of their
individual existence than if they were blackberries on a hedgerow.
On the occasions on which we become acutely conscious of our
neighbours, the temptation is to think ill of them. For example, we
were all late the other morning, and Matilda, whose function it is to
keep us up to time, explained that she had overslept herself because
of those people next door. Four o'clock it was, m'm, before the din
ended. Some of us had lost count of the hours at two and others at
three but Matilda was emphatic. She had heard the last of the
revellers go away in a car, and had looked at her watch and it was
exactly four. No one disputed her word. It was gratifying to know
that the hour was four rather than three. If it had been five we
should doubtless have been still more gratified. It would have made
the case against those people next door still blacker. And it can
never be too black for their deserts. Our neighbours are at once too
near to us and too far away from us. If they were under our own roof
we might be able to make something of them; if they were only in the
next street we could forget all about them. But they are just far
enough away to escape our celestial influence and quite close enough
to be a nuisance.
They are always in the wrong. Consider the hours they keep--entirely
different from our hours and therefore entirely reprehensible. If
they do not offend by their extravagant piety they shock you by their
levity. Perhaps they play tennis on Sunday, or perhaps they don't,
and in either case they are vulnerable to criticism. They always
manage to be gay when you are sleepy. They take a delight in going
away for more holidays than you can possibly have, or perhaps they
don't go away for holidays at all, in which case their inferiority is
clearly established. If they are not guilty of criminal waste, they
can be convicted of shabby parsimony. They either dress too
luxuriously or do not dress luxuriously enough for the decencies of
the neighbourhood. We suspect that they are no better than they
should be. Observe the frequency with which their servants come and
go. Depend upon it, they find those people next door impossible.
Their habits and their friends, the music they play, the pets that
they keep, the politics they affect, the newspapers they read--all
these things confirm our darkest fears.
It is possible to believe anything about them--especially the worst.
What are those strange sounds that penetrate the wall in the small
hours? Surely that is the chink of coin! And those sudden shrieks
and gusts of laughter? Is there not an alcoholic suggestion about
such undisciplined hilarity? We know too much about them, and do not
know enough. They are revealed to us in fragments, and in putting
the fragments together we do not spare them. There is nothing so
misleading as half heard and half-understood scraps. And the curious
thing about those people next door is that, if you ever come to know
them, you find they are not a bit like what you thought they were.
You find to your astonishment that they have redeeming features.
Perhaps they find that we have redeeming features too. For the
chastening truth is that we all play the rôle of those people next
door to somebody. We are all being judged, and generally very
unfavourably judged, on evidence which, if we knew it, would greatly
astonish us. It might help us to be a little more charitable about
those people next door if we occasionally remembered that we are
those people next door ourselves.
But the St. John's Wood case illustrates the frail terms on which
immunity from annoyance by neighbours is enjoyed. Two musicians
dwelling in one house gave lessons to pupils on the piano, and the
man next door, who objected to his peace being disturbed in this way,
took his revenge by banging on tin cans, and otherwise making things
unpleasant for the musicians. I do not know what the law said on the
subject. It may be admitted that the annoyances were equal in
effect, but they were not the same in motive. In the one case the
motive was the reasonable one of earning an honest living: there was
no deliberate intention of being offensive to the neighbours. In the
other case, the motive was admittedly to make a demonstration against
the neighbours. What is to be done in such circumstances? It is not
an offence to play the piano in one's own house even for a living.
On the other hand, it is hard, especially if you don't like music, or
perhaps even more if you do, to hear the scales going on the piano
next door all day.
The question of motive does not seem to be relevant. If my neighbour
makes noises which render my life intolerable, it is no answer to say
that he makes them for a living and without intending to destroy my
peace. He does destroy my peace, and it is no comfort to be assured
that he does not mean to. Hazlitt insisted that a man might play the
trombone in his own house all day if he took reasonable measures to
limit the annoyance to his neighbours; but Hazlitt had probably never
lived beside a trombone. I find the argument is leading me on to the
side of the tin-can gentleman, and I don't want it to do that, for my
sympathies are with the musicians. And yet----
Well, let us avoid a definite conclusion altogether and leave the
incident to make us generally a little more sensitive about the
feelings of our neighbours. They cannot expect us never to play the
piano, never to sit up late, never to be a little hilarious, any more
than we can expect never to be disturbed by them. But the amenities
of neighbourliness require that we should mutually avoid being a
nuisance to each other as much as we can. And if our calling compels
us to be a little noisy, we should bear that in mind when we choose a
house and when we choose the room in which we make our noises. The
perfect neighbour is one whom we never see and whom we never hear
except when he pokes the fire.