I live in a lovely three bedroom town house which backs onto a beautiful ‘country’ lane (well, it’s South West London but by our standards it’s fairly country!)
I share my neighbourhood with a great mix of people - Irish, Scottish, Norwegian, Asian, Jamaican (we share wedding hats!) and English - I’m also married to ‘Mr Heinz 57’, the product of a British father, Dutch mother and an Australian upbringing.
Then I have my ‘mad neighbour’ - and I’m not using the term lightly. She’s completely batty and I’m now at the point where I’m torn between the guilt I feel for not trying to be her friend (her behaviour is intolerable) and contacting social services to see if I can get her some help.
‘Nutty Nora’ (as my son calls her and, yes, he’s been admonished!), moved in about six years ago. We knew our lovely (and sane) neighbours were desperate to move, so hubbie did the ‘neighbourly thing’ and pulled out all the stops by telling her it was a great location, safe for a woman living alone with a great community spirit.
It’s because of this sense of community, and also the fact that I believe I’m a decent caring person, that I have the dilemma.
All went well for a while and then the rot slowly set in. ‘Nora’ began to accuse us of various crimes. We supposedly pinched an arm-chair from her (locked) garage when she was out, my husband constantly walked around on her flat roof and we left bird food up there.
We’ve recently moved on to the next phase - the noise of our SatNav drives her mad, (we don’t have SatNav and, if we did, what noise?) and other neighbours have been told that a disconnected fish tank in their back garden is keeping her awake at night. Every closed car door “reverberates right through” her and the planes are beginning to talk to her.
I’ve lived through schizophrenia (see older post “In Memory of a Friend” - 25 June 2011) and I know the sadness and danger involved - but when it’s a next door neighbour, and not a close friend or family member, what do you do?
Our dining table on the ground floor looks out to our secluded road and there are many nights when we see the wild haired woman peering through our bay window. My heart bleeds for her - she has no family (or, at least, no-one ever visits), no friends and I’m here surrounded by both in my cushioned world.
As a writer, I ask questions. What’s her history? What brought her to live in a fair sized house at London prices to spend her days, nights, weeks, months in solitude? Maybe she too once had a loving family and something just tipped her over the edge. As the saying goes, “There but for the grace of God …”
I want to help but I don’t know how. At the stage she is now, both mentally and in her isolation, I’d be biting off more than I could chew by befriending her. But what’s my alternative?
A call to social services from anyone other than a family member, and with no hard evidence, would probably fall on deaf ears but I don’t want to sit back and let the inevitable happen. Partly for her sake and partly because our houses join - if she decides to blow herself up, we all go! Flippant, I know, but the truth.
I’ve done the right thing in the past and made ‘wrong number’ calls to her, just to see if she’s OK when we haven’t seen her around for a few days, but I feel I need to be doing more.
I don’t want to be one of those people on the news that did nothing and then act surprised when their neighbour’s topped themselves but it’s proving a difficult one to solve.
So, lovely blog readers and my faithful Twitter followers, what would you do? Am I over-reacting? Should I just accept it’s not my problem? I’d really appreciate your views right now.
Have you checked out “Diary of a Mummy Misfit” on Amazon yet? Libby has the best neighbour in the world, Mrs Sengupta - she’s a laugh a minute, nothing like ‘Nora’!
Now also available in paperback at Lulu.
Now also available in paperback at Lulu.
