Matt Frei - Only in America

Barbara is the boss and although our neighbours include the former head of the American Peace Corps, two senior partners in a big law firm, the CEO of a biotech firm, a nuclear scientist, a deacon and the chief of staff of one of America’s best-known senators, it is Barbara who runs Tilden Street. It was Barbara who gave the reluctant nod to the wooden fence in our front garden, erected to prevent our small children from spilling over onto the street and being run over. When Alice, our fourth child and the only genuine American in our ranks, was born at nearby Sibley Hospital, it became even more important to herd our brood into a secure location. Some of the neighbours couldn’t be deterred from their displeasure. The Frei fence ruined the ‘line’ of the street. It was Barbara who organized the ‘working brunch’ in her house to discuss the controversial school extension at the end of the road. As we sat around her plush living room with adhesive name tags on our shirts, munching on bagels and smoked salmon, Barbara took us patiently through a PowerPoint presentation, outlining each aspect of the extension as if she was planning a counterinsurgency. The detail was as mind-boggling as the earnest-ness with which it was delivered. I snuck out after two hours feeling as if I had walked out in the middle of a High Mass. The next day Barbara accosted me in the street: ‘I know why you had to leave early,’ she said with a mixture of menace and sympathy. ‘The kids must keep you so busy!’

I was seized by paranoia. Had she seen me sneaking out and then chatting to my neighbour for half an hour? Did she know that my wife had taken the kids to the zoo and that my childminding services weren’t even required? Had my facial twitches revealed the fact that I was bored to death by the whole presentation?

Barbara’s PowerPoint briefing is part of a civic spirit that has thrived in parts of Washington – and in much of the rest of America – despite, or perhaps because of, the increasing transience of modern life. Almost none of our neighbours was born in Washington or grew up here. They have all lived elsewhere, many have been posted overseas, and yet they all behave as if they are tenth-generation residents in a Shropshire hamlet. When I first walked down Tilden Street to case the neighbourhood, two future neighbours stopped their cars and asked me what I was doing. The British accent immediately reassured them and news that we had just bought the Tuplings’ house triggered smiles and a wave of questions about our children. One ageing neighbour reiterated Barbara’s call for new blood in the place, making me wonder whether we had just bought into a suburban version of Rosemary’s Baby . But the Tilden Street solidarity has been a refreshing experience. If we forget to lock our front door at night we don’t wake up in a cold sweat. When Penny’s father passed away suddenly in January 2005, Lisa, one of our friends, who was born in Kentucky, turned up on the doorstep with baked rigatoni: ‘In the South it is a tradition to cook for our neighbours when they are busy grieving.’ This was a first. Steve and Betsy’s daughters Olivia and Mona regularly babysit ours. In Rome we lived in a three-hundred-year-old block of flats that was still inhabited by the descendants of the noble family for whom it was originally built. In five years we barely managed to extract a greeting from our neighbours, let alone a bowl of rigatoni. In Hong Kong the couple living below us regularly had screaming rows that went from threats of homicide to protestations of passion, finishing only about three hours before we had to get up with our young children. Our relationships could best be described as AMA – assured mutual annoyance. In Singapore the house next door was deserted apart from those days when it was apparently used by the secret service for interrogations. So the whole neighbourly package on Tilden Street came to us as a novel and welcome surprise.

What also cements the spirit of Tilden Street are the annual rituals, repeated all over America. On Memorial Day, which marks the beginning of a sweltering summer, the Stars and Stripes are displayed in a flurry of patriotic fervour, even though almost everyone in our street is a sworn Democrat and hates George W. Bush. Under the red STOP sign at the top of the street, one wag has added the letters BUSH! Before Halloween the street is transformed into a witch’s cavern, with fake skeletons, giant spider’s webs and glowing skulls adorning every porch and front garden. Even the neighbours without children feel the urge to hang a few cobwebs from their front door or prop a glowing cauldron on the lawn.

A few weeks later, when the last Halloween gourd has rotted, it is time for the Christmas fairy lights. Barbara deploys a twinkling regiment of reindeer and sledges. Her next-door neighbours have gone one better: the single sparkling reindeer, which looks as if it has been irradiated in the forests around Chernobyl, swivels its head in serene and infinite disagreement with the world. The tax attorney on Upton Street makes up for his lack of neighbourly communication with a super-sized inflatable Santa Claus that sways gently in the icy wind and carries a huge see-through sack full of fake snow. There are no limitations on the number of lights or the shapes in this annual extravaganza. You can transform your house into a blinking Camelot. You can show the Nativity in rhythmically flashing colours of the rainbow. Your house can be bright enough to be spotted by the space shuttle. There are no limits to bad taste, but there is one iron rule: the lights must come down by the end of January! You should ignore the advice belted out by Gretchen Wilson, one of America’s most famous country singers, in her hit song ‘Redneck Woman’: ‘I keep my Christmas lights on/on my front porch all year long!’ That would be lowering the tone of the neighbourhood.

Our street is not unusual, but if it seems to embody the civic spirit and ritual promulgated by our neighbour Barbara, the picture is by no means uniform. You need only travel down Washington’s P Street to see what I mean. It starts in the elegant neighbourhood of Georgetown, much of which still displays the quaint cobblestones and tramlines that date back to the late nineteenth century. The architecture here is not much smarter than in other parts of Washington but the tenants have scrubbed up their homes so that they look as if they’re competing for space in The World of Interiors . The streets are lined with manicured trees and cute terraced houses whose flowerpots overflow with geraniums in the summer and mums (chrysanthemums) in the fall. There are no unseemly additions because the Georgetown Historical Association is more draconian at sniffing out any irregularities than a troupe of IRS investigators. Here a bijou two-bedroom house can cost well over a million dollars. Senators, lawyers and lobbyists jostle for space with IMF officials, World Bank gurus and the occasional journalist.

But, oddly for a place with so much money and so many domestic treasures to protect, there is very little privacy. The more opulent the house the less likely it is that the curtains will be drawn or the shutters closed. The lights will be on, even if the owners are nowhere to be seen. Gawping is encouraged. House-proud America wants you to share in their pride. Or at least to feel a little jealous. Since this end of P Street is crawling with police patrol cars and responsible, like-minded neighbours, the assumption is that crimes are less likely to be committed. The open view of a sumptuous interior is seen as an invitation to imitate or get inspired but not as an invitation to smash the window and grab the first Ming vase.

All that changes if you travel a few miles down the same P Street until you cross 10th Street, which was in recent years the front line of gentrification. Here it’s impossible to peek inside the homes, not because the curtains are discreetly drawn but because the broken glass has been replaced by plywood. You can always tell the socio-economic status of the neighbourhood you find yourself in by the amount of furniture outside the front of the house. A faux leather sofa or a dislodged car seat on the front porch is a giveaway. So are metal bars on the front door. There are police cars here as well, but instead of gliding about with silent, reassuring menace they screech around, sirens blaring, lights flashing. In Georgetown the shops sell those pointers to affluence, kitchen tiles, bathroom fittings and fixtures and bedside lamps. At the dodgy end of P Street there are no shops apart from the occasional liquor store, where a terrified Korean couple cower behind iron bars as thick as their son’s arm, and dollar and dime stores that announce they accept social security cheques. The two Washingtons live cheek by jowl, the filthy rich next to the dirt-poor, not rubbing shoulders but giving each other the cold shoulder in close proximity. It happens here and in just about every other American city where there is enough space to sprawl and live among your tribe.