Who are the Neighbours?

For many of us fifties children, worrying over the viewpoint of others is natural. We were raised on the fundamental question of life: What will the neighbours say? This was sometimes restated: What on earth must people be thinking?

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Resentment, not gratitude, is rising in Julie, and for this she is sorry. However, she was mowing happily, the night far away from the sunny morning, and now it is over and Laila, not Julie, has saved the day and possibly the farm. Soon, every house will buzz with the knowledge that the new tenant has set the prized mower on fire. Heads will shake as hands reach for the phone. This one is surely worse than those bootleggers—remember them? Soon, Samuel will know that he has a very bad tenant, and will be studying the lease for clauses relating to termination of agreement.

• A Canoer of Shorelines, p. 51

Julie, in A Canoer of Shorelines, worries continually about what people are thinking of her. She wants to be independent, yet routinely squanders her independent moments wondering how people perceive her and her actions. She was not born in the nineteen fifties, but she had the mindset for it.

For many of us fifties children, worrying over the viewpoint of others is natural. We were raised on the fundamental question of life: What will the neighbours say? This was sometimes restated: What on earth must people be thinking?

How many times did we huddle at the scene of our latest crime, shoulders drooping, while a parent stared us down, a fist pressed to one hip, the other hand pointing to the horror we had been perpetrating, while demanding: What will the neighbours say?

Not: Do you seriously believe those paper bags and scotch tape would make an air balloon capable of flying your sister across the first field? From the top of the barn? The social perception, not the science, was challenged. Did they assume that we understood the science, but hadn’t stopped to consider the long-reaching social implications?

So you are five, and decide that sitting on the sheep pen fence with one leg dangling into the pen is a safe and happy practice. As you cling to the fence post screaming and the ram (this referring to the usually volatile male sheep of the herd, with the well-chosen name “Dynamite”) pounds your leg into the boards, a conversation develops.

Mother (from porch): What’s all the yelling?
Child (from fence): My leg! My leg! Dynamite’s got my leg!!!
Mother: Well, that will teach you to play on the sheep pen. Now get off.
Child: My leg! My leg! Dynamite’s got my leg!!!
Mother: Get off the fence then. Before you tear your clothes.
Child (descending from the fence, snivelling): My leg’s all black and blue.
Mother (checking a small bruising below the knee): What were you thinking? My god, what will the neighbours say?
Yet she hugs the child long and hard, rocking back and forth.

Somehow, we knew that behind the gruff exterior beat a heart that was terrified – a heart that cringed at every bruise, a heart that wanted to boot the ram across the sheep pen and did not dare betray its weakness. The neighbours were the personification of their own self-judgment.

So, like good children, we followed the rules and lived secret lives.

No, we did not to go swimming below the bridge because there was a soft bottom there. Instead, we built rafts using splintery old boards, made buoyant by empty sixties-issued bleach jugs, the ones that would deflect bullets. We climbed over sharp tin cans in the dump to find these. We bobbed, swayed, and tumbled, but we did not swim below the bridge.

When I was afraid of the dark, a plaster guardian angel was placed by my bed and I prayed dutifully to it for protection. Then I loaded my cap gun and slipped it under my pillow. When the night creatures surrounded me, I clutched the stock of my trusty six shooter and knew I was safe. I declared the prayer, but not the gun.

We raced along the beams in the hay loft, and sprang from bale to bale. We reported the truth; we were playing in the hay, and we saw the pigeons!

Somehow we survived a riotous game involving shoving one another off the hay wagon, without broken limbs or damage to the spine or brain. We were playing on the wagon!

I have no idea what the neighbours would have said, because we shielded our secret lives from parents, neighbours, and anyone else. That is why I raised my own child with particular care. I knew what he was capable of. Yet I have walked through a grove of trees to applaud the booby traps my son and his cousin had placed. I recall my amazement as a great log went whizzing past my head, released by a trip wire. It was a feat worthy of physicists. They were ten. And like ten year olds they were both proud of their achievement and horrified by the language with which I pointed out the inherent dangers of their cleverness. Oh! What would the neighbours have said if they could have heard me!

The trick, Julie, is not to let the neighbours rule you. Parents used the neighbours only allegorically. What will the neighbours say? translates I have failed to keep you safe, and you are the world to me. The neighbours are not lurking in the shadows, judging. You are judging them with your eyes, and judging yourself through their eyes. Embrace the love and the fear behind the question of the past, and get on with your adult life.
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That is all the time I have. I have to find an Internet signal, and get this jumbled reflection posted. What will the neighbours say if I am late?