I live on an odd little stub of a street, in the permanently unfashionable bit between Clapham and Battersea.
It’s steep and narrow, impossible to park on, covered with weeds in the summer and a confetti of litter that traffic from the Wandsworth Road blows down it.
But for the last eight years you could not have paid me to live anywhere else in London – for a very special reason this street is the site of the happiest period of my life, one which has just come to an end.
Ten years ago, my then-boyfriend Will was hunting for his first home when he got a text from his best friend, Billy: the house next door to his had just come up for sale, should he have a look around it?
A two-up two-down, just within his budget (this was when a first-time buyer with no parental doorstep could potentially buy within the M25) and next door to one of his oldest friends. In property terms, it was a unicorn.
But Will still weighed the decision carefully before making an offer. Billy had just got married to Rachel, would it be claustrophobic to have him living right there? On the other hand, they were excellent cooks – would they consider building a hatch through their kitchen wall to his?
The two friends had an honest conversation. “We might just need to have our own space – sometimes”, said Billy. Will made an offer and moved in. A few years later, I moved in too.
Growing up I spent far too much time watching Friends and Neighbours, both shows which suggested life as an adult was a series of effortless, unplanned social interactions.
Characters popped in through unlocked doors and hung out on each other’s sofas, they rummaged in each other’s fridges, borrowed bicycle pumps, chatted over fences.
Perhaps it was absorbing this unrealistic idea of adult life at an impressionable age that made living next door to Rachel and Billy so appealing. It felt like we had found a comfortable halfway point in the transition from cohabiting with housemates to living alone as a couple.
Our routines began to overlap. There were rituals like Sunday night curries or Saturday morning sausage sandwiches, but it was the many unscheduled moments that knit us together properly. (Perhaps it also helped that Billy and Rachel are veterans when it comes to strong neighbourly relations. The two grew up next door to each other on the Isle of Man before getting together in their early twenties – think Dawson’s Creek, but windier and with more cows.)
Around the time Billy and Rachel’s first child was born, we dispensed with front door formalities and installed a gate in our garden fence so we could nip back and forth more easily. As their kids grew older they would walk to the gate, shout ‘KNOCK KNOCK’ and toddle into our kitchen to swipe a bit of toast, ‘help’ with some cooking or sit in the old bathtub we had moved and plumbed into the garden.
The gate unfortunately also allowed Billy and Rachel’s dog Piper, a Jack Russell with a bark that could shatter glass, easy access to our lawn where she could leave small love gifts on the grass.
For a time Billy and Rachel insisted it was a fox, until one night when we were burgled and the responding police officer asked if we could turn on the back garden lights to check for points of entry. They lit up to reveal a small spotted dog, mid-excretion.
Sometimes Rachel and Billy would come for dinner at ours and we would find her, long after they’d left, burrowed into an armchair. But Piper was also a cuddly, heat seeking creature who we borrowed on cold evenings.
All four of us experienced great highs and crashing lows in the eight years we lived next door to each other – job crises, family dramas, bereavements, the time Rachel and Billy’s plumbing went kaput and she had to sneak behind Will on a work Zoom with a full potty.
But whatever the news, they were generally the first to know about it. We could be at each other’s kitchen tables in under a minute, with wine, to thrash it out. That physical proximity, the feeling we were doing life together, changed the shape of our friendship.
At some point, they stopped being friends and became family.
One of us had to move at some point, even though we frequently kicked the subject down the garden path. The two houses are old workers cottages with small proportions but over the years we had stretched and reconfigured them, building into the gardens and carving out space upstairs.
In the end, it wasn’t a desire for space but a job that did it. Last spring, Billy appeared at our kitchen window looking stricken. He had received a teaching job offer in the West Country he could not turn down. They were leaving London.
By then a family of five (six when you include the dog) they made themselves scarce for viewings. We caught sight of buyers going back and forth, squinting up and down the street, possibly wondering why there were so many weeds and crisp packets. Could we be commune friends with those people? We wondered.
The estate agent had to field quite a few confused questions about the gate. The nice couple who eventually bought the house would later tell me they assumed it was some sort of historic easement, but insisted they were pleased when they found out its real use: “It’s a sign of friendship and neighbourly spirit”.
A few weeks before Billy and Rachel moved out, we threw a big farewell party at our house. On moving day there were a lot of tears – in the garden, in the kitchen, on the street as the removal van pulled up.
In the weeks after they left, I kept hearing a phantom ‘hiyaaa Lulu’ from the kids whenever I opened our front door – they would often knock and say goodbye on their way to school. But we’ve already booked two weekends at their new house; the blended life might be over, but the roots of a well tested friendship remain.
Meanwhile, our new neighbours are coming over for drinks next week.
