Choose Community

Trudi Murray, a rare gem from South West London shares her thoughts, and an inspiring illustration, about what community means to her…

I once had the good fortune to live on a really friendly street. Just by waving and smiling and saying hello, my family and I were suddenly part of things. By the time we moved out, we’d lent and borrowed all manner of household stuff, had meals cooked for us when our babies were tiny, shared BBQs and beer, swapped seeds from gardens and allotments. We’d inherited an old Victorian front door from number 78, and a BMX that turned out to be rare, and worth a bob or two. We’d looked after cats, tomato plants and patio containers. We’d kept an eye out, and in turn been watched over. I’d even been taught how to reverse park by lovely old Ron from the flats, who was a retired chauffeur to London’s rich and famous. It was a brilliant, alive, flawed community (it had its ups and downs), and we loved it.

When we moved house, some place a bit bigger, just a few streets away, the local delivery man commented wryly how we’d gone up in the world. It made me a little sad. I confess, it didn’t feel like an improvement. We had more space, and a real garden. We had trees! But welcoming as everyone was on our new street – and they really were – it didn’t feel like home. I missed my own community, the one I’d just left, and I kept going back. Eventually Ron’s wife pulled me up by my boot-strings. Didn’t I have a home to go to? Well, yes. I did.

So home I went, determined to make the effort, to try to get that community feeling in our new place. Gradually, it’s happened. It’s not been easy. Maybe I just haven’t got the time like I used to, to lean on the garden wall and chat. Maybe the deep-slowing-down-of-the-days, that sense of domestic repetition, brought about by looking after small children at home, is actually over. Maybe I’m not so hungry for company any more. I’m not sure what the difference is, but I do think that community – caring about where you live, is a choice. It’s much easier not to bother. Sometimes I don’t. I plug in my headphones and stand waiting in the school playground like an island. The music’s good, but it’s not community. It’s not what my Mum taught me, which was to wave, smile, say hello, and I don’t think it’s sending my kids a good message. For me, it’s saying: Be separate! Be alone! I know better than that. My lovely Mum, always the first person to share a few words, or a quiet joke, with the most unlikely of the neighbours, would go mad. And what’s more, I once had the good fortune to live on a really friendly street. Forgetting all that inheritance and experience would be a loss, and a shame.

So this is what I think, for myself especially. If you’ve enjoyed it, share it. Make the effort. Practice community. Every day, if you can. Wave, smile, say hello. It’s a quiet discipline, but who likes a show off? No one will notice you propping up that lost teddy bear on the nearest wall. Nor will anyone care about your habit of picking up stray drinks cans and popping them in your recycling bin. Not everyone will clock you chatting to the postman (although be careful, someone might!). People will almost certainly welcome you making them some biscuits, or bread, or whatever you like doing best, but equally they might be bewildered. But keep on choosing community in all the little things. Most people will like it, and most people will respond in time. It’s a revolution, it’s kindness and it’s simply a choice. It pays you back though, sometimes in beer and BBQs, but sometimes in the fact that seeing a load of different people coming together to share what’s great about being alive is nice. It’s fun. Anyone can do it, even me, and the best thing is this. It makes you smile.