Julia and I went and hung around in our raincoats, pretending to have lost something on the roundabout, and we spied on him from behind the ragged branches of the willow tree, which were actually pathetic for spying because they were too thin and straggly, and only covered us down to our waists.
We walked over and started looking for our lost thing on the wet pavement outside number 13, and we found out that the boy’s name was Diego, and then we completely forgot about our lost thing, and when Diego asked us the next day if we’d found it, we had no idea what he was talking about.
Looking back, Diego was a chubby twelve-year-old, but he was three years older than us, and we thought he was the bee’s knees with his dark Spanish skin and his black eyes. His sister was called Paloma which means Dove, though she wasn’t at all bird-like, and this possibly wasn’t the right name for her.
‘Which animal does she remind you of?’ I said to Julia.
‘I’m not saying,’ she replied.
But we burst out laughing anyway.
Then we felt bad, and Julia said, ‘She has a lovely face,’ which is what people say about fat girls.
My mother made a large dish of lasagne for the new arrivals, as was her custom. My father was the Neighbourhood Watch man, and she considered this the least she could do. She handed it over at the front door, looking up the hall, hoping for an invitation.
‘It was quite bare inside,’ she said on her return, ‘from what I could see.’
‘They have only been there an hour,’ said my father. ‘Anyhow, they’ll have different customs.’
‘Yes, but I imagine they’ll have furniture,’ I said.
A few days later, Diego’s foreign mother committed the error of not returning my mother’s lasagne dish, one she’d bought on holiday in Brittany in 1998, which said along the bottom, Quimper, Bretagne.
‘You don’t expect that of a new neighbour,’ said my mother, who didn’t have the necessary imagination to understand people.
Julia went to number 13 for the missing lasagne dish, with her smile. On the way back, she put a little sprig of yellow wintersweet flowers from our garden in the dish for my mother, so that when she came through the door, the kitchen smelled of petals. She just had that way with her. I could have thought for a hundred years and I would never have thought of putting yellow flowers in my mother’s lasagne dish.
As I write my story here in La Higuera in the south of Spain, though Hedley Green is over two thousand kilometres away, I can smell the wintersweet flowers in the front garden of number 1, to the left of the front door, and I can smell Julia’s soft fair hair, washed with Timotei shampoo, still wet, over her pale pink dressing gown, waiting to be dried. We’d sit, legs apart, us two, and sometimes Angela Dunnett from the crescent, and Julia’s slightly dizzy school-friend, Amy Atkins, drying and plaiting and crimping, and taking turns to be the person at the back of the line who had nobody to play with her hair.
‘If Angela Dunnett wanted to frizz her hair, she would need quimpers,’ I said, looking at the lasagne dish from Quimper.
‘She can’t help having a speech impediment,’ said my mother. ‘So don’t be a clever clogs.’
I felt ashamed – but I also found it a bit funny that Angela Dunnett, who was so full of herself, couldn’t say her rs. She was only two years older than us, but she acted like she knew everything there was to know about the world.
Julia said that Diego’s mother was called Lola Alvárez, trying to make the Spanish sounds come out just right. The name made the most gorgeous sounds I’d ever heard. Also, Julia added, she thought Lola Alvárez would end up being a very good neighbour; she had a lovely smile.
But three months later, Julia’s prediction had not come true on account of the fact that there were weeds growing all over the front garden of number 13, which quite ruined the appearance of the crescent, and my mother felt that, if the Neighbourhood Watch man couldn’t say this to Lola Alvárez, who could?
My father was dispatched, but when he came back, he said it hadn’t quite come out how he meant it to.
‘Did you say anything at all?’ said my mother.
‘I said that an English man’s home is his castle,’ he said.
‘Well, I suppose that’s a start,’ my mother said.
‘I wondered if perhaps they don’t know the difference between weeds and flowers,’ said my father. ‘It’s probably different over there.’
He pointed towards the level crossing, as if Spain was behind the railway line.
‘Then I shall tell them the difference, Stanley,’ said my mother.
I was there, cringing, at her side, when she did so, patting her curly hair and going pink on her cheeks even though she had paley-cream make-up on.
‘Your weeds are my flowers,’ Diego’s mother said to my mother, winking, with her hands in the pockets of her baggy dungarees, smiling in the way she had that made her eyes wrinkle up at the edges.
My mother never learnt to wink. Nor did she wish to. Neither did she have any understanding of dungarees for adults.
The weeds went on growing – white, blue, yellow and red – in the garden of number 13, and I loved the look of them.
Your weeds are my flowers – I am still thinking it years after.
I knew I was going to love Diego’s mother from the word go. Diego’s father, Fermín, was large and dark, a top scientist, who had come over to run the huge science laboratory out in the Tattershall Industrial Park. His mother had found a job teaching Spanish in the Sixth Form College in Hinton, and she wore her hair in plaits, with a rose fixed to each elastic. Fermín would pull her face towards him by holding her two plaits, and give her mouth-to-mouth kisses in the kitchen. I found this completely transfixing.
My mother used to lean back against the big wall of my father’s dark chest, and he’d put his arms around her, clasped together like a belt at the front. I knew that nothing bad could ever happen to us because he was here, and he would save us, whatever happened.
‘We all need a Saviour,’ he used to say, smiling at us.
‘No we don’t,’ Pierre would answer, and this pained my father, the way he loved to say no to everything.
But now a saviour was coming.
Not down to earth from heaven.
But over the border from Rwanda.
With the name, Melchior, like my father, like one of the three wise kings.
He was a Hutu, like us.
And this Hutu was going to be president of Burundi.
Although Hutu people weren’t presidents, not ordinarily, not ever so far.
I’ll never forget the day that Melchior Ndadaye took power. The hope we felt in our new Hutu president, a hope that blew in the smoke of a thousand fires cooking a thousand celebration chickens, rising above the conical roofs of our huts on the collines above Bujumbura.
‘We have a choice to love the Tutsi even if they’ve killed half the people we loved,’ my father told us. ‘We have a choice to love our neighbour.’
We nodded because we hated to disappoint our father.
‘And who is your neighbour?’ said our father.
‘Anyone