The territorial imperative in practice

It’s curious the impact neighbours can have on your life.

Right now, I’m thinking of the neighbours at the front of our house, a pair of house martins, and one from next door, a Siamese cat.

The house martins I mentioned once before, when they turned up a few weeks ago and moved into the nest over our front door. It’s unlikely to be the same pair who were there last year, though one of the two of them may well have hatched there then. Since one of the things they’ve done is drive away a pair of larger house martins who clearly had their eye on the same nest, I can’t help suspecting that this is an ungrateful son or daughter taking over the parents’ place and kicking them out.

Kids, right? Think they’re owed a living.

My suspicions are reinforced by the fact that the female of the pair isn’t just smaller than the male, as they tend to be, but far smaller. Clearly a very young lady. Perhaps just a bit too sure of herself, a bit too convinced of her right to call the shots around the place.

We had a neighbour like that once. That was when we were living in Luton. She used to have parties that went on from about 10:00 at night until about noon the next day. We assumed that they were cocaine-fuelled, if only because I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to keep going that loudly for that long without some artificial stimulant to give them the energy.

The noise they made tended to follow a cyclical pattern. There’d be some silence when we’d think that we might perhaps be allowed to sleep. Then the voices would start up again, growing louder and louder as the revellers fell out with each other, until they were shouting abuse. That would sometimes culminate in the noise of breaking crockery, weeping, or loud lovemaking – well, sex, anyway - before returning to silence. Then rinse and repeat.

This was several years into the austerity programme of the Tory government, so the resource-starved police couldn’t do anything about the noise. One policewoman I was talking to did actually say, “Good God! I can hear her down the phone line!” That was through the intervening wall. 

The policewoman was sympathetic but couldn’t help.

I’m glad to say that the young lady who has moved in over our front door is far more attractive and far more well behaved than that neighbour from hell. But pretty or not, she and her partner are just as good at making their presence felt. Not, I’m glad to say, at night. During the day, though, if we have the gall to step outside, or merely open the front door, they like to share their views on the matter with us.

The house martin making her displeasure known to us
Small in size but highly communicative

Now, I had a limited education, and was never taught house martin. So when they go and perch on the phone line that crosses our yard and chatter away to each other, to any other passing house martins, and above all at us, I really can’t make out what precisely they’re saying. But I have no trouble with the gist. It’s “who the heck do you think you are, wandering around this place as though you own it?” I’m cleaning up the language here a bit, but I think they add a request roughly translatable as “go away” though I suspect expressed somewhat more forcibly. And who can blame them?

It’s clear that they regard the place as theirs and our irruption into it as a gross and unwarranted invasion of territory, bitterly to be deplored. And they tell us so. Loudly and at length.

Another creature that makes that kind of point indisputably clear is our assault poodle Toffee. She now weighs in at not a terribly long way off 4 kilos, making her a no doubt daunting presence to any passing creature the size of a squirrel or smaller. But like Queen Elizabeth I, she has the heart and stomach of a King, and she thinks foul scorn that anyone should dare to invade the borders of her realm.

That was made clear to me when I saw her, flat on the ground at the bottom of our garden, barking into the hedge while her tail flailed from side to side so fast that I swear, had we been able to attach a generator to it, we could have driven a dishwasher off it.

Toffee making her displeasure known to the Siamese
Small in size but not in heart

The object of her anger? The Siamese cat from next door.

The previous occupants of our house had no animals, so the Siamese clearly got used to wandering in and out of the garden as the whim took him. Toffee, though, has no intention of allowing such liberties. So there she was, barking her heart out to defend our territory. Sorry, correct that: her territory.

It really is an imperative, isn’t it? The protection of territory. Humans have that instinct too. It inflames anti-immigrant rhetoric: we don’t want him here, he’s foreign. Or, indeed, racist thinking: we don’t want him here, he’s different. Or the American or British hostility towards international institutions: we don’t want to be with them, we’re different.

Natural, I suppose. Though also a bit sad.

After all, aren’t we supposed to have bigger brains and more powerful intellects than house martins or poodles?