in the forests around Chernobyl, swivels its head in serene and infinite disagreement with the world. The tax attorney on Upton Street makes up for his lack of neighbourly communication with a super-sized inflatable Santa Claus that sways gently in the icy wind and carries a huge see-through sack full of fake snow. There are no limitations on the number of lights or the shapes in this annual extravaganza. You can transform your house into a blinking Camelot. You can show the Nativity in rhythmically flashing colours of the rainbow. Your house can be bright enough to be spotted by the space shuttle. There are no limits to bad taste, but there is one iron rule: the lights must come down by the end of January! You should ignore the advice belted out by Gretchen Wilson, one of America’s most famous country singers, in her hit song ‘Redneck Woman’: ‘I keep my Christmas lights on/on my front porch all year long!’ That would be lowering the tone of the neighbourhood.
Our street is not unusual, but if it seems to embody the civic spirit and ritual promulgated by our neighbour Barbara, the picture is by no means uniform. You need only travel down Washington’s P Street to see what I mean. It starts in the elegant neighbourhood of Georgetown, much of which still displays the quaint cobblestones and tramlines that date back to the late nineteenth century. The architecture here is not much smarter than in other parts of Washington but the tenants have scrubbed up their homes so that they look as if they’re competing for space in The World of Interiors. The streets are lined with manicured trees and cute terraced houses whose flowerpots overflow with geraniums in the summer and mums (chrysanthemums) in the fall. There are no unseemly additions because the Georgetown Historical Association is more draconian at sniffing out any irregularities than a troupe of IRS investigators. Here a bijou two-bedroom house can cost well over a million dollars. Senators, lawyers and lobbyists jostle for space with IMF officials, World Bank gurus and the occasional journalist.
But, oddly for a place with so much money and so many domestic treasures to protect, there is very little privacy. The more opulent the house the less likely it is that the curtains will be drawn or the shutters closed. The lights will be on, even if the owners are nowhere to be seen. Gawping is encouraged. House-proud America wants you to share in their pride. Or at least to feel a little jealous. Since this end of P Street is crawling with police patrol cars and responsible, like-minded neighbours, the assumption is that crimes are less likely to be committed. The open view of a sumptuous interior is seen as an invitation to imitate or get inspired but not as an invitation to smash the window and grab the first Ming vase.
All that changes if you travel a few miles down the same P Street until you cross 10th Street, which was in recent years the front line of gentrification. Here it’s impossible to peek inside the homes, not because the curtains are discreetly drawn but because the broken glass has been replaced by plywood. You can always tell the socio-economic status of the neighbourhood you find yourself in by the amount of furniture outside the front of the house. A faux leather sofa or a dislodged car seat on the front porch is a giveaway. So are metal bars on the front door. There are police cars here as well, but instead of gliding about with silent, reassuring menace they screech around, sirens blaring, lights flashing. In Georgetown the shops sell those pointers to affluence, kitchen tiles, bathroom fittings and fixtures and bedside lamps. At the dodgy end of P Street there are no shops apart from the occasional liquor store, where a terrified Korean couple cower behind iron bars as thick as their son’s arm, and dollar and dime stores that announce they accept social security cheques. The two Washingtons live cheek by jowl, the filthy rich next to the dirt-poor, not rubbing shoulders but giving each other the cold shoulder in close proximity. It happens here and in just about every other American city where there is enough space to sprawl and live among your tribe.
That America is a melting pot is a myth. If anything, this country is a vast archipelago of exclusive neighbourhoods surviving in an ocean of no-go zones. Washington, DC, boasts the U Street Corridor, which is a growing island of prosperity in a swamp of grinding poverty. We live in the so-called ‘Northwest Corridor’. It is green, leafy, predominantly white and overwhelmingly middle class. The majority of parents send their children to private schools, which is why 80 per cent of the students at the state primary school opposite our house are bussed in from the poor black neighbourhoods of Southeast Washington on the other side of town.
Many would disagree that the civic spirit is alive and well in America, even if only in bubbles across the country. The influential social historian Robert Putnam believes that civic America has been killed off with the passing of the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. Television, the internet, social mobility and social insularity have all conspired to keep the American family cooped up at home or in their cars, unable or unwilling to interact with each other. Perhaps. But on Tilden Street, Barbara made sure that we would be the exception.
Things didn’t always go smoothly. Civic spirit bristles at the unnecessarily unseemly and on that front the Freis have a problem. It comes in the shape of the three cars that we bought in our first year. In Europe these days three cars would be seen as an obscene overindulgence, a guarantee of social ostracism, an indelible black mark as big as your carbon footprint. That, however, is not the problem we have on Tilden Street. Most of the families in our neighbourhood have two or three cars. The issue is the state of our cars, their physical appearance, their roadworthiness and the kind of milieu they reflect. If America is having a love affair with the car then we have neglected our lovers to an extent that can only reflect badly on us. The convertible BMW, which is almost thirty years old and blotchy grey, has a black canvas roof so lacerated and threadbare that it looks as if it has been mauled by a tiger. The grotesque people carrier, used to ferry our four children to and from three different schools, appears to have been involved in several minor collisions. Whenever its doors are opened, a large quantity of sweet wrappers, empty bottles, broken toys, stray gloves and stale sandwiches spill out onto the road.
And then there’s the offensively red Dodge Neon, a car that looks as if it was designed for hobbits but hasn’t been driven anywhere in three years, thanks to its irredeemably illegal status. The red car is seeping slowly into the tarmac of our drive in a state of decomposition. It looks so downtrodden and crestfallen it might well be atoning for the sins of all the other gas-guzzling vehicles of America. The Frei cars are an exhibition of neglect that not even our British otherness will explain away. First they asked: ‘Are you ever gonna drive that car?’ Then: ‘Are you ever gonna sell that car?’ Now they have stopped asking. The red car has become permanently established as a mouldy fixture on our street. I could have it scrapped or ‘disappeared’, but since the car was never registered in my name that would be legally complicated and costly.
If Tilden Street offers an insight into the intrusive yet reassuring nature of American neighbourliness the purchase of our house was an early lesson in the excessive rituals of real estate. As an alien with no credit history in the US it took me a whole year before I became worthy of a credit card in this country. But I had no trouble finding a bank that was prepared to lend me a king’s ransom immediately to buy a house. Like most of the other hopefuls in the Washington real estate market my wife and I attended the ‘open houses’ that take place every Sunday afternoon; never in the morning because that clashes with church. Since we did not experience this scheduling issue ourselves we spent Sunday mornings snooping round the neighbourhoods, casing the houses before they flung their doors open in the afternoon.
Would anyone find out that we hadn’t been to church? Would they care? Perhaps they would only sell to a good Christian? Paranoid? No, as it happens. We are always being approached by Americans who want to know which church we belong to. And we are still working on an answer.
At first an open house seems a lot like a drinks party. Invitations are issued in the newspapers and at the realtors’ offices. Dressed as immaculately as Georgetown hostesses, the agents, with names like Clarissa and Mary-Lou, greet the guests as if they are old friends. In fact if you have done your homework and read the blurb you would know about Clarissa’s likes and dislikes. Likes: snowboarding, hiking, riding and baking. Dislikes: being late, traffic jams, air and noise pollution. With hair that has been blow dried to a new gravity-defying dimension and a face that has seen the careful attention of at least one plastic surgeon, Clarissa, who must be in her late forties, looks like a gently fading movie star. Her picture and profile give her celebrity status. And amid all