
Noisy neighbours
“Good fences make good neighbours” – Robert Frost
“Hell is other people” – Jean-Paul Sartre
We had been living in Paradise…until the new neighbours moved in.
Before coming to France in the fall of 2021, we had never resided in a dwelling without at least one adjoining wall. And we paid the price of proximity with vexing noise problems of all sorts. Here in Dijon, we have a tiny house entirely to ourselves. Our dream abode…until the new family moved in.
We first heard the pesky interlopers on several consecutive nights, as they scampered merrily in the walls and cantered in the attic, dancing wildly to the beat of their very own murine drum.
The unwelcome arrivals are common garden dormice, an endangered species as it turns out, residents of Europe and known to North Americans mainly due to Alice in Wonderland:
Dormouse (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland character) – Wikipedia
Now some folks find these beasties “cute” and are willing to broker a peaceful coexistence with the nocturnal invaders, but they give my wife and me a serious case of the heebie-jeebies. So we’ve had to seek the services of what is known euphemistically as a Senior Wildlife Technician, who has proven willing to exterminate the brutes notwithstanding their vulnerable rodent status.
Anne and I have been together for 44 years and our conjugal life has been buffeted by many powerful winds, not the least of which being neighbour issues of sometimes hurricane force.
Our problems began in our first apartment in downtown Quebec City, contiguous to a nightlife hotspot called Bar Élite, a venue for ear-splitting and hair-raising retro rock and ersatz Quebecois nationalist pop, featuring tunes which seemed to consist mainly of nonsense sounds such as “deedley deedley deedla deedla deedley dee deedla dum”:
J’veux pas rester sur mon trottoir
J’veux aller danser, j’ai envie de crier
Maudit que c’est donc d’la grosse misère
Quand j’suis pogné pour m’ennuyer
The sonar ravages of Bar Élite, along with daily street racket and the riotous honking of the Quebec Winter Carnaval soon sent us packing. Just a few short weeks before the building we shared with the infamous bar went up in flames, we moved to a neighbourhood known as Montcalm, on rue Dolbeau, where we thought we’d unearthed the ideal apartment. Little did we know that we were leaving the proverbial frying pan for another sort of conflagration.
By this time, in 1982, we had a baby of nine months who howled most of the night, and it took about three days before the downstairs neighbour, whom my wife dubbed Stará Bosorka – Slovak for Old Witch – arrived at our door shrieking that the baby was disturbing her family’s sleep. The stress of keeping our infant, who soon became a toddler (as infants are wont to do), quiet became nearly unbearable. Baby Dan would sleep fitfully and begin to caterwaul as soon as we beetled surreptitiously out of his room. Of course, he couldn’t be left to cry because upon the slightest peep, Stará was waiting to throttle him. So we used to take him out at 4:30 a.m. in the Arctic cold of Quebec City winter and walk the streets for hours, so as to avoid bothering the Stará family. The pressure was such that I broke out in hives and developed a case of Bell’s Palsy, with my face frozen in a crooked grimace that made me look like then prime minister Jean Chrétien, without his rustic charm.
When we weren’t driving Stará and her brood around the bend, they were paying back in kind. Many a long night, the Old Witch would metallically strum a guitar and her family of four, plus assorted guests, would merrily croon jaunty French tunes, the repeated favourite being “Papillon.”
Un bon petit diable à la fleur de l’âge
La jambe légère et l’œil polisson
Et la bouche pleine de joyeux ramages
Allait à la chasse aux papillons
Upon hearing this cacophonous chorus, as if on cue, Baby Dan would begin to wail like a banshee and my wife and I would often blubber too.
In 1983, the Quebec government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to cut the salaries of public sector workers by 20% and drastically pare down the workforce. As a young teacher, I found myself in a no man’s land called “availability,” only a few short steps from the firing squad. We could no longer afford to live in Montcalm and took a more modest ground floor flat near the university on rue de Belmont. Huge mistake! All night, every night, the student residents of the upstairs apartment seemed to swing from the chandeliers in protracted contortions of copulation, their moaning and whinnying punctuated with resonating thunderous blows to floor and ceiling.
We lasted six months on rue de Belmont.
During that era of near terminal stagflation, mortgage interest rates were above 15%, but the municipal government was offering special subsidies for first-time buyers of new housing, so we took the bait and purchased a modest condo in the suburb of Sainte-Foy for the now paltry sum of $53,500. The lure of this lodging, which at the time of purchase only existed on paper, was that the promoters promised “superior soundproofing.” What could go wrong?
Well, first off, the condo was still a worksite when we took possession, on the portentously Orwellian date of January 1, 1984. Then the promoters went bankrupt, as promoters so often do, and lawsuits of all sorts began to explode like trip-wired landmines. We were the very first residents of this building on rue Grandjean, and once the other happy buyers began to flood in, the promises of “superior soundproofing” began to ebb away. The new downstairs neighbours were soon knocking at our door. We sardonically called them the “Smiling Grandparents.” They were indeed grandparents, but their faces were etched in a peevish rictus as they informed us that they heard every sound we made; that our son thundered on their heads; and that they were able to discern which of us was using the bathroom facilities by the relative intensity of the prevailing pitter patter, cascading, as it were, to their lodging below.
If this wasn’t enough, our neighbour across the hall was a heavy metal enthusiast, whom we dubbed Rock Me Like a Hurricane, in honour of his favourite tune, which he blasted night after night, especially on weekends.
When we politely asked that he turn down the volume, Rock Me Like a Hurricane demurred, informing us that we could simply sleep in the next day and that anyway “people had to live and have fun.” Obviously, as parents of an early-rising toddler, we took this excellent advice to heart.
After two years of this condo nightmare, defeated yet again, we decided to sell the Grandjean apartment and look for a house.
Now the condo we owned came with underground parking and as the first residents of the building we were allotted the most desirable space, closest to the elevator, even though we didn’t have a car. When we put the condo up for sale, our next-door neighbours asked that we switch parking spaces with them since theirs was located deep in the bowels of the underground facility, far from the elevator. For obvious reasons of resale value, our realtor forbade such a one-sided transaction, and the neighbours were so apprised.
That same evening, a Sunday at around 8 p.m., deafening organ music began to boom into our apartment from next door. For the next two hours, we were treated to Engelbert Humperdinck’s greatest hits, followed by the best of Tom Jones. The thunderous concert reached its apogee with a long schmaltzy rendition of Dean Martin’s boozy tunes and we could stand it no more. We knocked on the neighbour’s door, whereupon the gent, a side-burned, tousle-headed, retired doctor from rural Temiscouata with the unlikely name of Tréflé (meaning clover-shaped) Ouellet greeted us, accompanied by Madame Clover, the organ virtuoso. “We wondered when you’d come by,” they growled in unison and proceeded to inform us that they would treat all prospective buyers to these cacophonous musical interludes until we handed over our parking space.
Legal advice was sought; the condo committee intervened; and the Clovers finally had to retract their threat, but the psychological damage was done. Our real estate goose was well and thoroughly cooked.
Having to live somewhere, we bought a house in a nearby suburban neighbourhood, but in a textbook case of madness we made the same mistake, expecting different results, by purchasing another abode with an adjoining wall. On the other side of that flimsy partition, the neighbour’s teenage son not only played ear-piercing rock music around the clock whenever his father was away on frequent business trips, but he also sold drugs 24/7, setting up shop like a titan of industry and welcoming a clientele made up of biker gang members and superannuated hippies. His father actually urged us to report him to the police without delay. “He’s still under 18, so he won’t go to prison if we nip this in the bud,” his caring progenitor explained.
Junior was eventually hauled away by the forces of order and his dad moved out, presumably to be closer to the penitentiary. We settled in for a 19-year stint in this house, punctuated by all manner of neighbour adventures, especially coloured by a pair of iconic suburbanites, Barbecue Billy and Pesticide Pete. Barbecue Billy moved in next door after the young criminal was dragged off to the pen, while Pete resided a couple of doors down. All of us lived in close quarters, in row housing. Billy entertained raucously from May through September on his front porch in the mercifully short Quebec City barbecue season, and not to be outdone, permanently pickled Pete did likewise while dousing his lawn with weekly torrents of toxicity, cheerfully supplied by a local firm called ChemLawn.
We were the only household in the vicinity that eschewed this toxic quick fix, and a neighborhood posse soon formed to shame us into compliance with the prevailing norms. My wife loves dandelions and also suffered from chemical poisoning in her native Czechoslovakia, so she single-handedly staved off all neighbourly entreaties and threats.
As soon as our sons had grown up and left suburbia for less oppressive climes, we too headed for the hills, once again in search of elusive tranquility, but uncovering only more racket and venom during our quest.
Too late, we’ve learned that housing, like much of the fabric of life itself, is so often informed by two unpalatable alternatives: flight or fight. We’ve spent our adult lives fleeing from neighbour issues only to find ourselves trapped in a rabbit hole, or more precisely a rodent hole, of our own making, while many others have stubbornly stayed the course in their abodes to face the proverbial music. Are any of us the better for it?
Postscript:
When I worked at CBC, I recounted an earlier version of this story on air and received a flood of calls from listeners, all of whom had housing horror stories to tell: about snowplows and snowblowers at 4 a.m. during winter; construction trucks incessantly beeping as they reverse during summer construction season; neighbours snoring, or copulating, as heard through flimsy adjoining bedroom walls; legal battles with neighbouring drug-dealing biker gangs; incessant dog barking and pooping (with concomitant excrement flinging skirmishes); trumpeting circus elephants, shady dope pedlars, and lurid hookers in a nearby parking lot; drag racing on an erstwhile residential street; infestations of chipmunks, squirrels, groundhogs, skunks, mice, various and sundry bugs, and bats; basements throbbing with radon; and so many more nightmarish stories besides.
“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” -Christopher Marlowe (Dr. Faustus)
Your friend,
Robert

Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com