Under the Tump Read Free Page B

Somehow, time shortens; your days are spent chasing your tail, bemused, fraught.
    If your income allows it, then you can sail through. You have a nice house in a safe neighbourhood with good schools nearby. For you, city living remains good. If not, if every spare penny you earn is going on childcare and the only green space you have is littered with dog mess, then it’s demonstrably worse. Soon you’re thinking it’s so much worse that anywhere might be better. The burbs. Upstate Massachusetts. Even the countryside.
    Surprisingly to me, Updike didn’t lament leaving the big city behind. The throb of the streets, the energy of the crowds, the thrill of the new: their appeal seemed to weaken as this leading light of American twentieth-century intellectualism stumbled on something else. A replacement, just as rich and seductive, yet almost unknown to urban life.
    He had found a place where people knew each other, he explained in the interview. Not just to share a ‘hello’ at the bus stop or a smile at the newsagent’s. People who really knew each other. Knew one another’s name and the names of their dogs. Knew where one another lived, where they took coffee, what they did at weekends.
    This information came to them not because they spied onone another or because they were busybodies. They knew it because the residents of Ipswich, MA, numbered in their hundreds rather than their tens of thousands. Their paths crossed more often. And when they did, they’d stop and share the time of day, asking about friends or Aunt Maud’s operation.
    A few of Updike’s phrases had struck a particular chord with me and I’d scribbled them down. Now, transposed into my notebook, I reread them as I sit in the yurt. The first quote runs:
    It’s a kind of community really in what I take to be the classic sense. In that if your child has a toothache on the weekend, you can call up the dentist you personally know. There’s that kind of knit.
    This idea of ‘knit’. It resonated with me powerfully. I loved Argentina, loved it passionately, but I was never fully part of it, and it dawned on me that I probably never would be. It was the little things that made me realise. The subtleties of topical jokes that I didn’t quite catch, the children’s TV shows I had never watched, the football chants I could never remember. These kept us on the margins. Embraced, but never quite integrated.
    This didn’t bother me especially. I accepted it as inevitable. What’s more, I found it immensely liberating. The ties that bound us back home – the cultural mores, the family expectations, the relational obligations, the social pressures – undid themselves. At the same time, we weren’t beholden to their equivalents in Argentina. We could make our own rules, chart our own path. If we wanted to take the kids out to dinner with us at midnight, we could. No one wouldscowl. For seven sweet years we were footloose, unencumbered, floating free.
    The more my mind turned to the prospect of returning, the greater the appeal of Updike’s picture became. I liked the idea of finding a place where I could truly belong. It would be good to be on the inside for once, to be a thread or stitch in the social fabric. I wanted to live somewhere I could walk down the street and know the grocer and the postman and the café owner. If it turned out to be claustrophobic or insular, as well it could, then we could always move on.
    Updike’s observation didn’t end there. In the interview, he went on to elaborate on the benefits of this ‘knitted’ community that he had stumbled upon beside the sea. As the next quote in my notebook read:
    And also you’re exposed to people that aren’t in your game. In the city I think there’s this temptation to see only people who are very likeminded. In a sense for a writer, it’s good to live between a widow and a plumber, and in a sense love your neighbour and know your neighbour in the old, old sense.
    The five words,