Expanding my ‘people’ horizons

Emilian moved three houses down the road when he was four. He arrived in my garden that summer wearing an outsized T-shirt and a necklace – like a pint-sized rapper – accompanied by two neighbourhood kids, Aelita and Hanna, both a few years older. They had come to introduce him to my dogs.

Aelita is from Latvia and Hanna is from the Philippines. As for Emilian, well, I wasn’t sure. “Hello,” I said. “Hello,” he replied. “Who are you?”

He stared at me while Aelita and Hanna giggled, because Emilian was fresh from Moldova and spoke precisely one word of English, and I’d just heard it.

My street is it’s an intriguing mix of people and accommodation. We have near-mansions, terraced rows of tall houses, cheap apartments, student digs, a church which hosts colourful Nigerian services, a community centre, and two schools. It feels to me like a village.

The house Aelita, Hanna, and Emilian’s families lived in is a Victorian pile divided into flats, the sort of rickety, plasterboard-wall place people move through on the way to somewhere else.

Studious Aelita left the street first and goofy Hanna went a year or so later, writing a lovely letter of farewell, and then one day Emilian – age nine – arrived to say goodbye in his now excellent English.

Other people came and went and one of the posher neighbours confided that they were terrified “homeless people” would be shifted into the empty nursing home nearby. How ironic, I thought, because surely they’d immediately cease being homeless.

Then the children’s apartment building went up for sale, and someone said wouldn’t it be lovely if a family bought it – “people like us,” they said – and converted it back into a single home, for one family, as if the families in it did not count ...

The other day I bumped into a beaming Emilian with his proud mum. My little friend was wearing a gold medal, which he’d just received at the library for reading the most books over the long holidays.

“Fifty-one,” he said, “but I didn’t take out books less than 100 pages, because I thought that would be cheating.”

And I was reminded again how much we lose by ring-fencing our lives solely with “people like us.”