Anna Burnside: Tenement life is up close but not so personal

By Anna Burnside
Published on 22/07/2012 00:00

SOMETIME back in the last century I lived in Albert Street, Leith. It was not a friendly tenement. One of my neighbours had a doormat bearing the legend “Beware of the Wife”. A kid across the road was called Rambo, and I don’t think he was named after the French poet.

A couple of decades on, one of ETA’s top operatives has been discovered living just around the corner in Sloan Street. Armed officers from Lothian and Borders police swept through Benat Atorrasagasti Ordonez’s flat in a joint operation with Spain’s Civil Guard. This caused some consternation, even in Rambo’s old manor. They picked up Ordonez himself having a cigarette outside the Brass Monkey on nearby Leith Walk.

It turns out the quiet, dark-haired chap who could occasionally be spotted smoking outside his front door had been on Spain’s most-wanted list since 2008. A member of the Basque separatist organisation for 16 years, he is said to have helped two ETA assassins cross the border of France after the execution of politician Miguel Angel Blanco in 1997. Ordonez escaped from Spain when his cell was broken up by an anti-terrorist operation. He’s been in Scotland for the past 11 years, one of a number of sleeper agents awaiting the summons back to active service.

In his Sloan Street flat, he was hiding in plain sight. Ordonez’s neighbours’ comments revealed everything there is to know about living in a close in which the only collective activity is turning its back on David Cameron’s Big Society. If there was a Jubilee street party – and I think it’s unlikely – he was not invited. If anyone actually knew Ordonez, or his girlfriend and two small children who shared the rented ground-floor flat, they are not ­letting on.

Bob Bulloch, his upstairs neighbour, had never set eyes on him. He found his constantly closed curtains a little suspicious (although living at street level, in staggering distance of various hostelries it’s perhaps not surprising). But, using the wonderfully accurate tool that is hindsight, he has now realised that Ordonez was a bad ’un all along.

“All the neighbours are planning on clubbing together to fix the roof and he was the only resident who said no,” Bulloch said last week. “It makes sense why he didn’t want to now.”

Terrorists of every stripe take note. There are strict rules to life in a Scottish tenement. Put your rubbish out on the wrong day, “forget” to wash the stairs, “borrow” someone else’s washing line and you are as popular as a cockroach at a cocktail party. Refuse to contribute to the communal roof repairs and everyone in the block has to suffer – or cover your share.

But, as Ordonez and his family discovered, as long as you take your turn with the mop and bucket, and observe strict bin bag etiquette, you can be a wanted criminal and still do pretty much whatever the hell else you like. Use your own name (Ordonez did, and even without the Atorrasagasti in the middle, it’s not one you see on every buzzer in EH6). Have a day job (Ordonez drove a van for Livingston Wine Importers Ltd). Paying the rent promptly also helps; his landlady described him as “charming” and “the ­perfect tenant”.

Open the curtains occasionally, stump up your share of the common repairs and you will disappear altogether.

It doesn’t have to be like that. My granny had a room and kitchen with a shared toilet on the stairwell. She could recognise every neighbour’s footsteps on the stairs and communicated with them via a ­system of taps on the pipe: one for I’m putting the kettle on, two for you put it on, I’ll be up in five. When the block was demolished and she was rehoused in a high-rise block with balcony, bathroom and a view to the Campsies, she was ­horribly lonely.

It is hard to imagine Ordonez’s family keeping their cover in such a close. If they joined the gossiping matriarchs for what my granny called “a wee fly cup”, their ­secrets would be extracted before they had finished their Gypsy Cream. If they declined their rapped invitation, they would find themselves the main topic of conversation and the subject of a surveillance operation that would put Lothian and Borders Police to shame.

Sharing a toilet with the family upstairs is clearly not an ideal way to live. I am very happy with my own neighbours, but have no desire to take tea with them on a daily basis. But there is a happy medium of Christmas card exchanging, communal area decorating and looking out for each other. My granny would be horrified that society has atomised to the extent that an ETA terrorist can live on the ground floor and no one has even said hello.

Ordonez realised that these traditional tenement areas, once highly integrated vertical communities, are now a constantly changing procession of students, renters, first-time buyers and other people with no stake in the stairs. Instead 
of ­living in a village or remote outpost, where it would be impossible to avoid the neighbours, he chose to live in a place where their very proximity made them invisible.

What else was going on behind the closed doors of Albert Street all those years ago? I didn’t make the effort to find out at the time and now I’ll never know. «