Author: Moobs

My Criminology and Penology tutor once asked why we don’t punish children. We students started scratching our heads and, before we all choked to death in a blizzard of dandruff, he gave us the answer: children don’t know right from wrong.

That answer sat uneasily with my own experience as what I remembered of my childhood was dominated by regular updates from my parents about just how naughty I was being. I think kids generally do know what is naughty and what isn’t without too much prompting but what they don’t appreciate is just how serious the consequences of their actions can be.

I might as well confess immediately: I was a juvenile delinquent. I went through a phase which started somewhere after my third birthday and came to an end somewhat after my fourth. Like most criminals I began with some mindless vandalism. My friend Nigel and I were playing in the background when he spotted that the Big Bad Wolf had appeared in Mrs Devis’ garden next door. We crept to the chain link fence and satisfied ourselves that it was him. He seemed to be sniffing the air as yet unaware of our presence. Of course he might have been pretending not to see us. As the stories we heard at Nursery School made perfectly clear, he was a devious creature.

We looked around the garden for the weapons that we knew we would need. There was a pile of half bricks that seemed ideal. With as much stealth as a three year with a half-brick can muster, we crept to the low chain-link fence that divided our garden from Mrs Devis’ and hurled the bricks as hard as we could. They plopped into the Mrs Devis’ beautifully-maintained lawn a few inches beyond the fence. The Big Bad Wolf was unharmed but now roused and vengeful. Panicked, we ran back for more ammunition. Over the course of half an hour or so of staggering and lobbing, the pile of half bricks had clunked and bounced its way onto the lawn next door and the Big Bad Wolf was vanquished. We headed off for tea awarding each other imaginary medals for bravery.

(Portrait of a Serial Killer – that’s me on the right)

An hour later I was confronted by my irate father who had been on the receiving end of a lengthy and vividly worded complaint from our neighbour. He was discinclined to accept that we had acted in self-defence and that Mrs Devis’ garden had, for a short while, been home to child-eating wolf of notorious cunning and terrifying dentition.

Where were our parents whilst we were saving lives with building materials? The answer is that they were sat in each other’s kitchens smoking and talking which is all parents ever seemed to do in those days. Children were put out the door and left to get on with things to an extent that would terrify modern parents and have social services patrolling the suburbs with a big net. Usually we got onto our little bicycles, found a hill with a base thick with nettles and let nature take its course.

One consequence of this enforced community of the tiny is that you had no real choice with whom you played. One child in our street was particularly unwelcome: Jane East. In the first instance Jane was a girl and any little boy knew that that was unforgivable. They were soppy and obsessed with ponies. They tended to break things and tell tales. Jane was not just a girl; she was a noisy, bossy girl. We made a deputation to our parents and asked to be spared any further visits from Jane and received a pithy lecture about the need to get on with each other and not to interrupt the smoking and the gossiping without a very much better reason.

This left us with no choice but to take matters into our own hands. Jane would have to go. My first thought was the red berries on the bush at the front of the house three doors down. They were a bright red and, when crushed, squirted out a dirty yellow paste that we had been warned would lead to instantaneous death if eaten. We offered some to Jane. She looked at them dubiously. It took perhaps 5 minutes of persuasion. She lifted one to her lips and we held our breath. She bit at it and our eyes-widened. Nothing happened. She tried another. Nothing happened. She consumed them by the handful and nothing happened. Foiled.

Then we had another idea. If you put soap in water and stirred it hard, it looked like milk. Or at least it did for a few seconds before it separated like curds and whey. Mum found us gathered around the sink looking guilty. She eyed us supiciously and asked us what we were up to. “Washing our hands, Mum” I said. She knew that couldn’t be true but all the evidence seemed to point in that direction. Four pairs of young eyes gazed back at her. She shook her head, sighed and went back to cigarettes and coffee in the kitchen. I stirred as hard as I could and then ran to Jane whom we had left sat on the front lawn. “Here – drink this” I urged “It’s milk”. Jane may have been as irritating as wire-wool underwear but she was no idiot. She harumphed and went back to smashing toy cars with a rock leaving us standing thwarted and clutching a cup of soapy water.

Then came the call for tea and off we trotted. Fish fingers and beans for everyone and my career as killer was over before it had begun.

 

Pop music has posed a lot of questions but provided very few answers. It falls to us to fill in the blanks.

Q: “How can we sleep when our beds are burning?” (“Beds are burning” – Midnight Oil)

A: You can’t. Furthermore, you would be well advised to evacuate the bedroom.

Q: “What becomes of the broken-hearted?” (“What becomes of the broken-hearted?” – Jimmy Ruffin)

A: Commonly they form unsatisfactory relationships with rebound candidates or else slide into self-pity and alcohol abuse.

Q: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?” (“64” – The Beatles)

A: No. I intend to leave that to Social Services.

Q: “Should I stay or should I go?” (“Should I stay or should I go?” – The Clash)

A: Your cab is here.

Help me put an end to all this rhetorical nonsense. Leave me some questions and answers in the comments.

Yesterday was spent in devotion to my patron saint: Saint Ferris of Bueller. A belt-bursting lunch in Wodka in Kensington was followed by a gentle amble down to the White Horse Pub on Parsons Green for a couple of pre-match pints. I enjoyed 90 minutes of watching Chelsea trounce Aston Villa and then returned home after another essential detour to the Pub.

Thus, I was to be found, at 12:20 am, stumbling contentedly down the Kingston Road. As I approached number 217 I heard the sound of breaking glass. The house was in darkness and set back from the road. I stopped and listened. Again I heard glass breaking and could see by the downstairs window the silhouette of man. An afternoon of Polish beer and strong Bitter had not dulled the keen edge of the Moobsian mind and I quickly concluded that there was burglary in progress (albeit not a particularly stealthy one).

I toyed with the idea of confronting the burglar but playing the scenario through in head a couple of times always seemed to end up unhappily for me, so I abandoned vigilante justice in favour of calling the Police.

I held my mobile in my hand and tried to decide whether this constituted an emergency or not. “What the heck” I thought and dialled 999. Within minutes, I was told, two “units” would be on their way. In fact, within a minute I was chasing a police car up the street as the eagle-eyed officers had failed to spot a big fat bloke doing star jumps on the pavement in an attempt to attract their attention. Perhaps they thought I was doing some impromptu midnight Jazzercise.

The two policemen and I were joined, incongrously, by a man in a dinner jacket and black bow tie; another passer-by alerted by the tinkle of broken window pane and sucked into the unfolding drama. Together we peered into the darkness and could hear the sound of stumbling about and cursing. The policemen sprang into action whilst we entertained a police sergeant who had, by now, driven up to the curb to join us.

I heard one officer announce that he was arresting the “suspect” and Mr Black Bowtie and I waited in eager anticipation to see the villain brought to justice. The criminal that emerged from the gloom was not, disappointingly, Raffles the Gentleman Cat Burglar. Instead he was a shambling Glaswegian in a baseball cap either leathered on booze or high on drugs. He did not shake his fist at us or say “I would have got away with it had it not been for you meddling middle-aged gentlemen”. Instead he said “greahhnuhfungerhurrugher” and was deposited on the back seat of the police vehicle and driven away. In other words, he was pretty much your typical villain.

When I first decided to become a lawyer I was attracted by the idea of becoming a criminal advocate. I was rapidly put off by the criminals. Most of them were mind-bogglingly dim. I once spent an afternoon with a man who had gone to prison after he had, for a joke, put an alarm clock in a shoebox marked “Property of the IRA” and put it on a table in pub in Colchester (a garrison town).

He told me proudly that he had written a book about his life in Prison and showed it to me. It was a red Silvine exercise book in which he had scratched away with a biro. The title had an endearing directness: “My life in Prisson”. He promised me that it was full of incident. “I write about when I played chess with a child murderer” he said proudly. He then turned to the relevant page and pointed to a short passage of prose: “I played chess with a child murderer” it said.

It was plain that his fight with the law was an uneven battle. Which leads me to the second surprising thing about the clients I encountered: they had all done it. Every single one of them was guilty. That is not to say they all got convicted, but they were all guilty. This amazed me because my expectations had been formed by television. On television anyone who is guilty of an arrestable offence always, at some point, does something of sufficient cruelty that you can be certain that they will be shot to death by a policeman or a feisty potential victim before the final scene. One only sees the inside of a courtroom when an innocent citizen is in peril of a false conviction. The reality was a dreary procession of alcoholic or drug-dependent inadequates, sobered for the day, their hair scraped back by a combination of spit and wrist-fracturing effort with a comb. Their familiarity with arrest and trial was such that they rarely even seemd to engage with the process having to be prompted to stand, prompted to plead and sometimes prompted as to their own identities. If at one end of the criminal food chain are Rolex-wearing Colombians with Uzis, splashing photo-genically across the sea in powerboats, the scaggy prematurely-aged sneak thieves of Colchester represented its shit-encrusted rectal termination. This was not, I decided, the job for me.