A Birmingham suburban world shaken apart by burglary

Apr 15 2009 Agenda by Roshan Doug, Birmingham Post

Roshan Doug discusses the helpless anger he felt after his house fell prey to burglars.

Journalists have often likened burglary to a horrid physical violation of some kind like an assault or even (without undermining the severity of it) rape. But to be honest, I never thought much about this simile – apart from weighing the merits of this staid image.

I mean, it’s one thing when the media come up with shock tactics by employing over-charged lexis and statistics concerning the nature and levels of crime; it’s another when you – as a reader – are trying to identify with a victim.

The absence of a personal attachment may sustain your objective perspective but it won’t give you a sense of how it really feels to be that victim. But every so often, a writer is confronted with real experience that might provide him with ‘emotional contact’. Take my personal encounter with burglary the other day.

I live in the northwest of Birmingham in a rather leafy, residential suburb of Handsworth Wood. It’s a stone’s throw away from the economically-challenged Handsworth and Lozells – two areas renowned for crime, unemployment and communal deprivation. On two occasions in the last 20 years, for instance, they have formed the epicentre for inner -city riots that have had political repercussions throughout the country.

For decades, however, Handsworth Wood has been the pinnacle of social respectability where many of its residents, to some extent, share the economic security that comes with professional employment.

Thus, crimes such as burglary are not quite the norm as in other less salubrious parts of the district, where it’s a prominent characteristic along with muggings and car theft. But recently, my Handsworth Wood world was shaken, as was my own communal perspective of my neighbourhood.

In the middle of the afternoon, someone came through the back door and rummaged through the house in search of anything of value. He – or they – virtually turned the whole house upside down, frantically puncturing every component of my privacy.

But being a humble freelance writer, I don’t have a great deal in terms of worldly possessions and I only happen to live here because the house belonged to my father before he died in 2004.

As such, I don’t own anything of any real value – I can’t afford to. So I can only imagine how miffed the burglars must have been at seeing that the only ‘valuable’ objects were items like a VCR and a terribly old PC that has been resuscitated on more occasions than Nick Ross has appeared on Crimewatch. A CD player? Forget it. Even my television is a clunky thing that dates back to the early 1980s. It only has four channels – I can’t get anything on Channel Five apart from hazy, grainy images like look like security pictures on CCTV cameras.

But I did have a metal briefcase, with a digital security code, that was hidden away (though obviously not enough) at the back of the wardrobe.

It didn’t contain anything of any monetary value, just some private documentations such as photos from my childhood, old letters, degree certificates and, most importantly for me at least, school reports in which – with a brilliant accuracy, my teachers forecast that I, most certainly, won’t amount to much.

How right you were, Mr King, Mrs Jones, Mrs Grey… I can still summon your names like a mystical incantation that reminds me of my childhood and my roots; where I’m from and who I am.

But apart from the overdose of sentimentality and nostalgia, the briefcase also contained manuscripts, numerous notebooks, my scratching-outs, my drafting of poems and prose, some complete, some half-complete, some not quite there but waiting for some kind of life or inspiration to breathe.

For many of these pieces, my old letters – long before the days of Word documents, internet, search engines and emails – and my school reports were the basis, the foundations of my inspiration. When you’re robbed of the very essence of your mode of working, your canvas, what is there left to use, to play with, to work with? In my case, an old TV set and a transistor radio that I used especially on Tuesday afternoons in the playground when Gary Davies played the latest chart-toppers in the early ‘80s.

Sadly, and bizarrely, they took that too. But they didn’t rob me of that; they merely denied it to me as they deliberately smashed it to bits – as a kind of political statement, or a violent objection to me and my personality.

I know it wasn’t. I’m sure they don’t know me but I couldn’t help registering the underlying absurdity of their selective destruction. Perhaps they were merely frustrated, annoyed at finding so little in my household. I don’t know.

It reminded me of that lovely 1950s short story by Graham Greene called The Destructors in which the protagonist, Trevor of ‘Wormsley Common Gang’, devises a plan to destroy an old house, belonging to Mr Thomas, simply because it is beautiful.

The meticulously methodical way in which he and his gang execute the plan is disturbing as they tear down the building from inside out until it’s nothing but a mass of dusty rubble.

When I read that at school, I sensed that for Greene and his protagonist, destruction was almost an art form, in which, like Larkin’s Sunny Prestyn, beauty is ‘too good for this life’ and thus has to be vandalised in the most crudest and basest way imaginable.

Apart from the contents of my briefcase, my transistor was the only tangible property, my only possession that was a remnant of an age, a time gone-by to which, I have always felt, I truly belonged. Looking at the fragmented transistor, I sensed a political commentary, a literary interpretation of what it might meant. And I suddenly thought: I had been violated.

Like a victim, physically abused, I looked around wondering what had happened. My mind was in a turmoil, catching up with the reality in which I stood. And then I panicked, sensing something close to an assault or a rape. A stranger had come into my space, without consent and tampered with the fabrics of my comforts, my world.

I rushed to the phone, then stopped. Who do I phone first? The police or my family? I really couldn’t think straight.

I phoned my brother and then the police thinking, for some irrational reason, that I have to ‘get my story right’. What if they don’t believe me? For a moment, I felt like a fraudster, as if they would think I’m making the whole thing up. But then perhaps this is the result of an overactive mind, wrapped up with trashy television soaps.

And though burglars spared the watch and the cufflinks – left in the bathroom – given to me by my ex-girlfriend only a few months ago, I can’t help feeling that what I valued is gone and impossible for any insurance company to replace.

How do you replace abstract entities, especially when they are in the forefront of your work? How do you deal with violation of your sense of security, exposed out of the blue? I feel I’ve lost something irreplaceable, intangible and abstract. It’s been taken away by strangers who had no right to touch, let alone destroy.

Today I feel a bit dazed, depressed as if I’m recovering from a tragedy – or like a loss of some kind. Perhaps it’s a mingling of insecurity and vulnerability with a loss of faith in humanity.

Even up until yesterday, I have been in denial. I believed, really believed that whoever they were, they might sense the awfulness of what they had done and might, just might, return the papers purely because they have no value to anyone other than me.

Perhaps they might let their conscience speak to them. Perhaps. But I’ve succumb to the eventuality of my thought: it’s not going to happen. I have to let go and accept that my valuables are now gone forever. And yet, even a week after the incident I’m still going around the house, clearing up, cleaning up as if the burglary is a shameful stain that just won’t wash away.