Mugging

An elderly lady, Mrs Coleman, was mugged outside our house last week. She is seventy-five and was on her way to the hairdresser's. It was a beautiful day, the sort of day when you feel glad to be alive. Her husband was not feeling well, so she insisted that he stay at home instead of driving her to have her hair done, as he usually did.

My eldest daughter heard her shouting for help, looked out of the window and saw Mrs Coleman being helped to her feet by a female motorist and a neighbour from down the road. Together they brought Mrs Coleman into our house. She was covered in blood, her stockings were torn and she was holding the broken straps of her handbag in one hand. She was in extreme shock and was trembling uncontrollably. When she saw her reflection in the hall mirror she started to cry.

The police and an ambulance were sent for. A police motorcyclist came within minutes, others followed. Mrs Coleman managed to give a policeman who turned up in a patrol car a description of the assailant: white, young, on a bike, dark hair. The motorcyclist was despatched to try to find this cruel young man. The ambulancemen arrived and were kind and attentive to Mrs Coleman.

‘We must tell your husband,’ they said. Mrs Coleman became distressed. ‘No,’ she said, ‘he's not well, he mustn't have a shock.’ At this point my daughter had to leave the room, she was so upset and angry. Outside she found the police motorcyclist kicking at our garden wall in his frustration. The young man had vanished, and there were no eye-witnesses to the attack.

Mrs Coleman was carried, on a stretcher, from the house and taken to hospital. A policeman left to break the shocking news to Mr Coleman, and three of my children were left to talk about what they would like to do to the cowardly young man who had attacked a frail seventy-five-year-old woman.

We later found out that Mrs Coleman had a regular appointment at the hospital. She was undergoing a daily course of chemotherapy there. I felt a murderous rage when I arrived home and heard this sad story. I knew that Mrs Coleman's life would never be the same. I hoped it wouldn't stop her from walking down a pleasant tree-lined street on a lovely day in the middle of the afternoon again. But I guessed that it would probably diminish her life in many such small ways.

It is easy to despair of human nature at times like these. The temptation is to lock ourselves away from the world, to trust nobody and never venture out after dark. But if we do this the criminals have won. They will not only have taken away our money and our belongings, they will have snatched away our confidence and our freedom. It is important to remember that the dark-haired young man on the bicycle is in a tiny minority. Other criminals despise his type of cowardly crime, and, when he is eventually caught and sent to prison, his life will be made extremely uncomfortable. In the prison hierarchy he will be the lowest of the low, on a par with those convicted of crimes involving cruelty to children.

The overwhelming majority of people are law abiding and respectful of the need to protect and care for the very young and the very old. Most of us keep these moral laws automatically, which is why we are so outraged when one of our fellow human beings dares to break this moral code.

As I have said earlier, I wasn't at home at the time of Mrs Coleman's attack. I was in London attending the rehearsals of The Queen and I, which was due to open in the West End: So I was startled to read in the local paper that it was I who found Mrs Coleman in the street and brought her into the house.

For a moment I thought that I had finally lost all my marbles – that I had hallucinated the train journey to London, the rehearsals and the train journey back. I didn't understand how anybody could confuse my daughter with me: she is young and beautiful, and I am lateish middle-aged and, well, not beautiful.

Mrs Coleman gave a very spirited account of her attack to the local paper; she was speaking from her son's home where she was recovering from her injuries. I detected from what she said that she was a brave woman who was most indignant that a cruel stranger had entered her life and turned it upside down. And, now that I think about it, there may be a chance that she will walk down our road again in the afternoon. If she does, I hope she calls in for a cup of tea. I'd like to meet her, for real this time.