Burglaries

We've been burgled four times in four months. We may as well leave the doors and windows wide open and erect a pink neon sign in the front garden that flashes House empty. Burglars welcome. Not that the house needs to be empty for burglars to call on us. The last time they came, my daughter was ill in bed, I was upstairs on the phone, the TV was on in the sitting room and there were three radios playing – all talk stations – but this cacophony of noise still didn't deter them.

Hearing a squeal of tyres, my daughter got out of her sick bed and looked out of her bedroom window to see a battered yellow car being reversed at speed and parked opposite our house. Two ferret-faced boys got out, crossed the road and began to ring our doorbell with some ferocity – rather like the Gestapo used to carry on in old war films. ‘I'll have to go,’ I said to my sister, ‘it sounds like there's a maniac at the door.’ My daughter came into my room and told me that she didn't like the look of the two youths. In itself this statement was not unusual – she is notoriously picky when it comes to men. The ringing continued, the letter-box was clattered, the door was booted.

This poor door has been sledgehammered open in previous burglaries and is now permanently out of action. In fact it is no longer a door, it is merely a piece of wood that keeps out the elements, stray dogs, etc. Other people's front doors open; ours does not. Large nails and heavy bolts have been driven into it. The noise stopped and we looked out of the window to see the ferret faces strolling towards the back of the house. I phoned 999 and asked the operator for the police. It could only have been seconds, but it felt like a fortnight before the police answered and I was able to give our address and the fact that two potential burglars were ‘climbing over our back garden wall' – because by now we were in the bathroom watching them do just this.

My daughter hurriedly changed out of her teddy-bear pyjamas (not the thing to be wearing when burglars call) into a more assertive, less vulnerable outfit, and went to the window to take the number of the ferret faces' conspicuous yellow car. By now a boy was chiselling away at the French windows at the back of the house. A police patrol car was ‘on its way’, said the policewoman on the other end of the phone. I handed the phone to my daughter and looked around the upstairs landing for a blunt instrument. Something to give us a few moments should the boys be armed with a knife. But it was a pathetic choice of potential weapons. A bottle of bubble bath? A wooden coat hanger? A loofah on a stick?

Simultaneously I heard the French doors crack open and my daughter whisper, ‘Mum, they've put me on hold!’ She then shouted down the phone, ‘The burglars are in my house!’ Adrenaline took over. I was filled with rage – an emotion that doesn't visit me often. I was a lioness defending her cub. There was no way I was going to let the ferret faces upstairs to frighten my daughter, and I was also not going to cower upstairs while they plundered the few possessions we had left from the previous burglaries. I told my daughter to lock herself in her bedroom and crept downstairs.

Ferret face One was in the last room I searched. To say he was gobsmacked when he saw me would be an understatement. His ferrety jaw dropped open at the sight of me, the harridan whose chosen weapon was a book Tolstoy by A. N. Wilson. I didn't need to bludgeon the boy with biography, however – he turned and ran out of the house, slipped in a pile of slimy leaves I had sluttishly left on the garden path, recovered himself and leapt over the wall. Ferret face Two had already preceded him. I shouted, in a voice I didn't know I had, well, perhaps I won't tell you what I shouted, this being a family magazine, but a lot of words in the sentence began with letters to be found in the early part of the alphabet.

I ran round to the front of the house to see the boys trying desperately to start their car. Eventually, in a cloud of exhaust fumes, they managed it and sped up the road with me futilely following on foot. As they turned at the top of the road, a police patrol car passed them. Within forty-five seconds there were three police vehicles outside our house; within another minute there were nine. As I said regretfully to the charming policeman who took down the ferret faces' description, ‘I should have waited one more minute.’ I've said it to myself many times since then.

Their number plates were false, their fingerprints were blurred. They haven't been caught.