Theft

 Have you ever thought about stealing something?

Of course not, you are a proper upstanding member of society.  You would never steal, right? Theft is a crime, you're not a common criminal.  

As I've been looking at historic petty session court cases, I've been thinking about what constitutes theft and why people do it. I've noticed that people taking things that don't belong to them was the most common crime in the late 1800s.  There were drunks, young lads having fights, the usual men who think it's okay to wave their willy at a passing woman and people cycling furiously down Market Hill but the majority of the cases were of theft.  When you look at what they've stolen, it doesn't seem like much: a handkerchief, a loaf of bread, a pair of worsted stockings from a washing line, a carriage clock that one sister thought her deceased mum had wanted her, not her brother, to have.  There is even a case where a child is sentenced to 7 days hard labour for picking a rose from a bush. This particular case is one we discuss often.  It seems a cruel punishment for a child who just wanted to take a flower home to their mother but that rosebush was at the grave of an important man's wife and an example had to be set.  The important man would never steal a flower, so why should the child?  I picked a couple of flowers off a viburnum bush today because I thought they were pretty.  Is that theft?  After I found them in my hand, I panicked.  It wasn't intentional but there I was, standing there with three little twigs of flowers wondering what to do with them. As you can see, I decided not to throw them under the bush, which was my first instinct but I'm not sure if that's better or worse. I now have stolen property in my house.  The fact that the bush was on wasteland and not in someone's garden is possibly a mitigating factor too.  

The thefts that ended up in the petty session court were crimes of poverty.  The criminals were poor people whose lives were difficult.  Some lived in the workhouse, most worked hard and we could assume that these people were taking things they needed, or small things they could sell to get some food (handkerchiefs were particularly good for this).  However, I wonder if some of them were just because the person saw them, liked them and had the opportunity to take them, like me and the flowers.

Today, I was walking along Fambridge Road, looking into gardens and I noticed that the council had made it's pink sack delivery.  We had ours a few days ago and I found myself wondering why these houses only had two rolls of sacks, when we had received three.  Then I heard two ladies talking on the opposite side of the road.

"Yeah, she didn't mean to hit her."

Who could resist looking to see who uttered that sentence?

"These things happen," said a lady with bleach-blonde hair and a fag on the go.

The first lady, in leopard print pyjamas, expanded, "Me daughter didn't really put anything on Facebook, she just said that if anyone knew Scott's mother could she get her to contact her.  Who knew it would kick off?"

It was then that I noticed that the arms of the leopard-clad granny were full of pink recycling sacks.  Far more than she could properly hold and she was juggling them between her elbows and chin.

Maybe she was bringing them in for all her neighbours, who knows?  However, she could have been taking them for herself in a cheeky version of 'finders keepers, losers weepers'.  

I kept walking and noticed that the rest of the houses on the street had three bundles of sacks.

It seems like an odd crime.  The bags are free.  You just have to ask the council for more. You could collect them from the library and to take one from each of the houses seems like a lot of trouble.

"People are funny about bins," my daughter said, when I shared my suspicions.

The other day the Long Suffering Husband had looked at some sacks thrown onto a garden, as we walked.  

"You could just take them," he said.

"Why?" I asked, "What would be the point?"

He just shrugged and said that he didn't know, but you could.

Maybe we all have it in us to be petty criminals.