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Town and Country Crime
Ted Bruning joins Home Truths to compare attitudes to crime in town and country...
When we moved to rural Cambridgeshire from rough, tough Hackney a few years ago, one of the things we thought we'd be leaving behind was crime. And to an extent we were right. In five years in Stoke Newington we'd been burgled twice, we'd had two bicycles and a rather nice china cachepot stolen from outside out flat, and my wife's handbag had been snatched at she was boarding a bus. In five years in our present village we've been burgled once, and that rather half-heartedly.
In Hackney, we once heard a man being murdered late at night in the street beind ours. We heard the fatal gunshot and the screams of the victim's girlfriend, and, distressingly, we discovered, his three year old daughter was there when it happened.. I can only speak for myself, but it seemed to me that crime in London was like the weather; it wasn't only outside your control, it was outside you, and you just had to shrug and accept it.
But if it happened in the village where I live - if I didn't know those involved personally, I would certainly know someone who did. Crime may not happen as often as it does in the city, but when it happens it happens to someone they know which makes it impossible to simply take it for granted. Help is also much further away - the nearest 24 hour police stationis 15 miles away. Mind you when the police do arrive, they make up for their tardiness with a terrific show of force: three cars, blue lights gleefully flashing, each with two officers aboard - they turned up once half an hour after I'd reported seeing a man climbing into my neighbour's garden. He was long gone by the time they'd got to the scene and it turned out he was only delivering a parcel anyway ... but the arrival of the county constabulary was the talk of the village for days!
Country people are too hard headed to see their lives in terms of the pastrol idyll, but they seem to believe that they've a right to a more peaceful time of it than the city. In this they're simply wrong - aggressive, out-of-control, hormone-fuelled adolescents behave in much the same way in Ambridge as they do in Hackney. There's just more of them in Hackney.
If your life has gone through an upheaval or even a long-desired change, tell us how you coped ...
Do you have any regrets?
If so, about what or whom?
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