If symptoms
persist. . .
LAST WEEK, I went to a lecture given by a man who studies juvenile delin- quents for a living. I thought his lecture would be amusing, in a way. He was a university teacher, and had been in receipt of a huge Home Office research grant. After much care and meticulous attention to detail, he had come to the conclusion that juveniles who offend hundreds of times are deficient in moral reasoning.
I should imagine that many listeners to our local radio station that same day had come to a very similar conclusion, rather more cheaply, though not only about the delinquents themselves, but also about their families. There was an interview with the 18-year-old brother of a boy of 14 who had just been arrested for the 240th time while stealing a car.
'He's not a bad boy really,' said his brother, with what in another context might be commendable family loyalty. 'I mean, he doesn't hurt people or nothing. And he only does it for the money.'
The following day I was consulted by a lady of quite exceptional timidity. She is also curiously old-fashioned, dressing in sparrow-coloured tweedy skirts and sen- sible shoes in an area of the city where women of her age usually peroxide their hair, wear leopard-skin leggings which do not reach to their ankles and have a cigarette clinging by dried saliva to their lower lip as they totter off on high heels to the post office to collect their social security.
Concision, alas, was not among my patient's gifts. Something had happened to her on her way home from her aunt's, but first I had to listen to an account of her aunt's life and opinions. Then I heard a disquisition on the local bus routes, and how none of it would have happened if she had taken the number 87, as she should have done, instead of waiting for the number 436.
Wait, however, she did, and while doing so a 12-year-old boy approached her four times to ask her the way to a nearby landmark. She grew suspicious, and asked him to go away. He then attacked her by making a grab for her handbag. She called out that she was being mugged, but the people on the other side of the street did not come to her assistance. She struggled against the boy at first, but he eventually got the better of her and ran off with her bag. She thereupon sat down on the kerb and wept. It was only then that a man asked her what the trouble was, and called the police on her behalf.
Her bag was found a few yards up the road, ripped in two and with her pills thrown into the gutter. The boy had made off with her purse, containing £20, her house keys, her blood donor card and a document with her address on it. She therefore had to have the locks changed on her house.
Considering her natural timidity, she had made a good recovery, but now when she walks down the street and sees a youth coming towards her she either • hides in a doorway or scuttles off in the opposite direction. Naturally, the boy who attacked her has not been found and lives to mug another day. He's a good boy, really, and he only does it for the money.
Theodore Dalrymple
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