Long life
Sissinghurst stripped
Nigel Nicolson
The police advise you in their brochures never to tackle an intruder. If you hear movement below you in the mid- dle of the night, you should switch on the passage light and shout, as if to an errant guest, 'Oh hullo Majorie, are you looking for the loo?' The burglars, like night-ani- mals, will then scuttle for safety leaving your possessions intact.
When my house was burgled three weeks ago, I was in Italy, and no Majorie was in residence to defend it. The robbers could have learnt this by casual enquiries at the ticket office (`the family' is always a favourite topic of conversation for visitors to properties open to the public), and they could also have cased the joint by posing as tourists and pretending a close interest in Pulsitilla palpitans while they examined the locks and alarm-systems and peered through ground-floor windows to see what was worth pinching inside.
They would have noticed that our win- dows are fastened by security-catches and that the doors are solid oak. But no house is a fortress - not even a castle - and they got in. Anticipating that the police might at any moment interrupt their operations, they had safeguarded their escape-route by forcing the lock of a garden gate. The whole job was highly professional. So much for the theory that unemployment is a major cause of crime.
I returned next day from Italy to be met by long faces. I was taken into the kitchen, given a glass of sherry and told to prepare myself for bad news. We had been robbed. The police and insurance people had already rallied round with the solicitude of doctors after a severe heart attack. The surprise was that the burglars had confined themselves to a single room, when in a tenantless house they could have helped themselves at leisure. They appeared to have been chiefly interested in small tables. It was their fetish.
Three tables went, one a tripod Chippen- dale, another a George III tray-table, the third Regency, but unaccountably they left a Pembroke table behind, and took instead a couple of old Italian stools, two carpets and a small wooden shield roughly carved by French prisoners of war who were incar- cerated here in the 1760s, worth, one would imagine, no more than f.500. A large Bristol-blue vase was left lying undamaged on the lawn outside.
The psychology of my unknown assailants interested me to the point that I felt hurt by their lack of discrimination. There were portable bibelots scattered round that room that could easily have been slipped into a pocket or the drawers of the stolen tables but they chose not to take them. Were they too ignorant to appreciate them? Was it a sort of charita- bleness on their part? Or did they suddenly panic?
Then an unworthy thought struck me. While I greatly miss the shield and the stools, I do not feel quite the same about the tables. They were inherited from my grandmother, and although one is sup- posed to mourn the loss of objects associat- ed with people whom one has loved, I did not love my grandmother. She scared me. And her taste was not mine.
Now with the insurance money, unless the police recover the goods, I can buy three tables to replace hers, and furnish the sitting-room with pieces more suited to a battered Elizabethan house than to May- fair in 1923.
One lesson the robbers taught me. Though a house must always be vulnerable because we are obliged to enter it and see out of it, there are other precautions that we should take besides locking the doors and windows. If my robbers return, they will be in for some nasty surprises.
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