Keep out!
Petronella Wyatt
Last night our burglar alarm wasn't working again. Our burglar alarm is so complicated that even the people who installed it no longer know how it works. There are ten buttons for things such as 'main bedroom window mats' and 'dining-room door'. Only years ago the labels beside the buttons became so indistinct that it is pot luck what you get. Quite often the alarm has worked only in the downstairs loo.
At any rate this house is burgled at least once a year. The first time I recall it happening at about 9 o'clock one night when the family was watching a programme about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. My brother said he heard the sound of glass crashing from the room below. But no one could make up their minds as to whether or not he wasn't being an imaginative little boy. It turned out, after the last reel, that for once his powers of observation were genuine. Some men had climbed up a balcony, broken their way into my mother's bedroom and stolen jewellery and pictures.
Sir Derek Jacobi said over the weekend that when he was burgled he minded far less about the stolen goods than the sense of personal violation. What codswallop. We always minded bitterly about the stolen goods, which during the following two years included antiques, an 18th-century clock and a Venetian mirror.
Nevertheless, my mother being of a nervous disposition had a panic button installed near to her bed. This rang through to an emergency section in the local station.
I used to press it sometimes out of fun to see how quickly the police would arrive. When they heard the panic button they didn't panic. It was possible to calculate that the entire family might have been murdered and their bodies dismembered before the police arrived. Of course, when
I pointed this out to them they were very rude: 'It's kids like you that give the middle classes a had name.' You may date bourgeois hatred for the police from this point.
My father took his own precautions. He carried a silver swordstick with him and took it to bed at night. One evening, when a man broke in downstairs, my father grabbed the weapon and rushed out stark naked. One or the other had the desired effect because the man let out a screech like a coy matron who had tumbled into some immoral ritual and fled.
Last week our street was designated an area of 'aggravated crime'. Friends urge me to be careful when I get out of the car and to ask taxis to wait until I am safely inside. Two days ago I politely asked the cabbie to wait and he replied, 'Not in this street,' and was off like a bullet. The gallantry of the modern man.
What is the modern man preoccupied with, incidentally? Certainly not honour, courage or protecting women. All my male friends talk of nothing except some controversy in the News of the World, apparently raised by Charles Moore, as to the mystery of the female orgasm. I point out to men who urge me to write about this that women who have any pretence to allure — pretence being the operative word — are never lewd.
The Ancient Greek courtesans — or hetaerai — were told never to discuss the details of sex. This was the province of the streetwalker not the accomplished beauty. Actually, the Ancient Greeks didn't seem to write much about the female orgasm, according to a very lewd book I possess called The Reign of the Phallus.
It was a 19th-century preoccupation, which hit society when it began to worry that women might enjoy sex. No respectable wife was expected to experience any pleasure. If you read the memoirs of Frank Harris it is only chambermaids and actresses who are permitted orgasms.
Since the 20th century, however, the preoccupation is solely a male one hinging on male vanity. To descend from the heights of the Greek courtesans I must confess that most women I know don't bother about orgasms at all. It never enters their conversation. I'll wager that only men read those articles in women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan on how to achieve the perfect orgasm. They like to convince themselves this way that they are Alcibiades in the boudoir. Nothing — not even the prospect of death — fills a man with greater horror than the suspicion that a woman has faked her orgasm.
Well, sometimes we do and sometimes we don't. There is no mystery about it. It is like the weather. Sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn't. And if it doesn't one gets a watering can and waters the flowers oneself. Do the flowers ask if the rain is faked? Certainly not. So why should men? They should have more pressing things to worry about, such as when my house is next going to be burgled.
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