Children drive pensioner from his home

6:12pm Friday 5th September 2008

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A RETIRED teacher friend tells me that a week or so ago, there was obscene graffiti painted on his door and stones thrown at his living room window. He went outside; the culprits ran away. They returned and attacked his window again, breaking it.

He made half a dozen phone calls to the police over a period spanning several hours and was given a Crime Reference Number.

The following day, the stone throwing continued and he called the police after every incident.

At five o’clock in the afternoon, a policeman turned up and advised him to dial 999 if he was troubled again.

Immediately he left, the vandals returned. He phoned 999 and was predictably rebuked for using an emergency line. “An officer will be sent to you when we have one available,” he was sharply told. One arrived four hours later. He was given a new Crime Reference Number; the officer departed.

My friend, who doesn't live in the Bucks area, is 68 years old but relatively fit. He told me he had thought of chasing one of them and restraining him until the police arrived. But he feared, with good reason these days, that this would expose him to charges of assault and kidnapping. He lives on his state pension and cannot afford to replace the damaged windows. One is bound to ask why these children have singled him out in this way. He tells me he was on a bus the day before it all started. A girl across the aisle put her foot on the vacant half of his seat. Very politely, he asked her to remove it. She rudely refused.

He informed the driver, who made a loudspeaker announcement that feet and seats were to be kept apart.

Muttering darkly, the girl complied. They got off the bus at the same stop, and it appears that she followed him home and her friends were exacting retribution for his ‘insolence’.

The culprits have apparently now been identified and are being made to apologise to him. There has been no mention, however, of the £110 it will cost him to repair his windows.

He has been in touch with estate agents, and is putting his house up for sale. A pensioner is driven from his home by kids. This is the Britain we live in.

Abysmal parenting and powerless enforcement agencies combine yet again to turn our streets into a jungle in which the inmates are taking over the asylum.