Rehearsal with Preston Community Arts
A
Cure For Light Fingers
Between
the ages of six to fifteen, I stole many things. It started with
pilfering money from my mother’s purse and concealing it in piles
around the house, in the hope that when bankruptcy arrived (it was
imminent if conversations between my parents were to be believed), I
would be able to save the family by producing a hoard of blackened
pennies and threepenny bits. That I was impoverishing the family by
stealing from my mother did not occur to me. Also, I quickly forgot
where I had stashed my hoards, possibly because the acts were so
deeply instinctive. I had no awareness of what I was doing on a
conscious level. I’m not even sure if I had
a
conscious level. When my squirrel stockpiles were discovered, I was
punished and disgraced, but my light fingers grew only lighter.
Next,
aged seven, I stole a roll of sellotape from a corner shop. Why?
I didn’t need to stick anything so far as I can remember. I was
caught and the shopkeeper said sternly that he would send the police
round that evening to arrest me. Terrified, I confessed the misdeed
to my parents, who punished me with the loss of various privileges.
Yet again, despite the scolding and the frightening nature of what
had happened, I strayed only further onto the path of the crooked and
wide.
But
on reaching secondary modern – I effortlessly failed my 11 Plus –
I became aware that I was not alone. The secondary school I landed in
on the outskirts of Manchester was a hotbed of petty crime. Most of
the boys I sat beside in class, practised stealing and general
lawbreaking on a daily basis. Hazel Grove County High was then (I
hope it has reformed itself), a sort of penitentiary for
working-class failures. Give or take a few sadists, the teachers were
a well-meaning, decent bunch, but were pitted against a thousand or
so lads who hated school in general and HGCH in particular. The child
inmates had already suffered a good deal of violence,
authoritarianism, boredom and coercion from their parents and in
primary school. By the age of eleven they were in more or less open
rebellion against the adult world – a sort of juvenile jihad
against the adult brutalisation of their souls. So anything that
adults didn’t like or forbade was good.
Delinquency and thieving were therefore practised and enjoyed by the
majority of my class – well over three quarters of the boys would
have been on the wrong side of the law. Any boy who didn’t steal,
smoke, wreck phone boxes, or scrawl graffiti in public places was
considered an adult sycophant and creep.
Stealing
then, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, became a regular event.
I got much better at it. It was one of the few things I actually
learned at school. I was rarely caught, and when I was, no
punishment, remonstrance or reasoning stopped me re-offending. I
could fill a book with larcenous tales of my childhood, and maybe one
day I will! Stealing cigarettes and Mars Bars whenever a shopkeeper’s
back was turned; shoving Enid Blyton books up my jumper in Smiths;
ransacking beer from beneath caravans on a school holiday in Belgium;
sneaking clubs from unattended golf bags on the local links and
selling the irons to a second- hand shop. The list could go on and
on. I’d be horrified if I ever felt the urge to steal now. Yet
also, I can’t help looking back on those young lads and their
escapades with a certain empathy and fondness. Sure, it was probably
annoying and unpleasant for the people we stole off. Yet, for the
most part, these Bugsy Malone’s of a Seventies Secondary Modern,
really were angels with dirty faces. Petit petty criminals who were
nevertheless often kind, decent, and honourable – even the ones who
ended up in jail or institutions for armed robbery, arson and in one
sad case, axing his parent’s while they slept. They were deeply
traumatised children with family problems that would sink a
battleship. And for the most part they were likeable. Unable to voice
our pain and anger, we allowed it to surface in symbolic acts that
spoke of a haunting isolation. Looking back forty years, I feel moved
by the defiance and disobedience of those children in the face of a
brutal adult world.
Around
the age of fifteen, things stepped up a gear, quite literally, in the
light-fingered circles that I frequented. My friends began stealing
motorbikes and cars. I don’t know why I didn’t join in. I’ve
never been interested in the Top Gear side of life. A few of my mates
did house robberies. I had no interest in that either. I’m
frustrated by not actually being able to recall if there was some
reason for abandoning the crooked and wide. Maybe I had developed a
greater awareness of the trouble that such acts could bring down on
my head and decided to steer clear of larger misdeeds. Then again,
the smaller misdeeds stopped too. I know the shoplifting and
vandalism that enlivened my school years were manifestations of
massive trauma I suffered in early childhood. But I still can’t
really account for my fingers getting heavier. It wasn’t that I was
doing much else as a distraction. I failed my O levels as completely
as the 11 Plus and did not one jot of work to pass them. Music, art
and literature, which were to become a vehicle for expressing my
anger and trauma were still a year away. Something happened. I guess
I must have developed an adult consciousness that could override my
unconscious.
On
leaving school, it was my great good fortune to go to an FE college
in Northwich to study art. I didn’t know at the time, but it was
staffed by renegades, revolutionaries and bohemians who were
interested in helping little hooligans like myself. After a couple of
years under their anarchic ministrations (another wonderful book), I
decided to resit my exams. It was while studying a sociology A level,
that I came across AS Neill and Homer Lane. I read about how they
dealt with troubled delinquents, my eyes getting bigger and rounder
with every turning page. They rewarded criminals! Assisted vandals in
their vandalism! So shocking and yet it seemed so right.
Though I did not consider myself to be a criminal – and oddly,
never had! – I knew their methodology would have stopped me in my
tracks.
I
went on to university, stumbling across John Holt on the way, and
eventually became a community artist in Preston around 1984. There I
was, devising community plays with, people from the local tower
blocks, with the theories of Homer Lane and AS Neill bubbling away in
my soul. Many of the lads attending the drama workshops could have
stepped out of my old secondary mod. So I wasn’t surprised to find,
after a drama workshop of no little mayhem, that someone had been in
the office and snaffled the cash box and with it £120. My colleague
Mick and I were annoyed, mostly because our management committee had
just slapped our wrists with regard to being more careful with our
spending. I had a fair idea of who had taken the box and its
contents. A boy called Alan who had left early. When he didn’t
return to the next couple of drama workshops, I was certain that he
was the light-fingered culprit. However, I didn’t report it,
feeling, perhaps because of my own history, that accusing him, even
if we got the money back, wouldn’t be very productive for him or
us. Not least, I didn’t want the drama group interviewed or
interrogated, and I decided merely to be more careful in future. I
knew where Alan lived, but I said to Mick jokingly, that if I went
round to the lad’s house, I’d probably only end up rewarding him.
Well,
there must have been some sort of synchronicity or fate at work, for
the very next day, I turned a corner onto Preston’s main street and
almost bumped into Alan. I was surprised, but said hello, while he
looked uncomfortable and confused. I asked chattily, why he hadn’t
been back to the drama workshop. He made a couple of plausible
excuses. Again, I felt a little angry, but then remembered what I’d
said to my colleague the day before, and on the spur of the moment,
took ten pounds out of my wallet and handed it to him.
“What’s
that for?” he asked, taken aback.
“For
stealing the cash box.” I replied.
He
looked very nonplussed, but before anything else could happen,
especially a denial, I said goodbye and walked on. I have to admit, I
was suddenly worried about what I had done. I’d
just rewarded somebody for thieving!
Would he now go out and steal more cashboxes? Would he now think
crime was acceptable and go and brick the nearest jeweller’s shop
window? Of course not. The next day, I went into work and the cashbox
was on the office table. There was £130 inside. My colleague had
found the box outside the workshop door that morning. I never saw the
boy again.
For
quite a few years after that, working in very heavy areas of
Northwest England as a community artist and drama worker, I found
myself having to pluck up the courage to reward criminals or join in
with vandals to get them to stop. It always worked. I think back to
my childhood, to that school full of disturbed and troubled boys, on
whom punishments were heaped over the years in thousands, to no
avail. Even when, in retrospect, it was glaringly obvious that the
harsh and violent penalties were not working. Why did nobody listen
to Neill and Homer Lane? Rewarding crime may seem counterintuitive,
yet to my mind, most criminals are traumatised children and their
acts are unconscious speech, symbolic acts of communication with a
world they have long ceased to trust – usually with good reason.
They
can only really be reached by symbolic acts of trust.
The sad thing is, it doesn’t take much, incredibly little in fact,
to reach such people. I go back to two friends of mine who were put
away for holding up a post office with a sawn off shotgun. They were
nice lads. Their criminal spiral could have been stopped years
earlier by adults showing their trust instead of doling out angry
condemnation and violent smacks round the head. It seems that no
matter how much evidence there is to support a liberal methodology to
deal with antisocial behaviour in young people, there is a very
stubborn desire not to learn lessons taught a hundred years ago by a
couple of Victorian eccentrics.
