THIEF IN THE NIGHT

My statement to the police was very straight forward. The man broke into my house and began to steal my things. I overheard him from my bedroom, came down, argued and fought with him, and then I clubbed him to death. There was some to-do about who struck first. Naturally I told them he did in order to plead self-defence, though in reality I regard attack as the best form of defence. I wasn’t going to tell them that though.

Apparently, the fool, Barry Frazier, or Bazza, to his friends, had been in the local Oldham Road Swan’s Neck pub and had overheard a few people talking about how I, Derek Winston, had been on the Telly again, talking about my English Civil War memorabillia and artefact collection. In fact the show was a repeat of one I had done years before. Bazza, like myself, never saw the programme. He just picked up on words like, ‘Lives just up Werneth Hill, and ‘Some of his stuff might be worth a few quid’.

Bazza snooped about for a few days to ascertain exactly where up the hill my semi-detached house was, and then broke in at dead of night. It was a simple forced entry approach. He took a spade to the base of my French window and prized it out of its frame. He slipped in through the expensive hole he’d made.

He was as thick as a brick, but he knew how to keep quiet. It was only a dog barking nearby at something else entirely that woke me up. It always barked, at just about anything, but it sounded louder to me precisely because my window was open. I knew something was wrong, so I came downstairs to figure out just what it was.

Not suspecting a burglary, I made a lot of noise. Barry would have fled but he was at the wrong side of my room which is packed full of collectibles. He was cornered among crates and boxes, unable to get free quickly enough.

I saw the damaged window as soon as I hit the lights. I looked immediately at the old mortars, the cannon in the corner, my books, and uniform materials. Most had been disturbed but so far nothing had been taken. I knew the thief had therefore little knowledge of what was and wasn’t of value here. I picked up my most treasured possession, a musket, which had once been in General Fairfax’s own hands. It was free from its case so I handled it more to make sure that it wasn't damaged, and that was when the ruffian stepped out from behind a pile of boxes and surrendered to me. The imbecile assumed the devise was loaded, and stepped out of the shadows with his hands raised in submission. 

I made him sit in a chair and threatened to phone the police, but he had learned from cell-mates after previous robberies had gone wrong that land line phones with cords should have their wires cut. He’d severed me from contact with outsiders. He asked me who else was in the house. I told him my wife was upstairs, though in fact she had long since left me due to my tendency to clutter the house with relics of a bygone era. She was very modern in outlook and objected to my sense of the past. She told me as she left that I was more of a museum piece than anything I had ever bought.

I was tired, with it being three in the morning, and rather bored. I began to lecture him on the nature of my collection. He had no sense of history, and no care for anything more than how much each item before him could be worth. I had not in fact calculated the value of my collection in fiscal terms at all. For me the pleasure was in ownership and therefore all was priceless. I had an unbroken shell from Roaring Meg, a famous Mortar Cannon, a saddle from a Cavalryman’s horse that served Prince Rupert Of The Rhine, I had the standard colours flag of a Scots Brigade Regimente, Manus O’ Cahan’s. I had a letter penned by Oliver Cromwell to his son, Richard. I also had weapons, from archery bows, to a full seventeen foot pike, though that may have been inauthentic. If my suspicions were right, it once belonged to modern day re-enactors. I had three muskets, one of which I now bluffed my trespasser with, and also a sword, which unfortunately, he had closer proximity to than I had. He used that to knock the musket from my hand. It wasn’t an expert sword-parry, just a simple lunge and swipe attack. My wrist felt as though it had broken, but it hadn’t. I dropped the musket to the floor. To my amazement, he then threw down the sword to take up the musket and point the gun at me, though I knew it not to be loaded. I feigned surprise and held up my hands accordingly, begging him not to shoot me. I knew that he might fire and realise the gun was not loaded even with its single musket charge if I tried to do anything rash like picking up the sword.

My assailant now ordered me to round up my property and move anything valuable towards  the door. He was going to have me load his car, the getaway vehicle, with my treasures, and then make good his escape.

I suppose the obvious thing to do would have been for me to wait until we were outside, then yell for help from my neighbours, but he might still have been able to get into the car and away with something. I was sixty-one, and he was a strapping beer swilled football and pub-brawl fanatic, of about twenty. I was unarmed. He had a musket that could still be used to smash me down.

‘Clubs’. mmmm. It was thinking of that which led me to my own plan. I carried a few books of unsorted books out and he insisted on putting my two other muskets in with the second of these. The return journey to the house was his fatal error, for in being behind me as we walked back, he was now between me and the front door. I picked up some bits of bric-a-brac, like an authentic pocket sundial, a snuff box, and other bits and pieces that were actually worth something, and also the murder weapon. This looked to Bazza like useless plywood off the base of a coffee-table. I laughed, and told him the truth, that it was in fact a wooden leg. It had belonged to Arthur Aston, a much hated commander at the battle of Drogheda in 1649 who’s own men literally beat his brains out with it, as Cromwell’s forces began their massacre of the town’s people there. I told the story with such s deadpan expression that Bazza laughed, and told me that I was making it up. That lowered his concentration enough for me to show that such an act of unlikely cruelty was quite possible. I hit him with the leg, once or twice. Well OK, twenty-seven times, though it may have been the third or fourth that did for him, according to the coroner.

Sadly, the leg was reduced to splinters, and these were not returned to me after becoming exhibit A at the trial where I was fortunately declared not guilty by Her Majesty’s finest. Of course the official version believed by all was that he attacked me, a frail old man with arthritis, which isn’t strictly true, but an Englishman’s home is his castle, and attack is the best form of defence, and Bazza had a roundish-head while I am a staunch Royalist. This time, we won.

© Copyright. Arthur Chappell

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