Well-heeled yobs with one foot in my world

ON FRIDAY morning, I looked out into our small garden to find a certain amount of chaos. Pots had been smashed, the bench overturned and all manner of climbing greenery pulled off and scattered. Yobs had invaded, tempted, no doubt, by the piles of scaffolding irritatingly left outside our back wall by the firm constructing new flats opposite.

I felt a tightening of the heart that will be familiar to many readers. Our children sleep at the back of the house. We had always considered our garden reasonably safe. I wondered whether the intruders would be back.

It seemed pointless to call the police, so, having told the builders to move the scaffolding forthwith, with the back gate open I set about clearing up the mess. Two youths wandered up, neither wearing hoodies, but both in familiar "yoof" sweatshirts and jeans. "Excuse me," said one, "but is this your garden?"

"Yes," I told him, holding my brush a little more firmly. He looked relieved. "Would you mind if I came in? You see my friend lost his shoe in it last night."

At first, I misunderstood what he was saying. "Did he throw the shoe in?" I asked. We live behind a nightclub and often find that people use us as a repository for discarded clothes.

"No," he said pleasantly, "he lost it somehow before we climbed out."

I was dumbfounded. Here were the culprits, the very people who had broken in and caused the damage I was clearing up, the very people I had been cursing all morning. Here they were and now they wanted me to do them a favour. I saw red, but, unusually for me, I remained calm. "Ah," I said, "and you think this is a reasonable request?"

They were genuinely puzzled. It was only after I explained to them in words of one syllable why skinning over the garden wall, damaging property, frightening the children and causing our anxiety levels to rise to unsafe heights was really not what you might call welcome that their faces cleared a bit and they nodded sagely.

"Oh, I see," said one. "But the trouble is, we weren't thinking. We were drunk." His friend nodded enthusiastically. What more was there to say? Drunkenness was surely a perfectly adequate explanation.

At that moment I felt the nadir of our "it's nae my fault", disrespectful culture had been reached. These youths were not feral predators from a housing scheme. They were not neds. They were well spoken and, although I didn't ask, they were almost certainly university students. Yet for all their education, they could not see, for the life of them, why I might be upset. The idea that their visit to our garden and the damage they had caused were in any way wrong or shameful had to be pointed out to them.

So genuine was their sense of innocence that they had come back, not to apologise or help put things right, but to collect the trainer one had deposited in the middle of the creeping geraniums. What is more, they felt they had a perfect right to do so.

As our surreal conversation continued, I even found myself thinking that we were lucky. Had these boys scratched an eye on a rose bush or sprained an ankle on our uneven flagstones, they might well have returned not to find a shoe, but to present us with a legal demand for compensation accompanied by one of those repulsive solicitors who tout for what can only be called "gripe-work" on the television.

And I won't disguise the fact that it was a relief to find our midnight visitors nothing more than a couple of unthreatening idlers who had been silly rather than ill-intentioned.

But in a way, as they smiled and shrugged, I found them more worrying than the street gangs of current fashionable preoccupation. Gangs of neds who trash things and terrify people do so on purpose. They still whine and blame everybody and everything other than themselves when they are caught, of course, but they know exactly what they are doing. We can recognise them as a hideous problem whose root cause is alienation fuelled by a breakdown of family and community structure.

These petty vandals were not in that category. They were articulate and polite. Their backgrounds, so far as I could tell, will have been solidly middle-class. They looked me straight in the eye with the confidence of those used to communicating easily with ordinary adults, not just grunting at policemen or social workers.

They did not swear at me - at least not to my face. Yet the damage they caused was no less for that and, most concerning of all, although their disregard for the consequences of their actions was not positively malicious, their consciences were quite clear even when they sobered up. When I tried the word "respect" on them, though they listened attentively, they clearly had no idea what I was on about.

THIS trifling story is not nearly as exciting as recent ones concerning toddler vandals with spray guns or disrupted funeral processions. Having a plant pot or two broken is hardly the equivalent of being "happy-slapped". It does, however, illustrate that mistake of thinking that yobbery is confined to one section of society. Increasing numbers of affluent parents also produce offspring who, while hardly qualifying as alienated, are just as lacking in any kind of moral compass.

After I wrote a piece about "MT"s, the teenage text jargon for a house thrown open - often literally - as a wild party venue when parents have unwisely absented themselves for the night, I was contacted with litanies of middle-class horror stories including complete house trashings, car vandalism, neighbour upsetting, thieving and other mayhem. The perpetrators were usually pupils at independent schools and from families more than well upholstered against life's harsher realities. We should remember that not all louts live on schemes and wear hoods.

Listening to my two youths explaining themselves, I thought, rather sadly, that somehow the notion of equality had taken a wrong turn. Instead of everybody being pulled up the ladder of moral and social responsibility, we are all being pulled down. No longer do money and social security, in its literal sense, naturally generate a commitment to uphold certain standards of behaviour. Nor is this lacuna confined to the young. Had I telephoned the boys' parents, it is quite likely that they would have been more annoyed at my complaint than at their children's behaviour.

Now I am not entirely unrealistic and I have not quite yet turned into Mrs Victor Meldrew, although I'll admit to being pretty close to it on Friday. Of course teenagers will get drunk and, even without drink, will occasionally misbehave. It is just a bit depressing when you find yourself explaining to those who should know better that while breaking into a garden is hardly a hanging offence, it is nevertheless something for which you should be sorry.

I did let the two miscreants look for the shoe. They did find it. They did, finally, apologise and one even offered to pay for any damage. I did not accept. If I had sent them away older and even marginally wiser, that was quite enough.