Someone broke in as we slept upstairs. Don’t let anyone tell you that burglary is just a minor offence

SOMETIME in the early hours of Wednesday morning, while we were asleep upstairs, an intruder entered our house and grabbed what he could lay his hands on. (I assume he was male, but I have no evidence for this, except that burglary has traditionally been a male occupation).

Clearly, it was a quick in-and-out job, which couldn’t have lasted much more than five minutes.

But it was quite long enough to cause an enormous amount of anxiety, distress, inconvenience and expense.

My guess is that Minnie, one of the smallest, friendliest and least scary dogs in South London, may have seen him off with her ecstatic yapping — her habitual greeting to strangers — as he opened the door to the kitchen where she sleeps. Perhaps he feared she would wake us.

As it was, we slept through her yapping and I won’t pretend I regret that. A less-than-impressive physical specimen of 70, and a lifelong coward, I really don’t fancy the idea of confronting an intruder in my pyjamas. Anyway, these days I would probably have been the one who was arrested if I’d tried.

It was our resident son who discovered that we’d been burgled, when he got up shortly after 6.30am to set off for his latest posting at an East London school, where he’s training to be a teacher. Downstairs, he found the front door wide open, as were the drawers in the hall table.

Trepidation

The bag he had left on it had gone, along with its contents: his wallet, bank card, driving licence, travel card, a season ticket to his beloved Fulham, a laptop belonging to the school and his passport (so bang went his plan to travel when schools break up for the Easter holiday).

Nor was there any sign of Minnie. That was until he heard her barking halfway down the street. He set off in hot pursuit and carried her home. He had his priorities right.

Having rung his bank to cancel his card, he came upstairs to wake us with the bad news.

I rushed downstairs, shaking slightly — though whether from trepidation, anger or a hangover, I can’t say for sure — to assess any damage and see what else was missing.

The answer was not much. There were no visible signs of forced entry. As for what the intruder took, it was nothing of any great value to him, though our losses were a very great pain to us.

He had taken my keys, to the house and the car, which I’d foolishly left in the pocket of my dog-walking coat, hanging by the door. He’d also gone through the drawers of my desk in the sitting room, but seems to have found nothing there to take his fancy.

This was hardly surprising, because they contained little apart from broken specs, an exhausted battery, a stapler, a gas-lighter refill (empty), a few bits of string — and sheaves of letters from readers, which weigh heavily on my conscience as they await my longdelayed reply.

Irritating

But he’d taken Mrs U’s favourite handbag — hugely annoying, since it contained our only other set of keys to our car, her bank card, wallet, Freedom Pass and much-loved photographs of her late mother and our four boys when they were young.

She says she feels the loss of those pictures most keenly.

Mercifully, however, the burglar had left my wife’s laptop on the kitchen table, along with my own wallet and smartphone, which were in my jacket over the back of a chair.

This meant that not only did we still have a bank card between us, giving us access to our joint account, but I had cash for our son’s fare to work and on my mobile were all the numbers and apps we needed for the tasks with which the intruder had landed us.

God knows where we would have been without them, in this age when our interactions with the outside world depend so heavily on pieces of plastic and silicon chips.

So it was that for the next eight hours, almost without a break, we were ringing call centres and logging on to websites to cancel my wife’s bank card, report the burglary to the police, contact insurers, order a new passport, Freedom Pass and two replacement driving licences, seek help with our now undriveable car and summon an expert to change the locks on the front door.

Enough to say that I spent all day listening to robotic announcements thanking me for my patience, warning me that my call could be recorded for training purposes, assuring me that ‘your call is important to us’, offering me a whole range of irrelevant options (‘to renew your policy, press button four…’), logging on to the internet (‘password not recognised’) and, after being told ‘I’m just popping you on hold for a minute’, listening to endless irritating music.

Our first call was to the bank, to block that stolen card — and, sure enough, we were told it had already been used twice that morning, at 6.57 and 7.03. To my surprise, Lloyds reimbursed us the £100-odd without fuss.

Next, the police — though I rang without hope, fearing they wouldn’t even bother to show up.

To my astonishment, however, within an hour of my call two charming officers appeared on our doorstep, full of courtesy and sympathy.

One diligently recorded what I knew of the facts, while the other went off to find neighbours with doorbell cameras. Then a third, a forensics officer, turned up to write a report of her own.

But was the cynic in me right to fear that this was more a PR exercise than a prelude to justice? After all, only 3.9 per cent of burglaries result in a charge, while in 48 per cent of neighbourhoods nationwide, police have failed to solve a single case in the last three years. Time alone will tell.

As for those other phone calls, when I finally got through to real human beings, they bent over backwards to help. It drove me half mad, however, that for the rest of the day my phone kept pinging with requests to answer ‘just a few quick questions’ about the service I’d received.

The car was the biggest problem. Parked outside, it was now useless to us, while the burglar could drive it off at any moment. So I had to keep checking it was still there, in between calls to Mercedes, the RAC, the AA’s Key Assist and our insurance company.

Difficulties

But I’ve left little space to describe the special difficulties presented by keyless technology to car owners who are keyless in every sense.

The long and the short of it is that a huge lorry finally arrived at 9.30pm, courtesy of Direct Line, to lift the Merc off the road and a weight from my mind as it set off for a specialist garage.

As for how much that burglar’s brief visit has cost me in cash, I reckon that after paying insurance excesses and the various fees charged for renewing official documents, I’ll be only a few hundred pounds out of pocket, while the burglar will have made much less.

The cost in terms of our peace of mind, my wife’s treasured photographs and our son’s hopes of an Easter abroad are much harder to assess.

Heaven knows, millions have suffered a great deal more than we did this week. But never let anyone try to convince you that burglary is just a minor offence.