Waving goodbye to crime

Good Housekeeping online 18.07.2007

Is it really safer in the countryside?

Waving goodbye to crime 'You can take the girl out of London, but you can't take London out of the girl. Well, not, I reckon, until she's done a good few years of not having to make sure her door key is out and ready on approaching her house, of not locking her car while driving and of not having to wear her handbag slung across her chest to foil snatchers.

'It took me about five years of living in Gloucestershire before I could give friends a lift home and not insist on driving them exactly to their door and watching them get in safely before I could leave. I would often give a few women a lift home after my book group, and despite their protestations that they be dropped off at a central point and walk the last bit, I couldn't bring myself to do it.

'We've just had some new people move in down the road, fresh out of Hackney, and their ten-year-old son keeps forgetting where he is and stumbles out of school, loaded like a pack horse, clutching all of his possessions. His mum has to keep reminding him that he can actually leave his pens and PE kit in school now, and they won't get stolen.

Fear of crime was not something that made me move. In London, I just put my streetwise head on, and got on with it'I know several people whose move from London to this area has been motivated by experience of crime. One woman was mugged walking through Clapham and it was the final straw. Another woman had one friend murdered in south-east London and then had another friend subjected to the most appalling rape and attempted murder in Brixton. She's now quite happy tending her garden and looking across the fields to the River Severn.

'I was freaked out when a couple of friends were mugged and when the London nail bomber detonated a device where I'd been standing half an hour before with a toddler in a pushchair. But fear of crime was not something that made me move. In London, I just put my streetwise head on, and got on with it.

'But now, especially with my son fast approaching teenage years, I'm glad we don't have to be quite as vigilant as we did. My son walks into Stroud with his friends to go to the cinema and I know he won't be mugged for his phone on the way back. Even my eight-year-old is allowed across to the playing field with her friends for short spells without an adult watching their every move.

'It's not like nothing awful ever happens around here. It's even harder to be a junkie on rural wages, so I'm probably being a bit reckless leaving the back door wide open quite as often as I do. About 18 months ago, a young man from Stroud was murdered. He was walking across a common when two psychos, on the lookout for a gay man to attack, targeted him. The common was Clapham Common and at the time I remember seeing pictures of his mother in the local paper and thinking, my god I bet she wishes he'd not moved to London. Jody Dobrowski would be alive today if he'd stayed in Gloucestershire.

'But what would life be like for a young gay man in rural Gloucestershire? Not that easy, that's for sure, especially in the villages. As a young, single gay man he'd have set a fair few net curtains twitching.

'In the town of Stroud it's different. We have our first gay bar and there are lots of gay people living there. But most of them are coupled up and older. And homophobia is very much alive and well in Gloucestershire. I was working in the office of the local MP at the time of the debate about lowering the gay age of consent to 16 and I was horrified by the vitriolic protest letters coming in from some terminally prejudiced local people.

'I sincerely hope that young Jody Dobrowski went to London so he could stay out dancing until 4am on a Tuesday and not to escape these small-minded local homophobes. They may not beat people to death, but they should not have a clear conscience.'

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