Being mugged made me fear living in London

I WAS mugged a few weeks ago, at noon on a glorious sunny day. It has changed the way I look at the world, and the way I view London. I had driven home to Holland Park from a meeting with my publisher, had just parked my car, walked the few steps to my back door, and was waving through the glass at my three-yearold son, when a man appeared from nowhere. He ran at me, punched me in the face, threw me head first into a wall, and demanded my ruby engagement ring. I screamed. He told me to shut up. I did. But I tried to defend myself and hang on to my ring. After a struggle, in which my hands were left pouring with blood, he wrenched off the ring and fled.

I got into my house as fast as I could, biting back tears, trying to convince my son that I had just had a slight argument with this man, and fallen over, attempting to keep at least his view of the world intact. I had to put on a brave face too for my other, younger son who, sensing something bad, ran crying to me.

My nanny, who witnessed some of the events, rang the police on her mobile and, three minutes later, they arrived. They whisked me into their car, and we drove around searching the streets, but the mugger seemed to have melted away. They took me to the police station, I answered questions, they filed a report. I felt numb. They were calm and supportive. They warned me reaction would set in the next day.

It did. I kept replaying the whole thing in my mind, futilely trying to invent another outcome, to rationalise what had happened, to adjust to the reality, and the seeming omnipresence of violent crime.

I cried, overwhelmed, by the sudden sense of vulnerability and violation.

That is what muggers, thieves, all criminals steal as well as your property.

They rob you, and your loved ones, of peace of mind and innocence. I no longer blithely walk around London as I did. As I near home, I scan the streets before I turn into my house. I categorise people as potential muggers or not. I get my keys out hundreds of yards away from my door, so that I can make a speedy entry. It's six weeks on, and the man who mugged me has not been caught.

Eight years ago, as a single girl, I would routinely walk back to my flat in Chelsea at 2am after a night out.

Now I wouldn't dream of doing so.

Being the victim of violent crime alters your behaviour, and also your self-image. I had thought myself tough, resilient, not a victim. I had thought too, probably in a selfdeluding way, that the explosion of media coverage of crime was partially hype. Now I know it isn't. A friend was carjacked last week. A few days before that, her sister was mugged. Everyone knows someone who has been attacked.

London's antidote to the crime wave is gated communities and private security guards. I've lived with the extreme version of that. It is not the solution. Seven years ago, I moved from London to Peru. For three years I lived in Lima where my husband set up and ran the South American arm of an international investment bank. We lived in a beautiful house, surrounded by 10ft walls, topped by a 10,000-volt electric fence. Night and day, our lush tropical garden was patrolled by armed guards toting submachineguns. Every time I ventured out, I was driven, or accompanied on foot by my personal, armed bodyguard.

This was the unwelcome side-effect of my husband's job; as an employee of a multinational, he and I were kidnap targets, with $3 million price tags on our heads. This made us prime targets, but crime there, as here, is egalitarian. Those with practically nothing were as likely to be robbed as we were.

Some friends were murdered in botched kidnap attempts. Before we got our heavy-duty security in, we were burgled. When we got guard dogs, they were poisoned.

Even after we had put our serious security in place, we had bombs hurled into the garden, the electric fence damaged, our walls scaled and a full-scale shootout take place in our garden. Fortunately, the intruders were repelled.

I know what it feels like to be in a shootout, what the discharge of weapons looks like, sounds like, smells like. As a novelist, I used it in my third book, Into the Fire. But, using bad experiences as material does not exorcise them. I know about fear, and I wish I didn't.

It does not disappear, it just creeps into hiding somewhere in our beleaguered bodies. I know how corrosive it is, how it taints your life, steals your freedoms. There is no safe hiding place from either criminals or fear. We have to attack crime, catch and punish the criminals, not insulate ourselves behind high walls and barbed wire.

Six weeks on, my sudden crying jags have stopped. Now I just feel angry.

I, for one, refuse to accept that if you live in London, crime is the price you pay.

Linda Davies is a novelist and former investment banker. The paperback version of her fourth book, Something Wild, is to be published by Headline in November.

Copyright 2002
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