When I was thirteen I was arrested for shoplifting, and it wasn’t for a chocolate bar either. Not my finest moment I admit but I was young, foolish, greedy etc. etc. so I think I can now revise this period in my life in a new and illuminating manner. Either that or I will offer up excuse after excuse for why I did it. Actually, yes, let’s go in that direction.
It began, as many youthful crime sprees do, by bunking off school. Doing this was a new experience to me, I had been top of my class since primary school and although I regularly revelled in sick days, skipping school was just not in my vocabulary. Then I met Collie O’ Donovan.
You know those small guys that stand in the background, egging on the seven foot oaf that’s kicking your head in? Well, that was Collie, and because I was top of my class for so long I quickly decided that this was a guy I’d prefer to be standing beside, not against, so he started to hang around with me and my other mates from home. Another one of the gang that day was Barry, a slightly more amiable version of Collie. Barry was a troublemaker, but in an easygoing, Puck of Pook’s Hill kind of way.
Skipping off school was always planned at least a day in advance. We needed smokes (we used to call them Softmint’s as code), money and a spare change of clothes. The night before was often spent tracing an already existing sick note written by your mother into your school diary. For the more experienced, it was simply a matter of copying your mothers handwriting directly. Once these preparations were finished, it was usually a matter of trying to sleep despite the nerves.
Now, skipping off school sounds fun to a lot of people, particularly for those that never did it themselves. As it happens, skipping off school is usually up there with the most boring days of your lives. You’re suddenly thrust into a cold morning with very little money and eight hours to kill with it. The activities that you can partake in is limited to the cinema, which doesn’t open early enough, or sport, which is a bit uncool when skipping off school. I’d invite those that are right now criticising my lack of imagination to walk to a bus stop at 9am with empty pockets and begin planning their day. For those that don’t end up eating a mars bar in the library I offer my congratulations.
This particular day was cold but there wasn’t any rain so there were plenty of options. I seem to remember us meeting at Killiney Hill just before 9am – me, Barry, Collie and Darren. Looking back I can see that trouble was inevitable. Darren, my local friend, famously went on to take too many mushrooms in Thailand and fall through a corrugated iron roof, slicing the top of his finger off in the process. That day his finger was its full, proper length and ready to point towards my inevitable downfall.
We had the obligatory smoke before we went anywhere. A pack of ten between us would only last so long so we shared two between us all. In those days we had a system where one of your buddies would be a ‘ston brother’ which entitled them to half of all your cigarettes. Lower down was the ‘shit brothers’ who would leave each other the last drag on the ‘ston’ they got. These were strict codes, and Darren happened to be my ston brother. Fortunately for my lungs, the guy never bought a packet of cigarettes in his life.
The record store was just one of the stops planned during our day. We reached there in the afternoon, having spent the day wandering slowly around the local shopping centre. I suppose that we were so bored and wanted to do something ‘mad’ to justify the fact that we had skipped school that we came up with the plan to rob from the shop.
To this day I wonder why I agreed to it.
Was it that I wanted to prove myself to my mates? I don’t think so. I had lived a double life for years; a member of the chess club while also being one of the first picked at football and how I was looked upon by my friend really didn’t concern me. My friends never went into peer pressure and I never really felt its effect.
Did I really want the record that badly? Listen, this was not stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family. If I wanted it so bad I could have asked my parents.
Was it for the thrill? This is close to the reason but not the full answer. I regularly climbed our local mountain with my mate with no ropes, scaling up past experienced rock climbers grappling with ropes. I could get thrills anywhere, but not elicit thrills. I had been a good boy all my life, maybe I wanted to be bad for once.
Once a thief….? I, like many other young boys, stole ten pence from my mothers’ purse for matches (to light fires) and a pound from the Trocaire box on the odd occasion. While I felt guilt about this at the time, I don’t now. They were stupid little acts of petulance and greed from a young person that didn’t understand the effects that they have. Because of these little thefts I learnt that it was wrong in a tangible way, not as some abstract idea (by the way, I have always added in an extra few quid every year, just to assuage the guilt a little more).
Was it to prove something to a stranger? Bang on the button. This makes it all the more stupid. Secondary school was the first time I had to stand up on my own opinions and beliefs. I was thrust into a school with people from wildly different backgrounds to myself and I wanted to prove I was like them. Many of us still do this; talking in a different way with different people, tempering our feelings about certain subjects to avoid confrontation, taking part in something we’d never do in a million years. I wanted to prove that I could do something illegal and I wasn’t just ‘a softie from Dalkey.’ It makes me cringe….
We walked into the record store after planning our spree at the top of the stairs in the shopping centre. I, for a reason that still eludes me, was nominated as the person that would carry the bag with the goods and the other two would distract the guard so I could get away.
Let’s just take a step back and look at that master plan in more detail for a moment. We knew the alarm would go off, we knew the guard would know and we knew we would have to run. Contained in here are the germs of why I’m no longer top of the class.
If someone was watching the security camera in the record shop that afternoon they would have seen four boys desperately trying to rip off the security tags from various albums with no success. They would have then seen a bizarre huddle as the next move was planned. If they could hear they would have known that backing out was now no longer an option. Each member of this crack team was determined to beat the system and salvage something from the day. If they had continued watching they would have seen us all nod our heads, open my bag and place the albums inside, security stickers still firmly in place.
We approached the door as a group with me in the middle. I can’t remember being nervous at all. I suppose it was the fact I had never been in real trouble before that in reality trouble didn’t register with me properly. It registered with the others though; they knew exactly what to do.
The guard was an archetype of his kind - overweight, middle-aged and moustached – and stood to my right as I walked out the door. Two of my partners walked past him (it may be my imagination that they nodded or at least acknowledged his presence) and I prepared myself to step through the barrier. The alarm went off immediately and I sprang forward. Strangely, I would have easily got away if I knew what I was doing. What stopped me was that my friend, Darren, was calmly walking away. I still have the clearest image in my mind of looking at the back of his head and wondering why he wasn’t running. This wasn’t in the plan and my brain told me to stop, thinking I should follow his lead. The only thing that followed was an arm that slapped down on my shoulder and I was dragged back into the store, past my friends who completely ignored the whole scene. I had been abandoned to my fate.
Inside they stuck me in a corridor and searched my bag, finding the albums, noting that ‘there had been an attempt to hide them’ and then they called the police. The ride in the back of the police car wasn’t nice and I only remember it for dumping my cigarettes on the floor (I was even caught for that – I dropped the matches at the same time which rattled embarrassingly). When I got back to the station they didn’t even interview me, they just rang my parents which they knew was the ultimate humiliation.
Seeing my mother as angry as that was a new experience and my dad’s expression of ‘disappointment’ was a rotten one. The only person in my family that didn’t give me some sort of abuse was my sister Maeve, who I will always be thankful for. The only other was my dog, Packie, who never gave a shit what I did. I also got a visit from a youth liaison officer which offered me a window into why people repeat crimes; being treated like that certainly gives you a push towards immediate murder of the youth liaison officer.
So did I learn anything? Can I pack the experience down into a bite-sized nugget of golden advice? Nope, not a chance, I can only finally confess to my biggest crime of the whole affair. The artists’ self-titled album I had tried to rob was….. No Doubt.
Told you I was young and foolish.
