Finding sense in vandalism

The phone call came while I was sitting in work on a Friday afternoon, already faintly panicky about something altogether else. It was my wife. She’d just left Kenwood, the grounds of an old stately home on the edge of Hampstead Heath where it’s pleasant to thrash the kids about on a sunny day, and returned to the car to find the driver’s side window smashed in.

There’s an awful lot of glass in a car window. An awful lot. Pavement diamonds, they’re sometimes poetically known as. But the sharp nubbles of the broken window of this Skoda Octavia were not, mostly, on the pavement but on the driver’s seat. And the passenger seat. And in the footwells. And in the baby seats on the back. And in the leather pouched around the base of the gearstick. And in the door panels. And… well, passim, as indexers used to put it.

My wife had to make the car sufficiently habitable to get home without her children ending up glass-studded, eyeless and bleeding like children from a Clive Barker movie. I had the lower-key pleasure of negotiating Elephant car insurance’s automated switchboards, halfway through which process I longed to be glass-studded, eyeless and bleeding myself. And of course there was no way anyone could get the right pane of glass until Monday at the earliest, and of course a car with a broken window parked on the street voids the insurance, and of course I had to try to get a family of five to Cambridge the following afternoon, and of course that evening, as I cleared the glass from the ravaged car with a vacuum cleaner and pliers and gardening gloves, fat drops of rain started to fall and short-circuited the car alarm so that our night was punctuated by sporadic eruptions of electronic grief.

Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof, in other words. A car seat full of broken glass is—who knew?—a huge pain in the bum. And I started—thinking of myself as a reflective type—to put myself in the shoes of the person who, quite casually, will have passed a family car on a sunny main road and thought: “What the hell? I’ll put my elbow through the window.”

Is this, I wonder, a failure of empathy? In the absence of a personal connection with your victim, or oblivious to the great groaning cycle of misery you set in train, do you simply smash the window for giggles or in the hope of finding an unguarded satnav? Or is it, rather, the opposite: a gleeful malice in considering that, minutes and then hours and then days later someone you will never meet will be suffering from your actions. Is it that you don’t imagine the consequences of so small an act—or that you do, and you love the casual power it gives you?

If the latter, here is surely a shadow-side to altruism. The highest good, we tend to think, is a kindness done anonymously to a stranger. Putting in a car window, of course, is very far from the lowest evil—but there’s something in the almost abstract, disinterested quality of the act that relates to that. It is an unkindness done, also anonymously, to a stranger: an acte gratuit of minor thuggery.

I have some actes gratuits I would be happy to see performed should I ever catch up to the anonymous prankster. I still remember with similar admiration the (presumably) would-be bike thief who, thwarted by lock and chain, simply removed and discarded the nut that held the front wheel of my bike on. He will have gone whistling on his way imagining, I daresay, the scene the following morning when I mounted up only to watch my front wheel roll lazily away from its frame into the traffic on Kensington Gore.

I recall a letter Auberon Waugh wrote to his son’s headmaster after the latter was suspended for pushing a wardrobe down the stairs. “‘Senseless’ is a word usually applied to these acts,” he wrote, “but when one grasps the simple proposition that vandals obviously enjoy breaking things, then vandalism is no more senseless than playing tennis.”