MY PARENTS WERE BURGLED

(My parents two weeks ago, while visiting us is Spain)

My parents were burgled yesterday. Some disgusting people broke into their house while they were away having their hearing aids tweaked and doing a little shopping. The thieves ransacked the place, stole all my mother’s jewelry, and some money that she had stashed away wrapped up in bags and fabric and towels, her secret little safety net. They took their watches and some clothes. They also stole all my father’s swimming medals from his days on the Italian team.

What kind of people take things from old people? Or from anyone for that matter. But from old people? What the hell?

My parents are both in their mid-eighties; they live in a house in a little French village, with lovely, friendly neighbours. They are two lovely, kind old people who worked hard throughout their lives to provide their four children with more opportunities than they were given while growing up during and after the second world war. My father is from Milan, and my mother from the north of England. They met in the early 1960’s met at a swimming pool in Milan,  my mother was working in Milan as an au-pair because she wanted to learn Italian, and my father basically spent his entire life at the pool because he was Italian champion in the butterfly discipline, and was training for the Olympics. He was twenty-years old, gorgeous, with black hair and blue eyes, with a body like, well, an Italian swimmer! And my mother was a gorgeous young woman, tall and slim, with brown hair and green eyes, just two years older than him. They fell in love, she got pregnant, my Mama went back to England alone and suddenly there I was!

My mother didn’t want my father to marry her just because she had me; she is a strong, independent woman who trained as a teacher. Since my grandmother was very catholic, and because having a child without being married was very much frowned upon back then, especially in small towns, she travelled down to London, changed her name, and gave birth to me there. Then, as far as I know, she returned to the north of England (Lancashire, near Liverpool) and got on with her life. I think we lived with my grandmother, also a strong, independent woman who lost her husband during the war, and was left alone to raise two young children. My Nana saw a business opportunity in the small town where she lived, and opened a clothes boutique for women which she successfully ran until she retired.

I’m told that my father came to see us as often as he could, although of course I have no recollection of his visits. He left the Italian swimming team, and managed to get a job in Geneva, Switzerland, where he opened the Alitalia airline branch which he ran for many years. My mother and I moved to Geneva when I was two, and my parents married a few months later.

I am the eldest of four children; I have two sisters and a brother, and my parents managed to put us all through private schools by making careful, strategic professional choices and by being careful with money. We lived in an apartment for many years, but they longed for a house in the country with a garden, and when I was about 12 or 13, we went to look at a big piece of land in a little village called Péron in neighbouring France, about twenty minutes from the Swiss border, where there virtually nothing for miles around. I clearly remember that day; we had picture postcard weather, with clear skies for hundreds of kilometres. Since the land sat a little higher up on the foothills of the Jura mountains, the view from there stretched right across the Rhone valley towards the Alps way, way over on the other side. It was magic.

My parents loved it, and so did I, and we were very excited at the prospect of building our own house in such a beautiful, quiet location. Little by little things came together; we went to look at various companies who specialized in building prefabricated houses. My parents compared quality, and design, and eventually settled on a company called Balency. I don’t know why I remember that detail, but I do. I’m good at remembering really random things.

The work began, and we drove over to our land, thrilled by the huge hole they’d dug for the foundations, and then the iron rungs sticking up everywhere, and the cement. It was all very exciting. Once that was done, the real exciting stuff began, with the arrival of an enormous lorry carrying all the different parts of the house, that the workmen gradually put together like Meccano.

My father would drive up there almost every day after work to make sure everything was moving along as expected, and my mother and my two siblings (my youngest sister wasn’t born yet) would go at weekends, running around the bottom of the huge field that was our garden, picking wild flowers and going to talk to the cows, and making friends with the funny old farmer down the road and dreaming about moving in and having so much space to play outside.

When we finally moved in, there was still a lot of work to do. As money was tight, my father did a lot of the work himself. We had all the tools, including our very own cement mixer. He made cement bricks to build what we called the “holy wall” (because the bricks were patterned, and weren’t just blocks) to hold up one side of the terrace,  he tiled the entire terrace, he laid down cement for the ramp into the garage, built a barbecue that doubled as a pizza oven, he wallpapered and painted, and put lights up; you name it, he did it. My mother made curtains, and gardened, and painted and wallpapered, and cooked, and cleaned, and picked us up from school (45 minutes away), and did the shopping, and made our clothes and and and... We had a hedge of plum trees, and I remember us collecting wheelbarrows full of plums, and turning them into enough jam to spread on every single baguette all over France for the next ten years! We had a little vegetable garden, and a black cat called Spooky, and we had wonderful parties on the terrace where all their friends would come, bringing their musical instruments, and everyone would sing and dance and eat barbecued sausages and baked potatoes or pasta salads, or maybe homemade pizza. They’d drink Chianti wine and we’d have Coca Cola because it was a party. I had my first big teenage party there, and my father made so much delicious pizza that all the cool kids did was eat. Nobody danced! I was so upset. My Nana bought me a moped, and I would ride it to school once in a while when the weather was fine, and it would take me over and hour, but it was fun, and I’d take my helmet off as soon as I got through the border because I was an idiot and because helmets were only mandatory in France. My friend Carolien would come over for weekends, and we’d go for bike rides, and sit on skateboards and ride them at  full speed down the steep village road, because there were so few cars back then.

Those memories are gold to me. Those days in Péron, in that house that my parents worked so hard to build and turn into a home, are the foundation of my world. I lacked for nothing, I benefitted from a first-class education in an expensive private school. We went on lovely holidays to Italy, or to visit my Nana in England. When I went to university in Geneva, they paid for me to have a gorgeous little apartment. They have always been nothing but supportive.

They don’t have much, but what they have they love, and they are proud of. My husband worked for a luxury goods company until he retired, so over the years we bought my parents a few nice watches, and some nice items of jewelry that my mother cherished. When my grandmother died, my mother kept some of her jewelry, and there she also had some little gold bits and bobs that had belonged to my father’s great-aunt. And of course my father bought my mother pretty things over the years; earrings, a bracelet, a few necklaces. But there were no crazy diamonds or rubies or emeralds or sapphires; just pretty pieces, with sentimental value.

And then yesterday, they came back from having their hearings aids tweaked to find their house upside down, and all these lovely trinkets: the watches, the earrings, the rings, the necklaces, the bracelets, all gone.

They’d been away less than two hours. Nobody saw a thing. The thieves came through the garden, ripped covers off cushions on the terrace and used them as sacks to run off with what they found.

The police soon came but found few fingerprints as the creeps had sprayed all the surfaces they’d touched with something sticky. My father is returning to the police station this afternoon, and of course the insurance will be involved. But the chances of finding the thieves and recuperating all these precious treasures are slim to none.

I called my parents as soon as I read my mother’s breathless, panicky email, and contacted my son who rushed over there with his girlfriend to console them and help begin cleaning up putting things away. I’m not in Switzerland at the moment, so am feeling rather useless; I’m going back early next week.

I just find it so sad. What kind of people do this? Whoever it was had clearly been keeping a close watch on their comings and goings, and chose a moment when both of my parents were out of the house. There is construction work going on in one of the neighbour’s houses, and the men there were apparently very shifty when my mother went to ask if they’d seen a car or van go by. And – quelle surprise! - the work there finished yesterday, so those workmen are gone. Also, they weren’t a legal company…

My mother – forever the optimist and counting her blessings – said to me on the phone that it was just as well they were both out of the house, because if the thieves had come while she was there alone, or my father there alone things might have been a lot worse. And there are worse things going on in Gaza…

So they’re ok. They’re just shaken. And bereft of little items that were precious to them, and that they intended to pass on to their grandchildren.

But they are safe. And that is the most important.

Thank you for reading.