The parable of Provence

Being the victim of a robbery highlights our inherent helplessness in an inexorably changing world

It was on the cusp of winter in southern France. As president of an international health care organisation, I had been in Geneva and decided to have a few days in a village near Avignon. Up to that time, the trip had had its moments.

One such moment was our flying out of Schiphol. Birds, probably geese, had struck the plane. It was thought that at least one engine had been involved. The plane returned urgently to Amsterdam with the runway lined with a welcoming display of fire tenders and ambulances. A daytrip from London had been transformed into the tedium of waiting into the early hours of the morning for a replacement plane. There was tension among the passengers given that, just a few weeks earlier, an El Al Boeing 747 cargo plane had crashed into a block of flats in the Bijlmermeer district of Amsterdam, killing at least 39 people on the ground and injuring many more. The plane had lost its engines in flight.

You put all that aside and have a relaxed time in Provence, shorn of tourists in this season. In the city of Orange on the way north, there is a famous Roman theatre, so we stopped in the city square, and went off to see it. From the end of the square I looked back and saw — nothing. The theatre was in a state of disrepair, much of it fenced off.

It must have been 30 minutes before we returned to our vehicle. Strange, the door on the driver's side was unlocked. And then came the full realisation. The car was empty. The lock had been broken with a screwdriver.

We had not been robbed of everything. They had missed a couple of bottles of red wine that had rolled under the seat and a couple of scarves stuffed into a plastic bag. The fencing blades for my son were ignored, as was my board report that had been printed out the night before. The computers had been taken, but fortunately, we had been carrying our passports and money.

First, a sensation of helplessness paralyses any action. Then there is a period of intense anger of deprivation, fortunately, not of identity, but of those pieces of memorabilia that are surrogates for identity.

J'accuse! You look round as if the square is full of accomplices. Being lunchtime in late autumn there were few people. Those that were there had seen nothing. Where was the police station? The gendarmerie had been moved from the centre of town.

However, we first made a rapid trip to the pharmacy to get replacement drugs. No prescription, but the staff, with Gallic insouciance, gave me what I wanted, and then went back to dispensing — and no, they had seen nothing.

Eventually we found the police station. Lunchtime, and not a policeman to be seen. A young man was seated on the corridor bench where we sat down. There was nothing unusual about him, except he was handcuffed; no other restraint, no guard. We all waited together. The French lunch extended well past 2 pm. We were ushered into the presence of an inspector who conformed perfectly to the stereotyped caricature. He picked his teeth, had a moustache, spoke little English and, after taking down a short narrative, solemnly looked out the window and concluded it was the fault of the Algerians who were infesting the south of France.

Disappointedly, he said the thieves could be anywhere. Then suddenly he realised we were Australians and launched into a long paean about “Oran”. I knew Oran was in Algeria, but this was about a chap. The sou dropped. The subject of his adoration was Timmy Horan, the champion Australian rugby union centre. The interrogation was at an end; the subject was now Timmy Horan and the Australian world cup triumph the previous year.

The guy with the handcuffs was still there when we left. Our mood was now one of resignation. We got into the car, looked for any tell-tale signs of discarded booty on the way out of town, and drove back to Geneva to the same hotel that we had left just days before with a car packed with luggage. Now we returned with all of our goods in a plastic bag.

Hire cars at that time stood out like beacons, especially as our car's headlights were perpetually on, common in northern Europe, but a real giveaway in the south of France. That we had been trailed by a gang of thieves waiting for the right moment to strike developed in both of us a distrust of leaving anything unattended. No longer was there carefree sightseeing. Taking in the sights became a matter of military precision. Go to the hotel, unload the luggage and then go sightseeing with an eye on the rear vision mirror and making sure any stuff in the car was scattered on the back seat to make robbery more difficult. It was said that a nimble burglar could empty a car in 30 seconds.

Insurance covered the loss, but the experience left a scar. I have not suffered having a gun held to my head, as happened to a South African friend, whose burnt-out car was found later near the Botswanan border. But still, there is a residue. One way to deal with it is by joking about the Clouseau-type inspector and his obsession with rugby — blocking the whole unpleasantness, and turning it into a conversational anecdote.

I was taught medicine by a raft of doctors who had experienced war and imprisonment, and had confronted their own mortality on many occasions as young men. Had they felt helpless? None of my generation ever asked. After all, being a doctor is about coping.

I have never been confronted by armed force or a terrorist missile — only by an empty car. I was a victim of random violation. Stolen goods are replaceable. Nevertheless, helplessness is no longer an anecdote to laugh off. We are now bombarded with matters beyond our control. Not just having to watch, but being able to cope with the apparent helplessness is a worldwide dilemma for all of those educated people who believe that there is a solution to everything.

I turned to the poet Milton. Are we lost in helplessness as was Samson, finding himself “eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves”?1 By contrast, Paradise regained, Milton's other work written concurrently, is a syntactical battle between the Tempter and the Other Guy, with Him eventually getting the ambrosia.2

Maybe in the final scuffle of stones, the trick is to realise that to counter helplessness, one needs to miss the mill and strive for the ambrosia. After all, the mill, which Blake expanded to “dark satanic mills”,3 compounds the misery of helplessness, whereas the concept of Milton's Saviour partaking of ambrosia at the triumphant end of the ordeal indicates hope — surely a relevant message for this time of the year.