Hastings East Sussex
February 2012
Ok, I will admit it now; when I was 14 I let the air out of the tyre of a parked car, dumped garbage into a mail box and threw snow balls at passing cars. I also, once, threw eggs from the balcony of a friend’s apartment building. But I never committed a robbery or stole a car let alone set one on fire.
There is a burning car directly in front of my house right now at 3AM in an otherwise peaceful English neighbourhood. I’ve only awoke after the fuel tank exploded, although my next door neighbour is well awake, almost hysterical—her Elizabethan house, made of wood, and leaning out over the road, is in danger of catching fire. It would have except that as the fire really got going and the car’s break pads were turned to toast, it began rolling down the hill in flames before the fire department arrived and threw something under the wheels to make it stop.
A burning car is a powerful image, almost an iconic one, up there with the AK-47 and the mid-60s Pop art representation of Ché Guevara that you see in every University dorm and radical chic hang out. But up close a burning car is not just a powerful image, it is a frightening one. It speaks of street violence and contested authority. Half asleep and standing in my briefs in the middle of the night, peering out the window I’m not sure what’s out there and whether there are people I should not wish to be seen by. Those are the thoughts that go through the mind of anyone living in a conflict zone woken at night by something they ignore at their peril. But a time and place for everything, please. This is not the Congo or Tajikistan, I am in a very respectable, even rather quaint, neighbourhood, the Hastings Old Town, steps from art galleries, delicatessens and bijou shops. So what is going on here?
Nothing that dramatic really—boys will be boys. Some joy riders have stolen a car and abandoned it before setting it on fire and heading home. Car jackings are common in England, there are dozens every day and many of them end with the vehicle being torched. Even in smaller towns like this one they are fairly common. My neighbours are quick to tell me that there have been several around here in the past year, the same year in which England experienced the first serious public riots in 30 years in cities all over the country. Car jackings in Hastings, though, are not crypto-political protests by the unemployed or disenfranchised, they are bog standard loutish behaviour. The road we are on leads from the rougher pubs on the sea front in what is still a working fishing village, through the gentrified old town and up a long hill toward another part of town notorious for its public housing estates. No proper evening out is over until someone has proved their daring-do by stealing a car.
As we grow older and more righteous we are quick to forget the foolishness and risk taking of our own youth. But burning a car is a pretty major statement. Or is it that my contemporaries and I were lacking ambition and guts in our garden variety vandalism? The current generation are in the big leagues when it comes to petty crime.