Here comes the judge, and there goes the mystery of my missing marrows

Rats? Rabbits? Roos? Beetles? Snails? Caterpillars? Parrots? Teague’s blight? Rule’s rust? Root fungus? Cabbage moth? The stink bug in his feverish gluttony? Powdery mildew? Sooty mould? Softly indomitable slugs sliding forth on silver saliva to lick away my broccoli with their raspy tongues?

They were all suspects. Something was stealing my crop. My vegetables had been shiny, plump and getting plumper, gathering pace towards a king harvest. I was as proud as any father-to-be, as any farmer-to-be. Until a mysterious pestilence ravaged my crop.

I lay in bed many nights trying to imagine the fiend that was serially denuding my patch. In my fevered half-sleep, I took a pinch of DNA from all the cultivator’s known enemies and created a voracious super-pest, an amorphous, horned and drooling beast with blinking ranks of red eyes, its chainsaw teeth tearing through my tomatoes and its elephantine trunk inhaling my zucchini. But I was wrong. The explanation was simpler – and far more complex.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

Coming home unexpectedly on a Saturday afternoon and looking out my back window, I saw a middle-aged woman in my vegetable patch. She was wearing a straw hat and baggy strides and a no-nonsense, go-get-’em look. A judge was stealing my vegetables.

Of course, I didn’t know she was a judge when I first saw her harvesting my crop. She was holding secateurs in one hand and an aubergine up to the sun with the other, admiring it in its empurpled pomp, freshly picked, freshly stolen and doubly delicious for that.

I stepped out my back door and asked her what on earth she thought she was up to. She was infuriatingly unabashed. “You can call the police if you want,” she said. “But I’m going.” And she walked quickly away down the side of my house carrying a woven basket filled with my finest, her bra bouncing heavily, crammed and knobbly with cherry tomatoes.

Thinking she might be an old Marxist who believed all property is theft, I followed her out onto the street and asked her for the keys to her Audi, but she told me to f--- off. So I guess her behaviour can’t be explained as collectivism.

I asked around the neighbourhood and discovered all the veteran horticulturists had had run-ins with her over the years. She’s a recidivist. And perhaps can’t help helping herself, people said. She maybe has a syndrome, they speculated, certainly a weirdness anyway.

Still, one expects restraint from a judge. One expects a judge to keep their mitts off the neighbour’s rutabagas. Banging the gavel at larcenists Monday through Friday ought to help stay the rash hand on Saturday, you’d think. I contemplated denouncing her. But you can’t denounce a judge. A judge would surely counter-denounce, and my adventures among the mayor’s satsumas might surface.

And, anyway, I didn’t want to harm the woman. For most of us, it’s not a big deal being known as a small-time crook, but a judge’s career more-or-less hangs on not being a thief. She’d be out of a job if it were known she was trousering the neighbour’s squash of a weekend. And while I’m keen to stomp snails, I draw the line at ruining a judge for a pocketful of marrow.

I don’t know why the woman has become a crop raider. But I admit to a vague feeling that the normal proprietary values don’t apply to vegetables. Natural produce is such a gift from Mother Earth that its ownership feels inherently communal. Who hasn’t reached for a lemon across a fence? Or dreamt of half an hour among the nuns’ turnips? I have stolen fruit. When I was a boy, I used to pick the loquats off old Mrs Spivey’s tree every year and take them around to her front door and sell them to her, telling her they were my own. She happily gave me two bob for them, lamenting that her own tree had failed to produce fruit once again. I was 35 before I realised she had been paying me to pick her loquats.

Anyone who’s lived a broad life knows stolen produce is especially sweet. Ask Eve – that peckish prototype gnawing away on God’s Granny Smith. Or Huck Finn, who always maintained a “stole” watermelon tasted better than any other variety.

For me, there is something intrinsically human, paradoxically perfect and utterly hilarious about a pillar of society hightailing it down the road in a serf’s mufti with an armful of forbidden fruit. Run, judge, run.