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Forbidden Fruit and What Goes Around Comes Around

As a child, I loved to listen to stories my grandparents and parents would tell us about the 'good old days'. As a teenager, I would roll my eyes and think to myself 'not another tale' of how good things were in years gone by. Now, as an adult with adult children and grandchildren of my own, I find myself telling tales and stories about the 'good old days'. One of my favourites is about the night my husband turned into a thief, which I relate with relish to my grandchildren who are still young enough to sit wide-eyed in disbelief at the thought of their grandfather stealing.

The eventful night happened on a warm summer evening when our now thirty-year-old son was just four years old. Our back garden was surrounded with a six foot wall, so that we had privacy around our swimming pool. The neighbours who lived behind us had a peach tree that we could only see when looking out of our kitchen window, which was on a slightly higher level than the back garden. My husband had his eye on one particular very large, juicy-looking peach. He would comment now and again that as soon as it was ripe he was going to pick it off the tree, sit down alone in the garden and relish it. A stolen peach tasted much better than the good, honest paid-for peaches.

I reminded him that the owner of the peach tree was someone to be reckoned with, as I had often heard him shouting and muttering away; at what, I don't know, but he did sound like someone who would take no nonsense. My remarks went completely unheeded.

The time came and the peach was declared ripe. "Tonight, I will be eating that peach," said my husband, smacking his lips at the thought of it. Right enough, at about eight thirty that evening, he got our small step ladder, and by the light of the moon, he silently crept to the bottom of the garden and balanced the step ladder in the flower bed. He climbed to the top step and carefully balanced himself so that he could stretch over the wall to pick the peach. He reached out his hand to pull the peach from the tree.

As the peach broke loose from its branch and the culprit, thinking he was home free, heard a loud voice from below. "Here Daddy! I have brought you the torch, so that you can see what you are doing!" Our son even went a step further, switching on the torch and aiming the bright beam of light into the tree.

My husband got such a fright; he dropped the peach back into the rightful owners garden and

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