Jenson and Jessica Button (Buttons gassed and robbed, 8 August) might have followed the example of James Thurber’s Aunt Sarah Shoaf, who always feared that during the night a burglar was going to break in “and blow chloroform under her door through a tube”. More afraid of anaesthetics than of losing her possessions, she devised a simple solution and “always piled her money, silverware and other valuables in a neat stack just outside her bedroom with a note reading: ‘This is all I have. Please take it and do not use your chloroform, as this is all I have.’” As an added precaution, she also threw shoes from a pile kept next to her bed down the hallway at regular intervals during the night. “Some nights she threw them all, some nights only a couple of pairs.”
John White
Seaford, East Sussex
