Where do you draw the line when you're compromising your morals?

WHEN I was growing up, down Gerard Street, in a house on the town side of Wilson Street, there lived a busy little woman who could often be seen scurrying about the neighbourhood after dusk, lugging a big sack on her back.
She’d criss-cross the street, knocking on this door and that. And if I answered her furtive tap, I’d be told, in an anxious whisper: “Go and see if your mother wants any tea.” Almost always, my mother did want some tea – or sugar, or butter, or anything else that was in short supply – and money and consumables changed hands on our darkened front step.
The goods had been stolen, of course. But, in those austere days, even otherwise law-abiding housewives broke their own rules in order to put a little extra on the family table. My mother was no exception. Because in the early post-war years, food rationing was more severe than it had been during the war. Which led to my mother making a huge compromise with her morals. Despite being scrupulously honest, almost to the point of eccentricity, there was one area where she allowed herself to dabble on the wrong side of the law: the Black Market.
Somehow, I just can’t see my mother’s name and the words “receiving stolen goods” in the same sentence. But that’s what it was. Albeit the circumstances were, shall we say, extenuating? At least that is what I still like to think. After all, there’d been a war on.
But if you start making excuses … Honesty? Where does it start? Where does it end? Is it black and white? Or will you allow shades of grey?
When I was an employer, I never minded staff making personal telephone calls, provided they first asked. When they didn’t ask, and I found out, I regarded it as stealing – stealing the cost of the call, and stealing the cost of my time.
When I worked in local government, some cleaners used to nick soap and toilet rolls. They probably saw it as a perk of the job. But in my book that, too, was stealing, pure and simple.
And when I hear that someone has purchased bootleg DVDs, I regard that as dishonest because artists and production companies are deprived of their rightful royalties and profits.
Phone calls, pens, toilet rolls, sneaking out for a fag in company time, buying pirated films and music – it’s a broad canvas. But where does honesty end and dishonesty begin?
Last week, I was in a Derby supermarket, transferring goods from trolley to bag, when I came across a small jar of sauce that I’d missed placing on the conveyor belt.
Eventually I found one of those self-service tills that I don’t like, and persuaded a hovering member of staff to process the extra sale. But it would have been easier to wander out of the store with the sauce (it cost £1.17) claimed as some small recompense for the time, not so long ago, that the same establishment short-changed me to the tune of a tenner.
An impatient queue muttered behind me, and I didn’t want to make a fuss. So I just left my phone number and went away with the promise that they’d call me when they’d checked the till. They never did. Maybe another mistake had balanced matters.
Or perhaps their subsequent silence might have been because, when the truculent sales assistant had examined the £20 notes in her till and barked: “Was there anything written on yours?”, I’d said: “Yes – I promise to pay the bearer.”
Honesty doesn’t always pay. And neither, apparently, does sarcasm.