Alan Bennett tells how 'ice cream gang' picked his pocket of £1,500 cash

Alan Bennett has told for the first time how he was targeted by pick-pockets who stole £1,500 from him.

The playwright has written publicly about his encounter with thieves who took money he had just withdrawn from a Camden bank near his home to pay builders.

The theft in June was reported at the time but Bennett has now described it in the diary he writes annually in The London Review Of Books, seen by the Independent.

He told how he went from the bank to a nearby Marks & Spencer branch, where two women, whom he took to be Italian, "very kindly" offered to help him clean off ice cream spilt down the back of his coat.

Bennett, 76, recalled taking off the coat while the women dabbed at it with tissues before a man in his fifties brought more tissues.

"I put my jacket on again, thanking the women profusely," Bennett wrote.

He went back to his car, thinking "how good it is that there are still people who, though total strangers, can be so selflessly helpful".

But when he looked for the cash, "of course, the envelope has gone".

Police told him the pickpockets were probably Romanian, and the con was common enough to have earned the name "Mustard Squirter".

Bennett admitted the thieves were "very good at their job" but added that the casualty was trust, "so that I am now less ready to believe in the kindness of strangers".