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A lesson from Maggie and Boston's heroes - bravery and kindness always win

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The legions who turned out for Margaret Thatcher's funeral demonstrated the public's warmth of feeling for the former Prime Minister

The Boston Marathon bombings and the funeral of Lady Thatcher were the two defining events of the past week – and at first glance, brethren, they could hardly be more different.

One was unexpected, destructive and left a huge cost in terms of life and limb. The other was long-planned, dignified and costly only in terms of time and treasure.

But both events were alike in one way: they exposed not only the impact of evil and of high office, but the power of something far greater.

 In Boston, the streets were so splattered with blood that they looked as if someone had been chucking around cans of red paint. In London, the pavements were partly clogged with placard-waving effigy-danglers, for whom the last rites of an old lady were ‘a good day to bury bad news’.

Yet nothing, not even anger and bombs, could stop the milk of human kindness flowing down Boston’s Boylston Street on Patriots’ Day, or through the City of London last Wednesday.

In Massachusetts, we didn’t see the cowardly bombers to begin with – but what we did see was the instinctive bravery of strangers. As shown by the competitors who kept running after the first blast, not fleeing but heading towards Red Cross tents to give blood; by volunteers who raced to help the injured, ignoring the danger of another bomb, and by those who tore off their own belts and clothes to try to staunch the bleeding of others.

And here, in this country, we saw something else too: the karmic legacy of past kindness. Which was moving and instructive. After all, who hasn’t wondered in the dark watches of the night how many people would turn up to their funeral, and why they would bother to come?

Well, in Lady Thatcher’s case, so many of the legions who remembered her mentioned not handbaggings or summits or power suits – but individual acts of personal kindness.

As the Rt Rev Richard Chartres said in his address: ‘One thing that everyone has noted is the courtesy and personal kindness which she showed to those who worked for her .  .  . and often also to those who were not, in the world’s eyes, “important”.’

I would echo the Bishop. We reap what we sow; what goes around comes around. And as nanny says: It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.

The memorial of flowers, personal objects and three crosses for the victims of the bombings near the Boston Marathon finish line

As the obsequies reveal, Lady T may have been rude to those in her Cabinet, and especially horrid to Howe, but she was nice to those below her (ie pretty much everybody). At a lunch at Chequers, a waitress tipped hot soup into Sir Geoffrey’s lap. Thatcher leapt up to console the waitress and ignored the scalded Minister. Which, if you think about it, is exactly the right way round.

She was constantly feeding people her home-made shepherd’s pie, fetching aspirin for fading secretaries, or waking up staff who were supposed to be looking after her with morning cups of tea. During the Falklands War, she’d stay up half the night, writing hand-written letters to the families of the 255 personnel who died in the conflict.

The ubiquitous Conor Burns, an MP who has taken on the mantle of chief mourner, has described how he first became friends with the Thatchers after driving Sir Denis to a ‘golf day’ in 1997.

MP Conor Burns described Margaret Thatcher's kindess and efforts to be the perfect hostess

On their return, ‘she insisted on making DT and me drinks, and almost had to be restrained from going downstairs to make us an omelette,’ he recalls. ‘She returned instead with crisps and nuts.’ In one of his countless interviews, he uttered the immortal line: ‘She was a very human human being.’

As Olga Polizzi, who redecorated the flat at No 10, has pointed out, what you don’t see in the famous picture of Mrs T leaving Downing Street for the last time – in tears, apparently heartbroken at being booted from office by lesser breeds – is the throng of No 10 staff, ‘almost all weeping as they said goodbye to her’.

In both Boston and London, flesh was proved to be flesh. Vulnerable, weak and mortal. But what last week’s two defining events illuminated, like sun streaming through a stained-glass window, was the invincibility of spirit.

 Who could forget the stetson-toting bystander Carlos Arredondo – a man who tried to kill himself by setting himself alight when he heard of his soldier son’s death in Iraq, but who is now a peace activist. Arredondo leapt to the aid of a young man whose legs had been blown off, used his own sweater as a tourniquet, and said: ‘My name’s Carlos. You’re going to be OK.’ And who could forget Mrs T writing to a nine-year-old: ‘There will be times when we do or say something we wish we hadn’t done and we shall be sorry and try not to do it again.’

It was a week to mourn atrocity and death. But it was also a time to honour the many random acts of kindness and bravery by everyday people who refused to be called heroes, and acted with no thought of reward.

And a week to remember one extraordinary woman, who had a marathon life and died secure in the knowledge that if you are kind to others, then history will be kind to you.

Here endeth my sermon.

  The mesmerising Texan Amanda Thatcher who gave a reading at her grandmother's funeral

Four further funeral thoughts:

1. Did anyone actually grasp when they signed off on this £10 million spectacle that for several hoursthe focus of the watching world would be .  .  . Sir Mark Thatcher?

2. Mrs T may have made this country  great again but – as the mesmerising Texan teen Amanda, pictured right, plus the all-American grandjock Michael somehow brought to the fore – her children and grandchildren do not live here but offshore, mostly in the Land of the Free.

3. Someone enterprising could have made a small fortune if they’d launched a pop-up grooming service for male mourners (it’s what she would have wanted!).

Many distinguished faces resembled exploded horsehair mattresses.

And for one alarming moment, craggy Sir Bernard Ingham’s luxuriant white eyebrows filled my whole screen.

4. Didn’t Mrs Clegg look magnificent? Mourning certainly becomes her.

 

On my way to the London Book Fair, I was struck by an unusual poster campaign splashed over Earl’s Court Tube for a brand of pushchair.

The ad features no pushchair, but two ripped young fathers with a tousled toddler, and the slogan How We Roll. Which is bold.

The number of same-sex couples with children is under 10,000, compared with 5.5 million heterosexual couples. And the name of the brand? Mamas and Papas.

 

My daughter, a languages student, has been in Paris and has returned with fresh slang. She passes on the correct French phrase for the essential teenage formulation de nos jours – which is ‘I’m like’ as in ‘I’m, like, totally into him.’ And it is? ‘Je suis genre.’




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