Out to the Undiscovered Ends - a few First Thoughts on the Death of Lady Thatcher

RIP Margaret Hilda Thatcher, born in Grantham, Lincolnshire 13th October 1925, died in London 8th April 2013.

 

Don’t worry. This isn’t an attempt at an obituary or a summary of Lady Thatcher’s career. There’ll be plenty of those, and some of them will be very good. So will the biography which that fine writer, Charles Moore, has been working on for so long and which will now soon be published.

 

It’s just a few thoughts on the death of an undoubtedly great human being, whom I was lucky enough to have met and seen in action, so that perhaps one day , if I’m even luckier and our country and people survive so long, , a grandchild of mine, when very old, will say to someone deep in the 22nd century that his or her grandfather had actually shaken hands with Margaret Thatcher. And that someone will feel they have gently touched the edge of history.

 

Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Dedicatory Ode’ has long haunted me, with its tremendous opening line ‘From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends…’

 

I am always moved by the distance some people travel, especially in politics, though in other paths as well. Even when they are signing enormous treaties, speaking to multitudes from high platforms, celebrating smashing election victories and directing wars,  there is somewhere in their mind a small and shabby bedroom, a cat curled up by the fire, a third-hand bicycle, a clock ticking, a walk through shabby streets to an unassuming school,  a corner of a sooty garden in which they have managed to grow a few beans or potatoes, a frugal seaside holiday involving quite a lot of rain. There are also the little chores that tie us to normality, washing up, sweeping the stairs, taking out the rubbish.

 

How do these great ones cope with this contrast with what they really are, and what we have elevated them into being? They may have wanted to be great, and striven for it all their lives. But when they finally caught the enormous Atlantic roller of celebrity, and it lifted them unmistakably far above everyone else, were they dismayed to see their own past lives , and everyone in them, suddenly become so small and far away, and irrecoverable?

 

And what about those they left behind? The mighty still have old aunts and uncles living in bungalows, schoolfriends to whom they once told secrets, and closer family who knew them before their lives changed. You hear it often from such families that after so-and-so went off – to a parliamentary selection or some such event – ‘he never came back’. What they mean is that the person who achieves great power, riches or fame is not the same as the person they knew before, and never will be again. Different rules apply. They belong to other people now, and to other institutions,. And, if they’re not careful, when they die they will , like Abraham Lincoln , ‘belong to history’, the cruel words used to persuade Mary Todd Lincoln to stop grieving embarrassingly, as if she were a normal widow at the bedside of a horribly murdered husband, instead of a powerless woman at the deathbed of a secular saint, whose memory was now public property.

 

In Margaret Thatcher’s generation, even more than for mine, 30 years behind her in the decline of England from disciplined Protestant superpower to multicultural secular Babylon,  childhood and early life were necessarily modest, quiet and limited. It was enough of a thrill to see an express train tear through the meadows with its plume of steam and hiss of power, on its way to London, a city you might expect to see three or four times in a lifetime (Lady Thatcher didn’t see London till she was 12 years old) . A school scholarship was a tremendous achievement. A university scholarship glowed like a medal. There was never much money. It didn’t do to lose your temper or offend people. You would meet the same people again and again, and they would not forget. I can just remember, too, the vigorous adult hatred of time-wasting, which meant that if you were even so much as spotted in a moment of repose, a task would instantly be found for you. I look back on this with a mixture of regret, as I know it was good for me, and immense relief that it no longer happens, as I spent so much of my own childhood learning how to avoid being caught in idleness. For Lady Thatcher, I think it remained an ineradicable part of life.

 

One long-ago winter afternoon I broke a railway journey at Grantham (I think I had been to visit Lincoln Cathedral) and walked through the unassuming streets in the biting wind, just to get an impression. Cold, it was, and bleak and workful.  Grantham, of course, possesses one of the loveliest church spires in Europe, and has a surprising amount of handsome brick houses. But it is no metropolis and (as John Campbell’s superb biography says) , the young Margaret Roberts did not grow up in the prosperous or grand parts of the town. Her father’s shop – which Campbell points out was a sub-Post Office, though Mrs Thatcher interestingly never mentioned this in her own reminiscences – was in her childhood days on the edge of a pretty rough area. Like much of the striving middle class, the Roberts family knew exactly what they were escaping by adopting the diligent Protestant deferred gratification which is the foundation of middle class life.  

 

I saw a lot of Lady Thatcher’s speeches, in the House of Commons and at Tory conferences.  I once saw her at some Tory ball, in an astonishing blue gown, a sort of 20th-century Gloriana. The last time I glimpsed her , she was already old and unwell, but had come out selflessly to support an old friend who had published a book.

 

I was lucky enough to travel, crammed into the seats at the very back of her majestic, obsolete and noisy RAF VC-10, on several of her foreign trips, and she was generous with her time on those journeys, sometimes too generous as she loved discussing foreign policy but seldom provided any  news, let alone gossip. You couldn’t help being impressed by her. She always knew what she was talking about.  If she didn’t know a subject, she studied it until she did.  She wasn’t going to be bested, or shown up by anyone. And the legendary single-mindedness shone like a lamp. But the only time I ever felt I *liked* her was on Tuesday 19th April 1983, when, as a very junior political reporter, I was in the House of Commons Press gallery and Denis Healey, then still in his full vigour,  sneered that she planned to ‘cut and run’ by holding an election.

 

Mr Healey, who even now still preserves a Yorkshire accent, and was in those days one of the politicians whose speeches would fill the chamber, and who rather prided himself on his ability to cope with the rough stuff, got the shock of his life ( and so did everyone else) when the supposed Finchley housewife suddenly shook off nearly 50 years of delicacy, pearls and elocution lessons, and spoke in the language of the Lincolnshire back streets:

 

‘ The right hon. Gentleman is afraid of an election, is he? Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Could not take it? Cannot stand it? If I were going to cut and run, I should have gone after the Falklands. Frightened! Right now inflation is lower than it has been for 13 years—a record which the right hon. Gentleman could not begin to touch.’

 

‘Frit!’. We had never heard it before,  especially not from her, but you knew what it meant as soon as it struck the eardrum. It was much more damaging than ‘afraid’ or ‘frightened’ because it came from somewhere much deeper.   It was the sharp, unanswerable Saxon jibe and challenge, pronounced with a sneer, that you couldn’t answer and which everyone listening would know had struck home. It was completely British,  and it was not from the neat world of suburban lawns and afternoon tea, but from the other less gentle world of cracked pavements and grimy brick walls where the only thing to do when in trouble was to stand and fight. And so she did.

 

This was not a handbagging, but a straightforward kick in the shins, as no doubt administered from time to time in the playground of Huntingtower Road County Elementary School. (This was the school where, when the head told the young Margaret she had been lucky to win a poetry recital contest, the self-possessed little girl snapped back ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it’).

 

Out of the same deep toughness came her resilience the night after the IRA tried very hard to murder her, and had succeeded in murdering or gravely hurting several close friends,  another moment which even the meanest of her detractors must surely admit does her credit.

 

That’s why, even though I don’t share the adulation that so many do, and even though I think that Lady Thatcher’s long-term legacy will be smaller than many claim, I’ll always back her against the silly critics who could never see the whole woman, nor give her any credit for anything, or grasp just how extraordinary and exceptional her rise had been, from her quiet home and first beginnings.