..."What's going on there,
mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie
Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them
flowers."
The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was
feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car
and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom,
dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol…
When I was a kid, Thatcher was the
headmistress of our country.
Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring
and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She
became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when
I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of
Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?
We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and
fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of
Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over
which she presided:
"We didn't just
break the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is
the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by
tyranny. The spell of community.
Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. All of the Tory
edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish
puberty, were confusing. When all the public amenities were flogged, the
adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and
affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people
companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the
British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat
where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.
You could never call Margaret Mother
by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a
bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they
would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly
mind, anathema…
In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of
domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping
Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions
from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen…
She is an anomaly; a product of the
freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement
that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the
sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an
icon of individualism, not of feminism.
.
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