As I was watching her sombre, half-heartedly controversial funeral yesterday, part-telly and part-live (I work round the corner from St. Paul's and my boss had raced in to my office, dragging my colleagues and me out to "witness a piece of history") it occurred to me that Mrs. Thatcher has been someone I had always been aware of, almost as far back in my life as I could remember.
It began when my free school milk was taken away at playschool. This was actually something my little self felt elated by - the milk had been left on the school's blisteringly hot radiator for the majority of the morning, so was nicely curdled by the time we got it. In those days, the attitude was still along the lines of anything you got for free mustn't be wasted, so there was no question of not drinking it. No lactose intolerances, either. I actually credit playschool for my ensuing hatred of milk, which I eschew to this day. I must have overheard my Dad talking about the removal of our school milk and in my little mind, assumed 'Thatcher' was a profession rather than a name, as I solemnly proclaimed to my Nan later on that "the Thatcher took our milk away today" to peals of adult laughter that confused me greatly. I must have been about five years old at the time.
A few years later my then-best friend Candice and I whiled away the boredom of group maths lessons by making up a stupid game called 'Margaret Thatcher's Maths'. This amounted to not much more than us reading out the instructions in our maths textbooks in a 'Margaret Thatcher' voice, but it cheered us up no end. As I thought about that game with a wistful smile, it struck me that there will be no children playing classroom games like 'David Cameron's Diction' or 'Ed Miliband's Motional Verbs'. Not just because they're stupid games, but because pre-school children won't have a clue who these people are. They won't have overheard their parents talking about them as though they knew them personally. Their 'Spitting Image' puppets would look and sound exactly the same. Why would anybody be bothered to characterise them in any way?
But I suppose it might have been these mad childhood events that made me warm to Mrs. Thatcher as I grew older. To me she was a comforting, stable figure who had always been in the background...someone who was unquestionably in charge of everything and with whom I just felt safe. Perhaps this wouldn't have been the case had I been brought up in a mining town up North, but there it was (I was hardly from an affluent family either, but that's another story!) Mrs. Thatcher, admittedly along with my Dad, made me interested enough in politics to do some background reading and form my own opinions about policies and decisions. To take an interest in my country and how it's governed.
These were my thoughts as the gun-carriage trundled silently past me along Fleet Street yesterday. I felt a little as though an obscure family member had just died. That batty old aunt (who I'm sure I'll personalise in a few decades' time) who is always in the background as you grow up, witnessing and putting her own spin on your life events as you go. A once-living example of how people can be apt to project their thoughts and feelings and ambitions onto a public figure, and how it's a shame that it's vacuous celebrities that will form these canvases now, and not people who are actually in a position to make a difference. People who, for better or for worse, lead.
So whatever else she may have represented to others, that was her legacy to this particular Eighties' playschooler. RIP, Mrs. T.
