��ѿ��ý

Available for over a year

The whole school sat in rows in the Assembly Hall while our English teacher read to us, an episode a day. “Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news: you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish!” I was eleven and the writer was my hero. I aspired to be her... forgetting that what made Anne Frank great was not just bravery, humanity and skill with her pen but also appalling deprivation, fear and oppression when she was barely older than I was. “Whoever is happy can make others happy.” “Despite everything, I believe people are really good at heart.” Now my daughter is eleven. I hope she too looks up to an example of courage and commitment, the youngest ever Nobel prize-winner, fighting for the rights of others when she was only eleven herself. Yet Malala, like Anne Frank, became a hero through not just her own considerable merit, but also the crucible of horrific circumstance. Like Frank having to write in secret, denied education and forced to flee with her family, the target of murder. What price heroism? Another of my youthful role models grew up in constant terror. Her mother killed by her father, when she was a toddler, on unfounded charges of witchcraft, adultery and incest. Effectively imprisoned for much of her upbringing, forbidden by her sister from practising her faith, as a girl also narrowly escaping execution. (Her teenage cousin was not so fortunate.) And through her fearless skill, political acumen and formidable intellect, going on to become one of our most influential and successful monarchs, the Elizabethan Renaissance a jewel still shining through a thousand years of this country’s history. At this time of year a rather saccharine version is often told of another insignificant young girl with a royal future, her story sanitised with spurious additions of donkeys and innkeepers, crisp virgin snow and wide eyed oxen looking on. The truth was brutal. Barely more than a child in an occupied nation, she was accused of a crime the horror of which, in our society with few taboos and fewer laws about sexual morality, we can hardly comprehend. Signifying, at best, a prospect of dreadful shame, exile from family and community, with prostitution her only feasible means of support: at worst, a mob lynching... pelted by rocks until she was dead. Possibly younger than Anne Frank when she died or Malala when shot at, she fled as refugee to a strange land to save her child from state murder. Perhaps already aware that one day she would have to watch her son tortured and slowly killed before her eyes. A girl of extraordinary learning as well as courage, profoundly versed in the history and significance of her race and faith, championing the rights of the poor and dispossessed and never flinching from her fearful destiny... to become the most famous woman of all time. A life too terrible to aspire to. And a truly formidable hero for my daughter.