Innocence died along with our children
WHEN I was 12 years old I went to see Kylie Minogue at Glasgow’s SECC. It was my very first pop concert and I had been practising the Locomotion for weeks.
I bought a pair of snazzy leggings and a new hair clip and when Kylie appeared on stage singing I Should Be So Lucky I don’t think I could have been more excited if I’d been up there with her myself.
Of the 18,000 people who went to see Ariana Grande at the Manchester Arena on Monday night, many thousands were children.
Wide-eyed and excited, off to their first ever concert, I’m sure they never once considered that they might be anything other than completely safe. Why should they?
This was an attack on innocence. The bomber could have walked into any concert, any gig. He could have chosen a comedy night, or a stadium rock band.
Instead he chose Ariana Grande, a bubblegum popstrel with cute-as-abutton dimples and a fan base that is almost exclusively young and female.
As adults we try to shield the children in our lives from the bad things in the world, while giving them the freedom to become the individuals they want to be. It is an imprecise art of weights and balances and the occasional slammed bedroom door. No one gets it completely right.
Donald Manford, the great uncle of 14-year-old Eilidh Macleod from Barra who perished in Monday night’s bombing, talked this week with quiet dignity about her flourishing talent as a piper, her love of dance, her enthusiastic involvement in community events. He spoke of a young girl just emerging from her chrysalis, ready to see what the wide world had in store for her.
The trip south from that safe, familiar community on the Isle of Barra all the way to Manchester would have been one of high excitement, tinged with the unknown.
That it ended in such tragedy seems unspeakably cruel.
SHE has been robbed of her life, while her family have been robbed of the chance to see what sort of woman she might have turned into. Her friend Laura MacIntyre, unconscious in a hospital bed, unaware of what has happened to her and that Eilidh will not be making the journey home with her, has been robbed of her friend and remains in a critical condition. Laura’s family say she is strong-willed and a fighter.
Innocence today is such a fragile, transient thing. Girls grow up faster than ever before, the internet piles pressures on them that previous generations can only imagine, and life moves agonisingly quickly.
A concert should have been a place of safety – somewhere to wear the snazzy new leggings and do a silly dance. A place, put simply, to be a little girl.
A total of 22 families have lost a loved one. Amid the vigils and the grief and the desperation to make sense of it all, my fear is that an entire generation may also have lost its innocence. PS SOMe people have remarked on why the Queen didn’t visit Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital with one of the younger Royals in tow, but I suspect this is one she would have wanted to do alone. At 91, this isn’t the first time Her Majesty has comforted the victims of shrapnel wounds in hospital beds. that she should be doing it again in 2017, with victims who are predominantly children, would have made her visit a deeply personal one.