大象传媒

Good morning. Ingrid Loyau-Kennett in a bus on the way to Victoria coach station looked out and saw a body in the road, and as a trained first aider got out to see if she could help. Amidst all the trauma and shock of the killing her reaction stands out as a light of sanity and humanity. I suppose my instinctive reaction in such situations, like many of us, would have been not to get involved. Or, if I had got out to find a man with a gun there, I would have either panicked or got angry. Yet she remained amazingly calm, talking reasonably, trying not to agitate two armed men into even more destruction. Two other women were also present being protective of the dead soldier.

There is a line in a hymn which always disturbs me 鈥淥nce to every man and nation comes the moment to decide鈥�. It disturbs me because faced with some unexpected crisis I don鈥檛 know how I would respond-would I reveal myself as weak and cowardly? It is all very well Kipling holding out a great ideal in his poem 鈥淚f鈥�- 鈥淚f you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs鈥�. But suppose what you find inside yourself is quite a lot of sheer panic?...