SONNY Bill Williams has made a million hearts sing. In the dark news days of the Russian air crash and amid harrowing stories about the bodies of drowned refugee children washed up on Greek shores, here is Sonny Bill fresh from victory with the New Zealand All Blacks lighting up the pitch better than Abba’s super troopers.
On the footage you see the child dash out on to the pitch at the end of the Rugby World Cup final and being tackled by security. And there was Sonny Bill.
“Just before he came to give me a hug he got smoked by one of the security guards and I felt pretty sorry for him you know,” said Sonny afterwards.
So he picked up the kid and took him to his “old lady” and then he gave him his medal – his World Cup medal. Better around the kid’s neck than on his, he said gently.
And that was it. The kid will remember that night for the rest of his life. It is a story he shall tell his children and his grandchildren.
Sonny’s was a spontaneous act of kindness that touched hearts. Ignore the cynic in the corner who whispered, “That medal will be on Ebay tomorrow.” Such moments of outstanding generosity stay forever with all of us.
And for every down and out lying battered in an old orange sleeping bag on a city doorstep, there is someone who will leave a coffee, a sandwich or the promise of a meal.
I was telling my friends about Sonny Bill and it brought back my old English A-level text of 40 years past. We got to study Wordsworth and Coleridge and the Lyrical Ballads which had their moments.
Some of the rustic poems were hard to stomach. There was Simon Lee the old huntsman with the memorable rhyming couplet: “Full five and twenty years he lived, A running huntsman merry; Though he has but one eye left, his cheek is like a cherry.” Ouch.
But then Wordsworth gave us Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, a meditation and explanation of his personal creed. He wrote of “little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love”. It is the small gifts that stay with us.
So I remember the day my uncle presented me with a huge album full of 3D photographs of the animals of the world.
No Dr Doolittle me, but he had collected them each time he filled up with petrol and he probably got repeats and had to hold out to complete the full set, working carefully until the album was complete.
As one of six children, it occurred that he thought of me and my heart turned. Perhaps it was a small kindness to him, but it mattered.
Or there was the postcard of a kitten that purred when you squeezed its tummy. It arrived by chance one day from a cousin, much older than me, who was off on holiday in France.
Somewhere out there on her whirlwind trip around the towers and boulevards of Paris, she had thought of me and taken time to send me a note.
And later, much later, on a day when I insisted on going to get my dose of radio-iodine all by myself, there was the gruff doctor with a kind heart.
This was a capsule that was not for handling. It came in a long glass vial. Once you had taken it, you had to go home and stay away from other people – eating off one set of dishes, using one toilet set aside just for you. It was like being in solitary.
My other half had all things ready in an Upstairs Downstairs kind of way. He left me up trays, collected dishes, slept downstairs and did his ablutions there too. My sister took my four-year-old for the weekend.
But at the moment when I sat in the hospital room and looked uncertainly at the dose, there was the doctor who insisted that at this moment I would not be alone.
“Now I’ll sit and hold your hand while you take it,” he said. And he took my hand and held it as I downed the pill and sipped the water.
It was not a grand gesture in the world’s eyes – it was a little risky, I thought. He should have made good his escape. But he did not.
And to him and to all those who have passed in and out of our lives and offered bright golden Sonny Bill moments – we are forever grateful.
