Angela Mollard: Kindness is a Cinderella virtue worth aspiring to

IT USED to be something that came naturally, but this week Angela Mollard was left asking why we’ve all left one thing out of our daily interactions.

Courage and kindness are the virtues of Cinderella.

CINDERELLA? Yeah right, good luck with that, I thought when Disney announced it was remaking the fairy tale.

How do you take a simpering heroine, a foot-fetishist prince, a wicked stepmother (aaargh, so outmoded) and an unreliable fairy godmother and turn it into a story for our times?

For this is an era when young women are more about the glass ceiling than the glass slipper. Sure there’s a timeless appeal to the “girl meets boy” narrative but in the 21st century a heroine really has to have done something authentic and brilliant with her own life first.

Think Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games or Merida from Brave. Think Taylor Swift filling stadiums and Malala Yousafzai fighting for girls’ education. Think Bindi Irwin saving the earth one croc at a time.

How does a meek young woman who talks to mice compete with that?

Well, with kindness it seems. That least spangled of characteristics, the beige in the dazzling paint chart of personality traits, has been resurrected by director Kenneth Branagh as the defining quality of a new age.

Cinderella’s kindness is her superpower according to Branagh and he’s shaped the movie around it.

“I wanted to make the pursuit of goodness sexy and proactive, not naive or unsophisticated,” he explains.

To that end, he’s meddled a little with the plot.

CHILL. Lily James as Cinderella in Disney's live-action feature film inspired by the classic fairy tale, "Cinderella." © 2015 Disney

Early in the film Cinderella’s mother — her real mother, not the menacing stepmother played by Cate Blanchett — reveals her dying wish is for her daughter to “have courage and be kind”.

In an era when girls are told they can do anything, be anyone, have anything; when they are instructed to lean in and aim high, to not be an apologist or a pleaser, we seem to overlook what Cinderella’s mother knew: that courage and kindness are not mutually exclusive ideas.

I admire brave women and their stellar achievements. Yet as I grow older, as ambition mellows and competitiveness wanes, I see it’s kindness which solders the cracks in humanity.

For such an unremarkable word, “kind” has a luminosity that glows long after the act that ignited it.

I was brought up in a home brimming with kindness. Nothing or no one was too much trouble for my mum as she took in foster kids and friends going through tricky times and, later, children with special needs. Meals could be stretched to feed a football team, the spare room was rarely “spare” and people in a pickle were comforted not judged.

But when I followed my career to London I left her template behind. In my clamour to do more and be more I lost the slow, soft capacity for kindness.

I forgot to ring my Mum on the day she received some medical results.

CHILL. Lily James as Cinderella and Richard Madden as the Prince in Disney's live-action feature film inspired by the classic fairy tale, "Cinderella." © 2015 Disney

I ignored my best friend Sarah when she was mugged because I had a deadline. To borrow from the superpower lexicon, kindness was my kryptonite.

When I became a mother I repeated the classic parenting mantra “calm and kind, calm and kind”.

Inexorably however, the demands of work and home trap families, mine included, on their own little hamster wheels. Round and round they go in perfect, private circles, progressing the lives of those on board but caring little for anyone else.

Then last year my hamster wheel broke.

My marriage ended. And what I needed to keep my life turning was a little kindness, the real messy human kindness my Mum has always practised, not the virtual kindness I’d outsourced to speedy text messages.

It came, as it always does, from both expected and unexpected quarters. Some people were brilliant, others less so.

Some were devastating. “Your words are hollow to me now,” one reader wrote “and your children are destined to failed marriages.” Wow! That was untrue, unnecessary but most of all it was really, really unkind.

Journalist Angela Mollard at home today, in Fairlight, wearing some of her wardrobe memories.

Compare it to the invitation I received from someone on my social periphery. Dinner with him, his wife and a hotchpotch of others. I laughed. Nobody invites singles, I told him. It messes with table symmetry. And he laughed right back and put the date in his diary, unaccountably willing to pause his own hamster wheel for a night.

It’s what I’ll do next time I hear of someone in need of a kindness. I’ll extend it generously because the last year has taught me that being kind is a virtuous circle, and that when you’ve drawn on it you have to pay it forward and up and out. We may not be superheroes or imbued with superpowers but we can all find the courage to be kind.

If you’d like to see that deeply moral lesson spelled out with corsets and carriages then do go to see Cinderella. It’s a timeless reminder that the heart-swelling, restorative practice of being attentive to others, of being kind, is for real life, not just for fairy tales. That, and a touch of bibbidy bobbidy boo.