While on my second maternity leave, I was travelling from Dollis Hill to Crouch End to visit a friend for lunch. After 2 changes and 3 tubes I got to Finsbury Park only to find me, the toddler and the baby in the pram at the bottom of 3 flights of stairs. My heart sank. As it was lunchtime, the station was quiet and I wasn’t too happy to see 2 hooded young men loping down the stairs but as they got to the bottom they asked if they could help by taking the pram leaving me to carry the toddler. They carried it up the 3 flights safely and even missed their train to do so! I always think of them when people use the term ‘hoodie’ as a generic term for violent youth because their kindness made my day and challenged my lazy assumptions.
From Acts of Kindness via Something Changed.
This echoes exactly my experience of trawling around London with a pushchair. All kinds of people stop to help me, but I am particularly arrested by those young men with seemingly hostile expressions who smilingly stop to help, perhaps because the images of these young men that the media portrays are so consistently negative.
I have a sweet fourteen-year-old hoodie. I smile at his compatriots on station platforms to make up for all the women my age who give them the snake eye.