Read Bryan Appleyard's account of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales: Page One | Page Two

THEY threw flowers at her hearse. They did that for Diana. She was devoted to her two boys. So was Diana. She was, like Diana, “a bit mouthy”. Like Diana, she lived her life on screen and in headlines and then, too young and at the peak of her fame, she died. And, as at Diana’s funeral, the crowds broke with tradition and applauded.

Finally, like Diana, she was laid to rest as a heroine of the working classes. Yesterday the people of east London and the aspirational suburbs of Essex huddled together in defiance of the toffee-nosed world outside to enthrone Jade Goody. She was, said her publicist Max Clifford, “a princess in Bermondsey and a queen in Essex”.

They loved him for that. In fact, out east, they seem to love him a lot. Back at Bermondsey, where the hearse’s progress began, Jackie Bugeja told me: “Hats off to Max Clifford. He put her right.”

Putting her right was a big job. The daughter of two drug-addict parents, her education went desperately wrong. She famously thought “East Angular” was abroad and was not sure what currency Liverpudlians used. On Big Brother, the show that saved her from dental nursing, she fumbled gracelessly under the covers. Later, on the celebrity version, she flung racist abuse at the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty. Even Clifford thought she was finished when she was driven out in disgrace after the Shetty incident.

The tabloids called her a pig, the tabloids that later called her a saint. On the back of her hearse was a floral jar of Marmite - like Jade, it’s something you love or hate.

But nothing so became her in life as the leaving of it. Diagnosed with cancer - being Jade, she had ignored warning signs - she determined to die in public for the sake of her boys, Bobby and Freddie. She wanted to buy them the best private education. Out east they’re smart; they know a thing or two about public education. And, warned by her public suffering, women flocked to have the test for cervical cancer.

Everybody mentioned this. Like her boys, it felt like a solid achievement in the incessant virtuality of her seven years of celebrity.

At 8am it is cold and grey at the Blue Market in Bermondsey. Needles of drizzle are dampening everything. Southwark Park Road - the land of Hype Hair, Fin King Aquatics and Vinh Phat oriental foods - was her home turf. She left some time ago for leafier Essex. But, today, they claim her.

“Bermondsey people like someone outspoken,” says Kay Fincken.

The white tribe of east London have for so long had t h e i r i d e n t i t y s t o l e n o r traduced that they seize on Jade as an emblem of what they are, her failings evidence of her authenticity.

“She caused a few upsets,” says Bugeja, “but she redeemed herself. She was just Jade. Yeah, she was a funny cow. Jade being Jade, she says it how it is. She was very, very Bermondsey. We’re all a bit the same. And she never did no harm to no one.”

The now dense crowd on the pavements floods out into the road as her hearse, an antique Rolls decked out like a carnival float, comes slowly into view. A man walks in front, doffing his top hat. They start throwing the flowers.

After some little ceremony at the gates of the market, the cortege winds its way through the narrow streets and council blocks of Southwark and then over Tower Bridge towards Essex. She moved to a village here, Upshire, and she stayed when stricken by fame.

“A local girl, we really liked her,” says Tamara Otham. “She was a lovely girl, honest.”

She and her daughter are holding pink roses. The need to throw flowers is strong. It represents contact, a breach of the funereal walls of deference.

There are giant screens - “adi.tv: Definitive Screen Solutions” - outside St John the Baptist church in Buckhurst Hill.

A group of girls from Coventry eye me suspiciously. Another reporter had been asking them questions they found offensive. “Be nice,” they say. Okay. What was it about Jade?

“She was real,” they chorus. “Yeah, not like that Victoria Beckham. She’s stuck up her own backside. Jade went down to the shops in her pyjamas.”

Inside the church there are flowers from David and Victoria Beckham. They plainly had not noticed their authenticity failure.

Steve Collis has driven Klair Allan down from Northamp-ton. They both shake their heads when I mention Diana: “People with day-to-day, mundane jobs, they identified more with her than they did with Diana.”

The Bose speakers are blasting out the gospel choir’s How Great Thou Art across the daffodil-spattered graveyard and, finally, the hearse appears and parks amid a tangle of big cars full of Essex men and Essex girls. The latter looked dressed for a night out - plunging neck-lines, short skirts - but in black.

I watch the service on the big Definitive Screen Solutions with the crowd on the green opposite. Jack Tweed, the convicted felon Jade married in her last days, wins polite applause for his poem. Nobody actually cringed but it was close.

John Finnegan, one of her teachers, says: “Do not make the mistake of thinking Jade unintelligent.” He adds, more profoundly, that Jade always wanted to be an actress and “Jade herself was the part she played”.

Again, that circle of identity and authenticity. She was herself, she spoke her mind, she laid it all out, and there is no higher virtue. It doesn’t, on paper, mean much, but, out east, it seems to be all there is.

And so Jade Goody went off in her carnival float to be interred at a location hidden from the cameras, microphones and notebooks. To say that her life was a tragic absurdity, that she was an artefact of vacuous celebrity culture, is true but it is not the whole truth. The other truth lies in the fierce possessiveness of her people.

“We loved her and we don’t care what you think,” to paraphrase the message repeatedly flung in my face. “We loved her because she was like us, a bit of a mess maybe, but real.”

In the same way they loved Diana, they loved this supreme star of virtuality for being real. The fact that she had no talent made her not less but more real. After all, most people have no talent; most people just blunder through life’s strange contingencies. In the postmodern salons of the West End, they will snigger at this. Real? Jade Goody? Don’t make me laugh. But out east they know a thing or two.

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