John Mortimer: It was a magnificent Hello

It was the longest goodbye. It started with the great immaculately organised procession to Westminster Hall and the lying-in-state of the queen who seemed as timelessly popular as Christmas. The funeral was to be the last wave to everyone's departing grandmother.

It turned out, to everyone's surprise including, perhaps, the royal family, to be a magnificent Hello, a great rediscovery of our history and the stirrings of a new belief in our national identity. The remarkable lady had been the last Queen of an Empire. She had seen our young men decimated in the First World War and refused to leave London when we stood alone against Hitler, when she shrugged off the odd bomb that fell on Buckingham Palace. She survived Stalin and Mussolini, Picasso and Freud to reach a sunny old age when she could still enjoy a gin and Dubonnet and do Ali G imitations.

The crowds that lined the route of Princess Diana's funeral grieved for the death of a beautiful woman who they thought was at odds with the establishment. The thousands who queued for five hours, or slept out on a freezing night, to say their goodbyes to the Queen Mother felt she stood for the achievements of a century.

We have become cut off from our history for far too long. Her life and death remind us, in the grey days when political ideals have vanished and all we seem to be concerned about is Railtrack, the collapse of the Post Office and whether we should join the euro, that we have a past to be proud of and, if we can keep as cheerful as she was, might have a future to be proud of.

By 9.30am the great theatre of the Abbey was prepared, the choirboys had arrived. The flowers, roses and great blooms chosen for their remarkable resemblance to the Queen Mother's hats, filled the Abbey. Just before 10am the crowds of friends had arrived and the bell, tolling one solemn stroke for each year of the Queen Mother's life, rang out once a minute.

Politicians, former prime ministers, the ex-kings and queens of countries that had gone without a monarchy for their own moments of national celebration, were in their places. Camilla Parker Bowles, a close friend of the Queen Mother, had arrived. Andrew Motion, standing in Poet's Corner, read an elegy and the poets buried around him uttered no word of criticism. Tony Blair jetted in from his Texan barbecue and arrived looking understandably exhausted. The crowd outside the Abbey was many times larger than the friends, politicians and all the private staff of the Queen Mother's houses inside.

And all this time the Queen Mother lay in Westminster Hall, that great place of history where Charles I was tried and condemned and the way was opened for the arrival of a constitutional monarchy.

So, with only drums playing, the band of the Grenadier Guards came to take the Queen Mother to the Abbey. It's a place she knew extremely well, where she had been a bridesmaid and a bride, and an Empress when they placed the crown carrying the great Koh-i-noor diamond on her head, and where she had taken part in her daughter's coronation. The service she was coming to was totally unlike Diana's. There was no Sir Elton John, no hint of family bitterness, simply a service in a great tradition, based on the King James's Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, none of it watered down or made commonplace by modern versions for trendy churches.

The processions began again, processions of the clergy, archbishops, and someone carrying the Cross of Canterbury. Then a procession of royal relations. Then the foreign royals processed. The Queen's car had arrived from Buckingham Palace, she had met the Dean of Westminster and had her own procession. Outside the Abbey, to the sound of pipers, the gun carriage and the coffin arrived surrounded by soldiers. Inside the Abbey Prince Charles and the rest of the family arrived, silent and moved.

The Abbey bell tolled off another year of the Queen Mother's life, the clock struck 11.30 and, in a magic moment, the sounds of orders and marching feet were silent and the choir burst out singing: "I am the resurrection and the life." The Queen Mother's coffin moved slowly up the aisle to the altar.

The Dean of Westminster read a prayer the words of which couldn't compare with the extraordinary passage from Ecclesiastes which followed: "The man goeth to his long home and the mourners go about the streets. The silver cord shall be loosened and the golden bowl broken."

A psalm was sung in true ecumenical fashion. Cardinal Cormack Murphy O'Connor read a lesson from Revelation and proved himself to be far the best reader. Dr Carey gave a sermon in which he called her the "Queen Mum" but found an excellent text about laughing at the time to come.

And then there was Brahms's How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings Fair and wonderful words from John Donne about a world where there shall be neither darkness or dazzling but equal light. There were prayers and another hymn. The Last Post was played, the Queen Mother's innumerable titles were read out and everyone sang the national anthem.

When she was married in this Abbey the Queen Mother put her bouquet on the grave of the Unknown Soldier. She could appreciate the truth of a theatrical gesture and today has been a terrific performance, backed by true emotion.

There's a lot to be thankful for. Even if we can't run a railway, or get the letters delivered on time; there is something in us that can manage a state occasion which never puts a foot wrong and gives back a pride in our history.