Liverpool weeps as James Bulger is buried: James Bulger's mourners prayed he did not die in vain, reports Jonathan Foster

A CHATTERING of starlings swirled overhead, a dog barked, and the first hearse of the cortege turned in to Scoter Road.

The mourners above and the city of Liverpool were focused on the funeral of two-year-old James Patrick Bulger, who was buried yesterday.

Two ten-year-old boys are charged with murdering him after they allegedly abducted him from his mother's side.

She rode in the fourth car. Two cars in the vanguard were full of flowers. The third carried more flowers and a white and brass coffin, no bigger than a boxed train set.

The cortege turned again, a hundred yards from the Church of the Sacred Heart. Neighbours stood in their porches and, from pavements closer to the church, a few hundred people watched, overpowered by such a tragedy.

A mourner on foot led the cortege of 14 dark blue Volvos, windows misted by grief. James's kin paused on the church forecourt, the Bulger and Matthews families standing as dark and together as the starlings, handkerchiefs pressed to tears.

Four pallbearers went to James's coffin. They pulled it from the hearse with ease.

James Patrick, as the priests called him, remained in the church for the hour and 20 minutes his ecumenical funeral Mass took. Outside, the crowd remained, weeping, staring, mumbling responses as the service was relayed. Wind chill made it about seven degrees below zero.

The parish priest, Father Michael O'Connell, did not try to assuage all his listeners' dumbfounded misery. But in his homily he said that James had not died in vain; we can survive, we can conquer; the death of an innocent little child was causing us to do something.

The mourners sang The Old Rugged Cross, Psalm 23, and Make Me a Channel of Your Peace. Albert Kirby, the detective who led the investigation into James's abduction, read from Revelation: 'You see this city. Here God lives.'

They played tapes of James's favourite singer, Michael Jackson, and Eric Clapton's lament for his son, 'Tears in Heaven'.

By James's coffin lay his teddy, the rabbit his grandad got him, and the chair his father made. His father and his uncles brought him out on their shoulders, decorous and handsome men carrying the little boy they assumed would outlive them.

Amid wreaths knee high to a priest, James was buried in a new grave. And they prayed that some good may come from his death.

(Photograph omitted)