One Woman, One New Year’s Resolution, 365 Good Deeds
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First published 2013
Copyright © Judith O’Reilly, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover photograph: © Getty Images
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Estate of Edgar A. Guest for permission to reprint lines from his poem ‘Miss Me But Let Me Go’
ISBN: 978-0-67-092114-0
Preface
A Year of Doing Good
Epilogue
Top Tips for Doing Good Deeds
Doing Good by Numbers
Charities Featured in This Book
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Judith O’Reilly is a writer and journalist. Her first book, Wife in the North, was based on her blog of the same name and was a best-seller. Her second book, a novel, is living in a drawer. Her third book is this one. She is married with three children, and for one year she tried to be good.
For my parents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Praise for Wife in the North
‘Funny, poignant and beautifully written’ Lisa Jewell
‘Genuinely funny and genuinely moving’ Jane Fallon, author of Getting Rid of Matthew
‘I howled with laughter, tears of recognition at every bloody page. My only problem with this book was choosing who to pass it on to first’ Jenny Colgan, author of Amanda’s Wedding
‘Cold Comfort Farm with booster seats. Funny, honest and moving’ Stephanie Calman, author of Confessions of a Bad Mother
Just begin …
Mother Teresa
Some years frame who you are for ever more. The year of expectation when I started my first job as a wide-eyed trainee journalist in Newcastle. The year of ambition when me and my shoulder pads moved to London. The year of desolation when I lost a child. The year of rapture when I gave birth to another son. The year of ‘What the …?’ when I moved out of the big city and up to the wilds of Northumberland. Then there was my year of doing good. When I can’t remember my name or that shoes should match, I know I’ll still remember these years, and that for a year at least, I tried to be good.
I didn’t realize when I made the resolution that New Year what I was taking on. I’d made resolutions before, even if I can’t exactly remember what they were, but the idea of doing one good deed a day morphed into something else again. I am no kind of moral philosopher – ethics make my head go squeak – but this year made me question what a good life is, how we give our lives meaning, and what it is to love. It also taught me that people don’t always want the good you want to do, and that doing good – believe you me – is harder than it looks.
In a way, my year of doing good was an admission of my own failings. My parents are saints, and it is tough being the child of saints. People feel sorry for the children of murderers, because they think it must be hard worrying whether you’ve inherited a genetic predisposition to kill as well as those long-lobed ears; it is worse when you’re brought up by those who are good. Really good. There is proof: the fact they looked after my gran, who lived with us till she was ninety-three; the fact my mum volunteered as a cleaner in a hospice on Saturdays, then as a classroom assistant in an inner-city school, then acted as chairman of governors at that school for years; the fact my dad visited the sick in hospital, drove busloads of the elderly to church, and that he and my mother put out poor boxes round the parish and over the years collected £20,000 for the hospice. My parents are modest, patient, and willing to do anything for anyone. Good people with good intentions living good lives. And what had I done all of my adult life? Earned a living. Married a man. Reared children. That was it, pretty much.
There was certainly no chance my children thought they were being brought up by a saint. Too much effing and blinding when they interrupted me when I was working. Too many empty wine bottles by the back door. Too much me and mine, and not enough time or space or energy for anyone else. Still, you are raised with certain ideals when you are brought up a Catholic:
My responses to these ideals are (in order of appearance):
But there are other ideals I do believe in: love, compassion for one’s fellow man, charity and good deeds. Yet unless you count that sponsored swim for the hungry of Africa which I did when I was eleven, I had never done much about those things.
Good people left me breathless and wondering. How had they got that way? How good were they, anyway? How would it feel to be good? Then I hit middle age and suddenly I wanted to be a better person and to know that I was living a good life. Not that I was a bad person; don’t get me wrong, I was all right. I did the odd thing: I helped out friends when it wasn’t too inconvenient, I didn’t litter and I never drowned a cat. But was I capable of more? Not Nobel Peace Prize more. Not OBE-for-services-to-one’s-country more. But more than this? Surely I could do more. I could do something. Plus there were my children. My three beautiful children, whom I have cherished and fed and clothed, and in whom I have attempted to instill values and a sense of morality. I owed it to them to prove that kindness, respect and patience are virtues to be acquired. That they were not just the monopoly of Granny. If I were a better person, I could teach them, not just right from wrong, but compassion and generosity, and perhaps my sons and my daughter would grow to be better people than me – do far, far better things.
Across the world, civil wars rage, there is random death, brutal torture and appalling starvation, but not here. Here, there is plenty and there is opportunity, even with economic hard times. Perhaps especially with hard times comes the recognition that we have need of each other. Most of us are lucky, we have so much. Our children are lucky, they have so much too. My children have a drum set, computer games and a big-screen TV to play them on, they have bicycles and scooters, and a garden to run round in. They download songs and apps and complain when I drag them to the beach. My daughter has dancing lessons and rugby boots, my sons play football and watch their favourite team on Sky TV. They have everything and they want more. I have everything and want more. So much attention these days is focused on how well you parent – that God-awful question ‘Are you a good mother?’ But how can you answer that when you aren’t even clear whether you are a good person or living a good life?
So, I decided: I would do one good deed a day for a year. It would be a start, and it couldn’t be that hard – could it? As soon as I said it out loud, I worried about sticking to it, worried about the message it would send to the children if I couldn’t keep it up. ‘Have a go and if you can’t be bothered, give up, pet.’ And at the same time as worrying about giving up, I worried about not giving up, about how inconvenient it was all going to be if I did indeed stick to my resolution. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, when ironically enough, I don’t even believe in damnation. Who goes to Hell? I do not believe any of us do. I do not look to an afterlife, or an eternity. I believe in the here and now, and if you believe in the here and now, logic dictates you want the here and now to be a good one, not just for yourself, but for others. I wanted to change myself and I wanted to change the world – one deed at a time.
Of course there were doubts. To live is to doubt. I doubted whether you could ever really become a better person, let alone mend society; perhaps you would just be the same ol’ same ol’ who did a few good things on the way. If I do not believe we are judged by an Almighty, if I do not believe our good deeds and bad are weighed on golden scales, then I am my own judge, and I am horribly tolerant. Could I up the stakes from doing no harm to doing some good, to living a good life? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was willing to find out.
Today was a three-hat day: a tangerine knitted beret, a black felt hat from Germany and a sheepskin Cossack number with earflaps. I’m short, so the inflated-head look wasn’t doing me any favours, but the weather on the North Northumberland coast was bitter while inside the hats where I lived was cosy and warm. Frankly, the problem wasn’t so much with how the hats looked, but that the Cossack one rendered me deaf, which was why I was bringing up the rear and walking alone. It also meant I had time to think. Every New Year I reflect on what is good and what is bad about the year that’s passed, mark it out of ten, and make my resolutions for the year ahead. Reflection, consolidation, improvement – I have considered myself a work in progress my entire life.
What was good:
What was bad:
Old year’s score: nine out of ten (on the grounds that I am nothing if not an optimist).
I was so deaf and so busy mulling over my New Year’s resolution that I only just heard the yelling. We were walking in a party of thirty out to the beach and the kids had abandoned the path almost as soon as we started out, and somehow, in a headlong dash through the grass, my friend’s youngest son had managed to wedge the top half of his body one side of the fence that cut across the fields, his thigh between two wires in the second section, and his calf up to his foot in another section again. Every time Al put pressure on the cat’s cradle to loosen it, the boy screamed blue murder. My husband Al is extremely good in crises. By contrast, I am useless in pretty much any emergency and prefer to panic immediately. I had already begun to wonder whether my teeth were sharp enough to gnaw off the poor lad’s leg when, with a grunt of satisfaction, Al loosened the wires enough to extract him. The boy leaned against me, still shaky, and I made ‘there, there’ noises, bending over him to rub his thigh and knee to get the circulation going. He sniffed and, hunkering down, I dug around in my pocket for a small bar of milk chocolate; he took it gratefully, peeling and eating it tiny piece by tiny piece. It was the fact he ate my chocolate that decided me. In giving him my chocolate, I had my first good deed of the year.
Then, of course, I had to tell people. To keep a secret, you tell no one, but to keep a resolution, you tell everyone. I waited till we were back at Diane’s farmhouse.
I cleared my throat, my back to the Aga – my bones still cold from the walk – and the others looked up at me from their empty soup bowls. The resolution I was about to make is not one I make every year, or indeed have ever made before, or am likely ever to make again. ‘I’m going to do a good deed a day for the rest of the year.’
Across the room from me, my husband hid his face in his hands and groaned.
‘Highly commendable,’ said Diane. She is a mathematics teacher – sometimes you can tell. ‘Tough ask, though.’ There was a murmuring of agreement.
‘What makes you feel you want to do that?’ Diane’s doctor friend said in the tone she uses when she says to her patients, ‘Tell me about these voices.’
Why? Because of how I was brought up, because I should, because I do nothing for anyone but me and mine. Doctors do good all the time. They heal – at the very least they listen. I am nothing. I am a journalist and sometime writer. I do not do anything for anyone. I am someone who bought antique-style metal letters at Christmas to spell out the words K.I.N.D.N.E.S.S, R.E.S.P.E.C.T and P.A.T.I.E.N.C.E, and when they fell off the wall – clattering and bouncing one after the other onto the ceramic hob – didn’t stick them back up because I couldn’t be A.R.S.E.D.
‘Was rescuing that boy your good deed today then?’ asked my husband. ‘Because technically I rescued him.’ I glared at him as he picked up a half-empty bottle of Sauvignon and gestured to Diane as to whether she wanted her glass topped up, and as he poured he grinned at me.
‘My other New Year’s resolution is to stay married,’ I said. ‘If at all possible.’
Good deed no. 1.
For reasons which defeat me, people think I am hospitable, when in truth I am the least sociable person I know. I blame being an only child. Even having a husband and three children crowds me sometimes. As for Christmas and New Year, we have had family staying throughout, and – thanks to bad planning on my part – we also have to factor two of the children’s birthdays into the festive season. The next person to tell me I am the ‘hostess with the mostest’ or how much I love having people around me is liable to get a saucepan on their head. Exactly what response can you make to a guest who says, ‘You just love all this entertaining, don’t you?’ You cannot say, ‘You’re so right. Is that the time?’ and point to the door.
He was half right, though: I do quite like entertaining – if by ‘entertaining’ you mean chatting over a glass of wine about love, life and the universe with my favourite people. ‘Entertaining’ in middle age, however, is more likely to mean other people being entertained, courtesy of me shopping, cooking, serving and then clearing up after us all. Increasingly my fondness for those I entertain is on a sliding scale of how much washing-up they are prepared to do after we eat, because if I get varicose veins, I know exactly where I’ll get them: at the kitchen sink. Not forgetting that when my parents are staying with us, as I am drying the last pan – round about ten o’clock at night – my dad usually steers my blind mother into the kitchen, saying, ‘Your mother’s feeling neglected. Make her a cup of tea and have a chat while I watch the football.’
Having said that, I’d rather make her a cup of tea than watch my dad do it. My dad has a permanent shake in his hands because of a car crash when he was young. His shake means that when you make him a cup of tea, you have to pour it short by a good inch otherwise he will shake it out of the cup. When he makes tea for my mum, he passes it to her and his hands are already shaking, and she is patting the air, reaching for it – bear in mind she can’t see because she is blind – and I have to curl up on the sofa with a floral cushion in my mouth to stop me screaming. And God forbid you make any sort of comment about health and safety, because then the pair of them get all sniffy and start adding up just how many cups of tea they have made – and passed to each other – in their forty-odd years of marriage.
A simple thing like mealtimes during these times of celebration turns into one long sum: today’s lunch equalled the five of us plus two (my elderly parents) plus six cousins plus one. Both of my husband’s parents are dead, he has one brother and a niece who live in West Wales (which is almost as far away from us as you can get in the UK), one uncle, one aunty and a small smattering of cousins he never hears from. I have hundreds of cousins – two of whom have just moved across the world to be close to us, and five of whom are building a holiday cottage outside my back door. I blame Irish-Catholic DNA.
The ‘plus one’ round today’s table was my beloved friend Daniel, who lost his wife four months ago. He was brave agreeing to come, and he arrived so sad – I could see it and it is not who he is at all, and I wanted to cry for him. He tried so hard over lunch, talking to everyone and making a fuss of my mum and dad, whom he has known for years, but he is lost. Getting through the first holiday season on your own takes some doing. When my first son was stillborn at term eleven years ago, that first Christmas we didn’t see anyone or go anywhere. Aside from a walk through a bleak and wintry St James’s Park, we stayed home in London curled up in a ball all wrapped around each other. We well know how commonplace death is, that it is part of who we are, and yet, grieving for a son, a wife, a father, it strikes you as outrageous, undeserved, a misfortune. You are the first and only person to feel this way, to feel so deep, to suffer. In that place in you where reason sits on a wooden chair in a bare room, the bulb swinging, you know that death has come before and death will come again, but reason is small and reason is lonely when death drops by.
Good deed no. 2: lunch with my friend who lost his wife. (Not enough. Nowhere near enough.)
Everybody has left. Thank God. Really thank God. Much as I love them all – and I do love them all – thank you, God, that after the last birthday tomorrow, the festivities are done.
We celebrated our freedom with a yomp along the beach. The afternoon sky was immense and grey above us, white clouds heavy and crowding together for warmth. Ahead, black and white oystercatchers scurried across the sands, their tiny legs criss-crossing, urgent and hungry. Yelling at each other to wait, the children scrambled through the grassy dunes, while Al and I walked together, hand in hand. We have been together more than twenty years and used to hold hands all the time before the children. Why shouldn’t grown-ups hold hands, one with the other – how else do you avoid getting lost? Mind you, my sense of direction is shocking. Nowadays we hardly ever hold hands. My hands are full of children or shopping; his hands full of phones or papers. Part of me is surprised we even remember how.
‘Remind me what your New Year’s resolutions were last year,’ he said.
I dug around in the silt of my memory looking for treasure, finding only salty mud and corrugated worms. ‘To get fit?’ I offered.
He looked me up and down dubiously, and inside my puffa coat I sucked in my stomach so hard it slapped against my spine. My husband is one of those lean runners who have the same rangy body in their forties as they did in their twenties. I have someone else’s entirely. A few years ago, heavies took mine away in the middle of the night, wrapped it in chains and threw it out of a low-flying plane into the sea; I’ve had to make do ever since.
‘And did you get fit?’ The bastard knew the answer.
‘I went running.’
‘Once. You went running once.’
Running is hard. All that effort. All those hills. Frankly, if I’m not working, I am with the kids and if I’m not with the kids, I’m working. But I can slot a good deed into my day without breaking a sweat. How hard can it be?
‘Are you serious about this resolution?’ My husband has been known to claim I complicate our lives. He can talk. As a journalist, he lives in a state of semi-permanent deadline: either he is working all hours at his desk at home or he is working all hours in London pulling together supplements for a national newspaper. He is driven – one of life’s perfectionists; I, on the other hand, am one of life’s amateurs. ‘Does doing stuff for me and the kids count as a good deed, for instance?’ He sounded momentarily hopeful.
I stopped walking to watch the dunes. We have a boy of nearly ten, a boy just turned eight and a five-year-old daughter with a smile like the first day of spring. Usually, you glimpse one or other child barrelling along the tops. I held my breath till first one and then the next and then the smallest appeared, running and leaping the gaps where the dunes fall away, their shouts of delight and fury carrying across the sands, over our heads and out across the grey-blue rolling sea. Reassured, I considered my husband’s questions. I was serious. Did doing things for him and the kids count? Surely not. I am going to draw up some rules of engagement – like in war.
Good deed no. 3: rang Sophie, my best friend from school, who is sick with Lyme disease, to cheer her up.
The lock has stopped working on the back door and a handy sort of mate came over to try and fix it. I didn’t bother mentioning we are so neurotic that last night we decided Al should sleep on the sofa in the kitchen in case a paedophile tried to gain entry and abduct a child. At least that’s how mad I thought we were. Actually, Al’s even madder than that, because he confessed he slept with an axe within reach.
While my mate was fixing the lock he mentioned his sister is having her first baby, so out came two enormous boxes of baby toys I had cleared from the kids’ rooms. A good-deed result. The only problem was that tonight when we got back from a day out, the boxes were still there on the kitchen table. This particular good deed may be on a slow burn. Whether he wants them or not, my mate is now morally obliged to take them. In any event, the question arises how much self-interest is permitted in a good deed? Frankly, I would fall at anyone’s feet if they took away clart, debris or general baby clutter from this house. Question: is a good deed still a good deed if it benefits the giver as much as the receiver? (These good deeds are an ethical quagmire.)
Good deed no. 4.
The cottage where we live is a former farm labourer’s cottage – one of a string, the others used as holiday homes. Built as one-storey, then there were two, the whinstone and sandstone walls are soft-buttered with pale mortar and steep-roofed in grey slate. Behind the cottages is nothing much – a massive breeze-block and iron barn where a farmer stores piles of golden wheat and plastic sacks of fertilizer like immense Chinese pork dumplings. But in front, quilted pastureland of green and golden silks falls away to the distant grey-blue sea, and despite the massive beech and sycamores that stand guardian alongside, there is openness, space and a sense of possibilities. The countryside isn’t quiet, though – not this countryside anyway. Soft, brown garden birds sing and chirrup and whistle, and wings flap heavily as wood pigeons bustle through the trees avoiding the rooks’ nests caught like knots of hair in their skinny wintry branches. And then there is the wind, sometimes so slight you scarcely notice it, sometimes pushy and loud and straight from the North Sea.
The problem with living in Northumberland and working from home, I am discovering, is that it’s all big skies and sheep, and you don’t see many people to do good deeds for. I was mulling over the fact I might have to go into the village and mug a pensioner so I could make him a cup of sweet tea when my friend Lily rang asking me to do her a favour and pick her son up from school because her four-year-old daughter had fallen over in the playground and she had to take her to Accident and Emergency. She seemed taken aback when I cheered.
The little girl was fine, though sporting an egg on her temple, and when Lily arrived she gave me a bouquet of roses with velvet petals the colour of a Caribbean sunset. The flowers were gorgeous but disconcerting. Question to self: can a good deed still be considered a good deed if you are rewarded so thoroughly for the same? The reward was not solicited, but the roses are very lovely and it is not even as if taking care of the boy was any great trouble. I didn’t realize I would have to think so hard about this good deed business.
Good deed no. 5.
We moved to Northumberland because my husband loved it. I came round to it, or it came round to me – who knows? When I moved from the East End of London, I left behind old friends who knew and forgave me for the fact I had moved away from them, but there was no one who loved me as deeply or as well in Northumberland. Who has friends when they move some place new? People who buy them off Amazon, that’s who. I did that for a while – though the postman complained – but gradually, along the way, I acquired friends-in-the-North. It took me a while, though, to catch Lily.
Lily owns 149 pairs of shoes (I know because I made her count them) and 70 bags, many from Hermès, Mulberry, Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Fendi. She moved up to a smallholding in the wilds from a fancy gaff in Newcastle a couple of years after me, and she seemed just my type (although my handbag comes from M&S and I have no shoes to speak of). The problem was she was always busy, busy, busy, whirligigging around as if the pieces of the pale blue sky would fall down and flatten her if she stopped moving. It took me years of nagging to get her to stop long enough to realize she was my friend and there was no getting out of it, however hard she tried and however fast she ran in her paint-splattered trackies and her diamanté flip-flops.
Lily started life as a paediatric nurse and went on to a big job in IT with a six-figure salary (hence the bags and the shoes) and a favourite plane seat. Now she runs round in ever-decreasing circles juggling snippets of consultancy with managing the smallholding, a five-star holiday cottage business and her kids (which is an even bigger job but for a lot less money and absolutely no benefits). We have in common the knowledge that it is a thin line between a been-there-done-that career and a has-been-never-do-again life. It helps that once we both had proper careers – till she got made redundant and I got a bad case of family-first, career-second, which can frankly kill you stone-dead with regret if you let it. It helps too that her children and mine are the same age. She is late for everything – usually because she has tried to fit one more thing between the-very-last-thing-on-my-list and it-was-round-the-corner-so-it-seemed-a-crime-not-to.
The first time I invited her to my house for coffee with a few girls, she arrived early and promptly washed up my breakfast things and then ran upstairs to clean the bathroom. She was obviously brought up the same as me: you don’t come for tea and leave a sink of dirty pots behind you. The only time up here I haven’t done the same is when I was asked round for coffee by a very lovely, very posh mummy with lots of other posh mummies, and I had to physically sit on my hands to stop myself from washing up because there was no way on God’s earth the idea of clearing the table was in anyone’s mind other than mine.
Good deed no. 6: checked on a cousin recently bereaved.
Distracted by a migraine that felt as if black rats were hanging from my eyeballs by their claws. It chewed up my entire morning, which I had to spend in bed with only my eyeball rats and drugs for company – beta blockers, paracetamol and codeine. It was so bad Al had to get the kids off to school while I wallowed upstairs groaning. Of course I now have almost a week of good-deedery behind me, so as a distraction, and to protect myself against charges of moral laxity, I drew up my Rules of Engagement:
Good deed no. 7: gave my expat cousins a CD of their favourite movie soundtrack, picked up while out shopping.
Good deed no. 8: picked up someone’s change when it fell to the floor in the newsagent and returned it.
Had my expat cousins over for dinner. They grew up in Yorkshire but emigrated to Africa in 1975 when she was an air hostess and he was a policeman, to escape ‘the rain, a Labour government and a terrible cricket team’. After thirty-five years in Africa, they decided that however brightly the sun shone over the rainbow nation, they didn’t want to see out their days there, and a few months ago returned to Blighty. The year they left Britain, inflation was running at 24 per cent; The Sweeney premiered on ITV; sitcom stars Windsor Davies and Don Estelle were at number one with ‘Whispering Grass’; Harold Wilson was Prime Minister; and the Conservatives elected Margaret Thatcher as their first woman party leader. Give or take another punishing economic crisis, they have come back to a different country: inflation isn’t a problem, although everything else in the economy is; violent, no-holds-barred 1970s detectives are ridiculed, not glamorized; Don Estelle is dead – as is Harold Wilson; and they just made a biopic about the fact Lady Thatcher, who served as PM for eleven years, has dementia. I believe they are in shock. Luckily he still has the moustache he went out with.
She is sixty-three and he is sixty-eight, their parents are long dead, there are no brothers or sisters and they don’t have children. What is ‘home’ after all? Not a flag, nor a cricket team, nor even your own history – home is who you love, so they have come home to us as their nearest and dearest. Both of them are wrapped in so many layers they are like birthday presents waiting to be opened come the day, and they have not been warm since they arrived. I cooked roast beef and trimmings – including very flat Yorkshire puddings – to remind them how bad British food can be.
Good deed no. 9.
Finally went to the doctor about my migraines after my post-new-year stonker. I’ve decided to see a consultant, and needed a GP referral. The doctor said he would dig me out a name and told me my blood tests were all fine, which was a relief. At least I know now that migraines aren’t from a grapefruit-sized tumour, which is what I was beginning to think, and which would have been a shame because I have always liked grapefruits.
After the doctor, as my good deed, we went to see the little old lady who used to live in this house and who moved down to the village after her husband died. She lives in a neat little yellow-brick bungalow on a well-tended little estate with handkerchief lawns and palings around the very tidy gardens and, to my utter horror, it turned out that we had completely forgotten her New Year’s Day drinks. Every year she has open house with bottles aligned on the cabinet, and her family sit round in her living room and people wash in and out of the house and drink whisky at ten o’clock in the morning. This year, I had so many people washing in and out of my own house, her invitation completely went out of my head. While we were there, her neighbour came in, as she does every morning and every afternoon. The neighbour is about to go to Australia, where she heads every year, and was full of stories about pythons trying to eat her brother’s cockatoo and my personal favourite: a whirligig dustball blowing into the house which turned out to be a spider mother (festooned with spider babies) who got stomped on and all the spider babies fled to the four corners of the room. It quite put me off my golden crunch biscuit.
Al is heading for London tomorrow and is not due back till very late on Thursday night. This removes tomorrow’s fallback position of a blow-job which he kindly offered to let me give him (at no extra cost) in the event of running out of other good deeds to do. I have told him I can always cheer up the postman.
Good deed no. 10.
Good deed no. 11: let the electricians into a neighbouring holiday cottage.
About noon there was a barking and a tremendous commotion, and when I went outside, the access road outside the cottage and my garden were a heaving muddy mass of panting, stiff-tailed hounds searching out a scent. Blow my horn, the hunt was upon us. From atop his horse, the whipper-in was shooing the hounds back out, and as I went to shut the farm gate the hunters in their black jackets all waved cheerily and thanked me with exquisite courtesy as they trotted on and the doggy tail-end Charlies leaped and scrambled over the ivy-clad stone wall, back to the pack.
I had no sooner gone back inside to my desk than there was more hallooing and clipping-clopping, and when I went back out into the winter sun, Ally and the Lovely Claire were up on their enormous shiny horses waiting for me by the shut-up gate. Ally and I met through the school, while Claire is the partner of the farmer who owns the land around our cottage and the barn full of wheat and Chinese dumplings behind it. They are both deeply glamorous and looked like something from a ‘County Belle’ photo-shoot captioned, ‘How tight to wear your jodhpurs this season’ – unlike me, who wasn’t to know the county set would invade my garden and was caught out in a murky sloppy joe with a serious case of bed-head. We held an impromptu coffee morning, but instead of coffee I served up plastic beakers of Pinot Grigio, and as soon as she’d drained dry her plastic beaker Ally announced that she was giving up alcohol for the month of April and would I like to join her.
Giving up alcohol strikes me as a terrible idea, but in the spirit of good-deedery, I said: a. for the record, I had no idea why she thought I might be suitable for such an experiment; and b. if the friend she is doing it with dropped out on her, I would take her place.
I absolutely didn’t mean it. Surely doing good deeds means I get to drink twice as much as normal?
As a thank you for the refreshments, once she had emptied her Mr Incredible beaker, Claire suggested I get up on her horse and she would lead me up and down the access road. The Lovely Claire is the only person I know who trills over large and small pleasures – sometimes I imagine her perched on a branch of a tree clad in jewel colours and an ostrich-feathered headdress and tail, trilling out her joy that dawn has come again. She has one of those naturally sunny dispositions – plus, she is beautiful, statuesque and blonde. Perhaps it is easier to have a sunny disposition if you are downright gorgeous? I am five feet two inches – if I was only that bit taller, I might be less cranky myself. Although I am immensely fond of her, I normally refuse to stand anywhere near her, on the grounds she makes me look bad.
At well over six feet tall, she needs a horse of seventeen and a half hands (which doesn’t mean much unless you know about horses, but the term ‘monster’ would genuinely cover it). It is her life’s ambition to make me love horses. It is my life’s ambition not to. Once I had mounted the damn thing – that is to say, stood on a garden bench, put my left foot in the stirrup, stood up in it and then thrown my right leg further than I thought possible – it struck me that I was far closer to the sky than I wanted to be. Regarding me thoughtfully as I sat there trembling, Ally advised a twelve- to thirteen-hand pony would be fine for me and that I might feel safer on something smaller. I am guessing she put it on the record in case I went online once they left, googled ‘monster’ and bought one on eBay. In any event, aside from sitting on an engaged missile heading for a Taliban stronghold, it is difficult to see how I would have felt less safe. On the grounds she knows everyone in Northumberland, I asked Claire as she led me up and down the access road whether she could persuade someone in the local radio station to take the little old lady’s seventeen-year-old grandson for work experience. She is going to ask a presenter mate of hers and get back to me.
By the time we finished, and Claire had managed to get me off the horse again, which involves letting go of everything and trusting the ground will eventually meet your feet (skydiving would have got me there quicker), the hunt had long gone. I doubt the girls managed to find it again, but they didn’t seem to care. I heard them clipping-clopping down the lane as I went back to my desk. Clip-clop-trill. Clip-clop-trill.
Good deed no. 12: asked a favour for someone else.
I’m working for six weeks on company write-ups about how well employers such as debt collectors treat their staff. I’ve done it before and the project always leaves me convinced I should run out and get an extremely well-paid nine-to-five job in IT and spend my day getting my feet massaged, checking on my work–life balance and dreaming of the Saga cruises I will go on courtesy of my enormous pension. Since I have spent the last two years writing a novel which I fully expect no one will ever read and which will earn me less than nothing, such jobs leave me sweaty with envy.
I did not lift my head till 5.30 p.m., and in the interests of good neighbourliness I stumbled through the darkness along the terrace with my five-year-old daughter to one of the other cottages. Because they are not occupied all the time, they occasionally get an upwardly mobile mouse or two who scurry in from the inhospitable fields around. The last time Dr Will and his wife were up, they left a trap behind the sofa. His wife is vegetarian and his nineteen-year-old daughter Jess is vegan, and if they see a dead mouse they will keel over with regret and self-hate. I was half hoping I could check on the trap, find it empty and still count it as my good deed, but unfortunately there was a furry little critter-corpse slumped over the luscious but poisoned sultanas, his tiny legs stretched out and stiff as winter twigs. Yuk … I mean, yuk. My daughter, who wants to be a ‘singing’ vet and has nerves of steel, held the black plastic bin-bag out while I shovelled in the mouse, and together we set another trap with chocolate. Vegetarian or not, they are doing the next one themselves.
That should have been my good deed for the day right there and then, but I was slumped on the sofa in front of a roaring log fire reading a thriller, darkness all around, when there was a rapping at the window. My first thought was the mouse was back; my second, that it was a psychopath come to slaughter me; my third was where’s an axe when you need one? It turns out living in the country with no full-time neighbours, your husband working in London for weeks at a time, and reading blood-spattered crime novels is a bad combination.
Palpitating, I headed to the French doors and outside was the little old lady’s grandson and his mam. Karl is a broad-shouldered teenage hulk with straw-blond hair. He quit school because he was being bullied – despite the fact he looks like a Viking and is the size of a four-bedroomed house, though size of course matters little in these cases. He got low after he dropped out of a construction course at college, and the local vicar hooked him up with the community radio station. Now he has decided he wants to work in radio.
Our friends’ kids have middle-class parents who know how to work the system; they get work experience in glamorous places which helps with their confidence and self-esteem, their university applications and their careers. When Karl drove his gran over to mine at Christmas for a cup of tea, I made an airy offer about helping him with his CV, not particularly thinking he would take it up, although I did remember to ask the Lovely Claire to see if she could get him some work experience locally. All credit to the lad, after we spoke he went to Connexions (a scheme that helps sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds get work), and they told him where to look on the computer for a CV template. He tried to call it up at home on the Internet but everything was in Arabic, so tonight he told his mother he wanted to come up and talk to me about what to do next.
I set my computer up on the kitchen table and drafted a long list of things for him to do, including reading about what is happening in radio and figuring out what podcasting is. The community radio where he is hosting a weekly programme has links with a couple of local radio stations, so I told him to ask the woman who manages things there to get him set up with some work experience. I also had a brief look at courses, and I will check out what he can do bearing in mind he dropped out of school. I also copied over the Connexions CV template (in English), emailed it to him and told him to draft something and then bring it back to me and we would make it sing.
Truth be told, I am frightened. I have told a seventeen-year-old without a lot of self-confidence that it is OK to want something and to try for something that is really hard to get. What happens if he starts wanting it really badly and I can’t help him get it? Wanting can eat up your soul. Good deeds should have good intentions – though it is possible to imagine a deed which has a good consequence but is poorly motivated. It is easier, though, to imagine a well-intentioned good deed which ends badly all round. I hate that expression ‘No good deed goes unpunished’. It is a misery and an excuse for apathy and neglect. I also very much hope it is not true, otherwise I am all undone and heading into a perfect storm of troubles. Is it possible that my good deeds could have a real effect? That they wouldn’t just be something self-contained and momentary, something worth little more than a brief ‘thanks’ – soon to be forgotten? Marvellous if I do a deed like that, ring out the bells. Horror upon horror if the effect it has isn’t good.
Good deed no. 13: told a seventeen-year-old it is OK to have dreams.
Despite my somewhat patchy faith, my eight-year-old is down to do his first Holy Communion. The reasons for this are:
Plus:
Bearing in mind there’s instruction at the weekend and strict rules on attendance, my son will have to miss football and rugby. There was hell when I told him, a situation which was not helped by my Protestant husband pontificating about football being more important than religion, which meant I had to tell him that football was his bloody religion. I ended up storming out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind me and going to bed without speaking to him.
Luckily, I came up with a plan. Bribery. I should have thought of it earlier. Straight after I dropped the kids at school, I hared up the road to Currys in Berwick. Nice though it would be if my eight-year-old son preferred to do as his mother told him and do his Holy Communion rather than what his father wants, that is to say score goals and make tries, it is not going to happen.
This year, I refused to let the boys ask Father Christmas for an iPod touch on the grounds they were far too young and the iPod touches were far too expensive. This morning I bought him one, in return for which he has to turn up to his Communion classes with good grace. It is, after all, a mother’s prerogative to make up the rules as she goes along. I spent every last penny I had in my account. An iPod I can buy; scruples, however, are a luxury we mothers cannot always afford. The official line is as follows: you are doing your first Holy Communion for Granny (Granny being a devout Catholic), so Mummy (who is a bad Catholic) wants to say thank you for making Granny happy. It wouldn’t get him – and it certainly wouldn’t get me – through any pearly gates, but strangely enough protests over missing football dropped off immediately. Can an action which is bad if you look at it one way still be good if you look at it another? Now there is a question.
Good deed no. 14: made my mother happy. (If I were a nicer person, I wouldn’t count making my own mother happy as a good deed – but I’m not.)
I have been worried about Lily for a while. She adopted Ellie almost three years ago when she was two (the kid having been taken into care when she was one), and Lily’s life hasn’t been her own since. Ellie looks like a fairy, with soft ginger ringlets and big hazel-green eyes like champion marbles; she is also damaged beyond belief. She asks the same question over and over again – ‘Can I? Can I? Can I?’, like a woodpecker breaking through your skull to get to the good stuff. If you look at someone else, if you talk to someone else, if you do something that doesn’t involve her – that is when she thinks you don’t see her any more, don’t love her any more, that’s when she thinks she doesn’t exist any more, and that is when the problems start. Lily loves her, but her neediness is burning Lily out.
We’ve shared the run to dancing classes since the girls started. Lily takes Ellie and my daughter to ballet on a Wednesday night, and I take both girls to tap and modern dance on a Saturday morning. I am putting my money where my mouth is. I am going to keep Ellie for lunch and for a couple of hours after dancing on a Saturday. That way Lily can draw breath and spend some time with her husband and son, and away from Ellie. The only problem is who gives respite to the respite-givers?
Ellie maintains my daughter is her best friend. If my daughter has a toy in her hand, Ellie wants it, and if she doesn’t get it she ‘tells’ or says, ‘You’re not my friend any more,’ and then my daughter cries. She sits in the car as I zip up the dual carriageway to dancing and asks, ‘What happens if I open the car door?’ and in the rear-view mirror her big hazel-green eyes are bigger and greener than ever. The other day, I was still parking the car in the churchyard opposite the dancing school (despite the sign that says it is for churchgoers only) when she actually managed to open the door and start climbing out. Ellie is adorable, and Ellie melts my brain.
Today, however, the kid was as good as gold over lunch. The only problem this time was taking her home afterwards. Lily had dashed to the shops and her husband was somewhere in the fields, so I was forced to plod through the fields with two small girls in jazzy leotards and pink frothy tutus, all of us sinking into shin-deep mud, with Ellie shrieking hysterically that the horse would bite us if he was hungry. Lily rehomed a rescue pony and also has one rescue cat and two dogs (one of them a rescue dog), two rescue geese, two rescue ducks, twenty-eight sheep (three of them orphaned lambs farmers didn’t want), five pigs (two of whom are rescue pigs), two chicken-reared ducks, one incubated duck, seven turkeys, half a dozen chickens, and a rooster called Lucky Lazarus who was born on Good Friday, died on Easter Sunday and whom she brought back to life. She names them all – not just the rooster. I have two guinea pigs called Nibble and Dark Dude, and I resent them both. I once asked her why she seems compelled to rescue both animals and people, and she described herself as ‘a sucker for a hard-luck story’. She went on: ‘I don’t like to think anyone or anything is not going to have a decent life.’
And I said: ‘OK.’
She said: ‘And I was raised that way by my mam – you don’t walk by someone who is suffering when there is something you could do to help.’
And I said: ‘OK.’
She said: ‘And when my dad left us, I was six. I remember how that abandonment felt then – and since.’
And there wasn’t anything I could say.
Good deed no. 15.
Good deed no. 16: rang a grown-up friend in Bristol to see if she would go out for a run with another friend’s daughter (new to the city and having difficulties settling in).