A Year of Doing Good

by Judith O'Reilly

  She is contemplative, infinitely patient, softly spoken and gentle. I am amazed we share the same genes, since I prefer a strategy of ‘do-first-think-how-later’, am hideously impatient and regularly shout ‘Bollocks’ at all-comers. Tragically, her partner died last year at forty-six. So there she is – my age with a soulmate already in the ground, and there aren’t many sticking plasters big enough to make that better. At Christmas, her three children went to an ex-husband and she went to bed for the day. When I checked on her after New Year, she had managed to stay up and watch Jools Holland – friend to lonely souls everywhere – and drink a bottle of red wine, which has to be a healthier option than taking to your bed for the day. (Well, maybe not the wine part, but I would have been tempted to boil it up in a copper pan, slice an orange, drop in fat slices and skinny, fragile cinnamon sticks, take a hot bath, a few spicy mouthfuls and open up a vein.) In the event, when I called her to offer comfort, I did as much talking if not more about headaches and exhaustion as she did about heartbreak and desolation.

  Question: is the truth of good deeds that very often they are as good for the doer as they are for the done-to? And if they are, does that matter – providing good is done for someone other than the good-deed doer? Perhaps I should be a psychotherapist, like my best gay boyfriend. The problem is it takes seven years, which is a long time. Also, you have to go for therapy sessions yourself four times a week and I would run out of things to say. (Actually, that’s a lie: I wouldn’t run out of things at all.) Perhaps I could save time and just call myself a counsellor? I am genuinely good at listening and I already have several cardigans.

  I am sending Merry books because my advice as an amateur, cardigan-wearing counsellor to the grieving is that in the event of bereavement – and I speak from personal experience – filling up your headspace with books and DVDs and good conversation is as effective a survival strategy as any. Grief is a desert to be crossed. Grief is a marathon to be run or walked or crawled. You can cross that desert. You can run that distance. Killing time any which way till you reach the other side is a mercy you owe yourself.

  Good deed no. 22.

  Sunday, 23 January

  Good deed no. 23: stood by somebody else’s child, who had gone on ahead of his parents in a car park, till his dad arrived.

  Monday, 24 January

  Good deed no. 24: invited someone who wanted to talk for a cup of tea.

  Tuesday, 25 January

  Good deed no. 25: dug out a couple of contacts for a stranger who wants to write a book.

  Wednesday, 26 January

  My ten-year-old left his PE kit at home so rang me, which was disconcerting because the last time I checked he didn’t have a mobile phone. He begged me to bring the kit in, which I reluctantly agreed to do. The problem was that I was so busy crawling to the garage excruciatingly slowly in case I ran out of petrol, I completely forgot, and went to a friend’s for a coffee instead.

  It may have meant forgetting the PE kit, but coffee with Kathryn was my good deed because I managed to drag Diane along with me. Kathryn lives in a centuries-old stone-built farmhouse, perched up a height, which can see straight through to the Cheviot Hills away in the distance. Often, I drive straight by the tight turning to the farm, and I have to watch hard for an ironwork windvane which marks the bend, and which, if looks are anything to go by, must screech like a banshee when the north wind pushes it around and around.

  Kathryn has four sheepdogs with pleading brown eyes and a twelve-year-old daughter with autism. A warm and very pretty woman twenty years younger than her husband, she often has her hair dyed; occasionally it is a joyful chestnut, today it is a glorious aubergine. I brought Diane along because, ever one to solve a complex problem, she has come to the heart-wrenching conclusion that her own three-year-old girl is also autistic. Her daughter is a doll but was slow to walk, has delayed speech, won’t come out of her cot, insists on routine and doesn’t engage as you might expect her to. I have watched this child grow up, watched her grow prettier – her silky, soft brown hair cut in a French bob; I have listened for words that don’t come, sat by her as she sorted the food on her plate – here potato, here meat, here peas, sniper alleys between – no pea allowed to stray into this no-man’s-land, punishment immediate. I have watched her and wondered.

  Diane used to play hockey and lacrosse. I have never asked whether she captained the teams, but I’d put money on the fact she did. She rode competitively and, whether it was the sport or the falls or just ‘one of those things’, she damaged her spine. Since I first met her, she has had two major operations on her back and keeps an X-ray of her sometime-pinned-and-caged spinal column in the downstairs loo like a nineteenth-century adventurer keeping a stuffed grizzly bear that took out his eye on that fateful hunting trip in the woods. I am always surprised she doesn’t lock up and sink straight to the seabed when she swims. She happens to be frighteningly posh, which is perhaps why she is so good with pain – well-bred phlegm. She is showing similar equanimity about the daughter. If I believed my breathtaking girl to be autistic, I would ball up my fists and beat the knuckles bloody on the plastered kitchen walls. That, however, is not what you do when you have grit, the right stuff, and when you do not have a choice.

  Instead, Diane considers how the child will ‘come across’ at school, which she is due to start in September. She isn’t worried, she explains carefully, her hand sliding down to scruffle one of the dogs behind the ears, who squirms ecstatically; the key is an official diagnosis and getting the right support at school. Kathryn nods, been-there-done-that, and there is a hairy, panting flurry of collie dogs as she moves first one then another from between her and the cupboards to get out the chocolate biscuits. (She always has chocolate biscuits in – it is one of her best qualities.) Diane will fight for her daughter with exquisite manners and determination as steely as the rods that were once in her spine. But I worry that she herself will need more support than she expects, than she believes is necessary, than she believes her due. In the living room, the two remarkable mothers talk. The special little girl lies on the wool carpet and plays with leggy Barbies and plastic-fantastic horses with flowing manes. Utterly ordinary me lies alongside her – and plays too.

  Quid pro quo, as we left, Kathryn gave me a dozen brown and fresh farm eggs from the hens that strut and peck the grassy bank outside the farmhouse. As she hands me the cardboard tray, the eggs whole and perfect, for a moment I think that they are warm.

  Good deed no. 26.

  Thursday, 27 January

  Good deed no. 27: looked round a house the expat cousins are thinking of moving into.

  Friday, 28 January

  I checked up on Merry again. How tiresome are my loved ones starting to find my constant check-ups? Do they feel as if they are under surveillance? Bereaved? Sick? Depressed? Stand by your sickbeds – the good-deed doer will be calling any second. Pretend you’re out.

  Good deed no. 28.

  Saturday, 29 January

  Good deed no. 29: had a child for the afternoon, to let her poorly mum rest.

  Sunday, 30 January

  This evening, Mum rang to say my uncle died. He was eighty-five and ill with cancer and died at 3 a.m. in hospital. She says my dad’s heartbroken.

  What can you say to bring any kind of peace when a husband dies after fifty-two years of marriage? You want to make it better and you can’t, but you try anyway. I feel so sorry for my dad, sorrier yet for his sister – my darling Irish aunt. How terrible to get into your eighties and lose the person you love. How do you remember what it is to be on your own if you have been with someone else for more than fifty years? How do you remember that they aren’t there any more? That they haven’t just stepped out to the kitchen to make you both a cup of tea? Or that they aren’t in their allotment and won’t be back for lunch with some freshly dug new potatoes?

  When I rang, she told me how on his last day their youngest daughter washed him, cleaned his teeth and shaved him, as sh
e had shaved him every day on his sickbed, and he asked whether she had made him look beautiful. For forty years, a father tells a daughter that she’s beautiful, and in the telling he makes it so. Hearing him, believing him, she walks through life lightly – her feet bare, her smile open – she meets the dawn and stretches, greets other men who’ll love her too, with the sure and certain knowledge that she is lovely. She knows it’s so – her father told her years ago and yesterday and every time he looks her way. And at the end, when no daughter, however loving, can stop her father leaving, she does the thing she can: she shaves this dying man, she holds his hand, and nods in answer to his question. Her gift to him. His gift to her. She makes him beautiful.

  Good deed no. 30: consoled the bereaved (not true – tried to console the bereaved).

  Monday, 31 January

  Good deed no. 31: wrote a letter to someone who’s ill.

  THE HELPER

  I am trying to set my kids a good example, having been set the best of examples by my own parents. I may fail. Epically, as my son would say. Still, epic fail or not, I’ll know I tried. What happens, though, if you don’t learn about charity and generosity from those who should teach it to you as a child? What then? Do you grow up hard and loveless? Or do you teach yourself what goodness is?

  Jean taught herself. Standing four feet eight and a half inches in her tiny stocking feet, 61-year-old Jean makes you want to pop her in your pocket and take her with you wherever you go, like a lucky charm. After twenty-seven years of working with the terminally ill and those with mental health issues, she retired as a community support worker because of acute osteoporosis and osteoarthritis. Since then, two days a week for a decade, the pupils at my kids’ school have taken it in turns to sit next to Jean as she hears them read. ‘That’s marvellous,’ she says as they stumble through the words. ‘Superb,’ she tells them as they turn the final page. Encouraging children when she was only ever discouraged. Boosting their self-esteem when hers was covered over with ash and beatings. Her arm around these children, when her own mother would never hold her.

  Jean grew up in poverty in Ashton-under-Lyne with an alcoholic father who served in the merchant navy during the war, was unemployed thereafter and whose mood depended on the 2.30 at Chepstow. ‘I used to protect the kids. I can remember standing with my three brothers behind me’ – she stretches out her arms as she talks, as if to bar a doorway – ‘and saying, “Don’t hit them, hit me,” and he did. That’s how it was. That’s what life was like, but he was still my dad and I loved my dad – worshipped him. Three weeks before he died of lung cancer – he was only forty-six – he apologized for all he’d done, and I did forgive him – and my mum – because you have to.’ Jean says that life was hard in the 1950s. ‘Nobody had anything after the war. It was all make do and mend and it was all big families. I was around six and I remember my mother saying to my dad, “We can’t send her to school – she’s too many bruises.” You’d get a good hiding and that was one of those things. It wasn’t any different for the girl up the road, but it was a horrible childhood – hard and cruel. I’ve got more bad memories than good.’

  However tough life was for that ‘girl up the road’, there was certainly no sanctuary to be found for Jean in her mother’s arms. Jean’s mother worked shifts in a cigarette factory and as a piecework machinist making handbags at home. ‘A grafter’, Jean describes her as. ‘Grafter’: a word of respect – a compliment. But compliments didn’t flow the other way. ‘I can’t remember a word of encouragement – none whatsoever. The only thing I can remember from my mother is her saying, “Go into the other room – you make me feel sick.” ’ The woman had spent her war in the Land Army, had five children in five years, ten years fallow and then two more children. She had an alcoholic husband and worked all hours. But there are all kinds of poverty in this world – did she work so many hours, was she so spent, that there was never a moment for a fond word or a loving gesture? ‘I can’t remember my mum or my dad ever giving us cuddles,’ says Jean. ‘I tell my children I love them every day, but there was none of that when I was growing up. That wasn’t just my upbringing, that was the 1950s for you, but she was a hard woman. Mind you, she had to be.’ As she speaks, I wonder that tiny Jean was strong enough to keep growing on the inside to the size of a giant. Years after, a woman can still feel a father’s fists fall on her young girl’s body, however heartfelt his ‘Sorry’. You can’t recover from the thousand tiny hurts where there should have been a hundred-thousand-million mother’s kisses. But you can hold your own children tighter, cover them in the kisses you never had, and say, ‘I love you, love you, love you, child, love you all the more for never knowing this myself.’

  When Jean fell pregnant at sixteen she was sent to a Church of England home for unmarried mothers and their babies in Blackburn, the girls taken together for antenatal classes but not given pain relief in hospital during the birth of their babies and talked down to by nurses. ‘Inside you were all in the same boat – in a lot of ways it was better than home. Outside, though, they segregated you. You felt awful, you had to walk down the street with your head down, you felt shame – I still do sometimes.’ Her newborn son should have been put up for adoption; instead – ever the protector of the vulnerable – Jean fought for him. ‘I prayed on my hands and knees to my dad to keep him, because you were in that home to give the child away. I thought, I just can’t, and finally my dad said, “If you bring this baby home, you’re not to ask me or your mum for anything because we won’t help,” and by gum they stuck to their word.’ Jean cleaned houses with her baby in tow while bringing up her two youngest siblings, now one and three – siblings who when they left school came to live with her and her husband.

  I am looking at Jean and thinking, ‘Why are you here doing good? Why aren’t you mean and angry after the start you had in life? When your health broke in your forties, why didn’t you say, “I’ve done enough,” rather than, “What can I do now?” Why don’t you take rather than give?’ I ask her whether it helps her to do good and she says, ‘I’ve seen it – I’ve been there, but you have got to have hope, you have to know that things will get better. I am who I am because of what I have gone through and I can never see me not caring, not doing what I do.’ In nature, where there should be bitter herbs and rank weeds, occasionally a tangle of wild roses bloom: scented, startling pink and beautiful.

  Tuesday, 1 February

  Yesterday the eight-year-old was off sick and today it was my daughter’s turn. She drifted around all day in a one-piece, fake-fur, pink leopard-skin pyjama suit complete with ears, saying, ‘I’m sick. You have to do whatever I want when I’m sick, and I am really sick.’ The logic of a five-year-old; I may try it.

  This good-deed thing is getting serious, though, and I’m not sure I like it. I decided I couldn’t in all conscience continue to ring up one of my nearest and dearest to talk through their particular crisis or I risked a totally groundless accusation of emotional stalking. In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis writes that ‘a sensible human’ once said, ‘ “She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.” ’ So instead of hunting down my ‘others’ I decided I needed to find an alternative source of good-deedery. Tonight I signed up to raise £500 for charity within the year – more specifically for a local cause – and committed £10 a month from my own money to kick it off. I have a JustGiving website page and everything. Annually HospiceCare North Northumberland needs to raise around £255,000 of its £300,000 running costs from its own fund-raising. That is a lot of money. The JustGiving page advises you to contact everyone on your email contacts list and to put it up on your Facebook page and the like. Not sure about that. I can’t see acquaintances giving much dosh, and the people I’m closest to will think I am David Cameron’s Big Society crack-whore. I’ll keep it low profile.

  Good deed no. 32.

  Wednesday, 2 February

  Good deed no. 33: drove round
to give Diane a pot of hyacinths.

  Thursday, 3 February

  Lily’s boy has been off sick for the past couple of days and she is shattered. Two nights on the sofa in his room will do that to you. (I didn’t ask whether she kept an axe handy.) It wasn’t him, though, but Ellie she talked about when I called to check how things were. The child’s starting point is ‘I’; the first words out of her mouth every morning are not ‘Love you, Mum’ or ‘Did you have a nice sleep?’ but ‘I want …’, ‘I need …’ ‘Her whole wiring is for survival,’ Lily said. She is overwhelmed.

  Lily first asked for help in August, but there has been no sighting of the cavalry. Weekends are the worst. Without the routine of school, Ellie’s on a downward spiral. Tension in the family has been so explosive that they went to the beach at the weekend despite the fact it was bitter and blowing a gale, and they sent Ellie off into the dunes with her brother. She didn’t want to leave her mother, but Lily was desperate for a moment’s peace and her husband insisted. Sobbing, the kid climbed up into the dunes. But as Lily walked towards the sea, the child panicked that she was being abandoned and, hysterical, stepped out over the edge of the dunes to get to her, falling two metres and crashing onto the sands – which, had they been walking on a different beach, could so easily have been rocks. Lily ran to comfort her and the shaken girl clung to her.