For Dr Will, medicine, and more particularly general practice, is more than a family tradition, it is a vocation. ‘I truly turned up to my interview and said I wanted to help people – I wanted to help make things better – and I was the first person at med school who, on day one, admitted to wanting to be a GP. I took a bit of grief for that.’ I pictured Dr Will, twenty-five years younger, amiable, charming, and burbling with enthusiasm about the joys of general practice to glory boys intent on royal colleges, surgery, consultancy and their very own spotty bow tie.
I asked him whether most people became doctors to help people, and he looked thoughtful. ‘Quite a few go into it for status, whether that’s to do with self-esteem or financial status. We were told by the Registrar at medical school that they used to oscillate between setting the academic bar quite high one year, when they’d get a lot of academic people who were a bit stiff, and lower the next year when they’d need more people-people, or GP types.’
Nothing is harder than holding true to the dreams you have when you are young – particularly when the dreams are ones of virtue. But working as a GP for more than twenty-one years, at fifty-four hours a week, Dr Will clearly remains a believer. ‘The thing in it for me is the thank you. That’s the drug. Several times a day, a patient says, “Thank you for your time, Doctor.” I keep reminding them I do get paid.’
For Dr Will, the art to doctoring lies in wanting to be useful and, most of all, in listening. ‘It gets easier once you know the patients better, because then they are more comfortable with you so they open up. I just seem to connect with people easily – I am very lucky in that. Somebody said on the radio the other day that if you shut up and listen, patients will tell you what’s wrong with them, it’s not difficult.’ Even with the most chronic cases, there is always something new to try. Dr William Carson Dick, consultant rheumatologist in Newcastle while Dr Will was a student, died in 1995. Towards the end of his career, the consultant held weekly open-house sessions where patients and their relatives, doctors and medical students met together for a glass of wine and a sing-song. According to one obituary, after Carson Dick’s death ‘many of his patients claimed [these get-togethers] did far more for them than any of the drugs prescribed for their diseases.’
Dr Will admitted that there is a danger in his full-on, give-all style of doctoring and ‘take your time’ approach. Not only do queues build in the waiting room, but ten years ago he burned out. He blames the burnout on giving too much, and is wary of it happening again. ‘I was giving too much, so this year I made a resolution to be less tolerant. It is a marginal switch on the setting – maybe I say no a bit more. But I just love it. If I won the lottery I wouldn’t quit. The worry is the patients become my family, my friends, but I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. It is a drug, I’m sure – the sense you are helping and the feedback you get; and it is often the most vulnerable that give you the best feedback of all.’ I smiled at Dr Will as he left to go out on a run along the lanes, and felt … uplifted. You want your doctors selfless and quietly heroic, to feel that they have your best interests at heart, that they work relentlessly to make you better and the world a better place. You want them to carry a battered Gladstone bag at all times, to work in grainy monochrome, wear tweed and tip their hat, you want to feel all doctors are like Dr Will.
Saturday, 30 April
Waved goodbye to the old folk, who drove off in convoy, my mother all teary. She can’t leave without crying, which makes me cry, which makes her cry more. I have no idea how my aunt managed to drive off at all bearing in mind she can’t feel anything below the knee – I must ask her. She can move the leg; she just can’t feel it. It’s the left one anyway, so at least it isn’t the accelerator foot. It’s been nice having them: you know where they are – lying on the ground in my father’s case – so you don’t have to worry. As she walked out of the door, my aunt said: ‘It’s been lovely, pet, but it’s too much work for you with the three of us. I’m coming on my own next time.’ I’ve got these really itchy bumps on my back and I can’t decide if they’re mosquito bites or shingles. The fact I am even thinking shingles says my aunt might be right, but even my parents plus the kids are too much for me. Even the kids are too much for me sometimes. Even I am too much for me sometimes.
Apparently in Buddhism you get more brownie points if you perform meritorious deeds for holy people, the needy or your parents. That is some comfort, because I have now made so many cups of tea for my aged relations that I don’t only have itchy bumps but my repetitive strain injury has come back. I am hoping Buddha might make it go away again. The problem is that I have an Aga, which is a vast cast-iron contraption that you cook on and that heats your kitchen and dries your clothes and makes you feel like life is worth living on a wet and wintry day. The hobs are covered by heavy round lids like giant tiddlywinks. They are not a good combination with ancient Irish DNA, on which scientists with microscopes can read, ‘I drink tea, therefore I am.’ To make tea on an Aga you have to lift the lid of the Aga, lift the kettle from its place by the Aga, fill it, lift it back onto the Aga, pour the boiling water into the cups, place the kettle back in its place and then shut the Aga lids. Farmers’ wives must have arms like ham hocks. I am rolling up her sleeves and looking next time I meet one.
I am feeling so stressed, I am nauseous. Stretched like cling film ready to tear over a glass bowl that’s ready to shatter. I have too much to do. I have so much to do I cannot even remember what I have to do. I should write a To Do list, but I can’t because my arms hurt and anyway I would lose the list and then I would have to add ‘Find the To Do list’ to my To Do list and I wouldn’t be able to. God. Don’t have children if you seriously want to do anything useful with your working life, and don’t try to do anything useful with your working life because life itself is too damn short anyway and you should be spending it with the kids. I am losing the plot. I am:
bringing up three children while husband works far too many hours and occasionally goes insane while he does it;
preparing to teach a university short course on blogging;
doing a good deed a day;
trying to launch a major fund-raising initiative;
and writing a novel no one wants to read.
Plus my laptop now has thirty-one vertical lines running down the screen, one of which flashes all the time. I’m hoping it doesn’t make me have a fit.
For ten minutes when the oldies had gone and before the next lot of children came along to play with my children, I sat out in the soul-drenching sunshine of the garden in the chair my mother had been sitting in. A chaffinch sang in the branches of the blossom-heavy cherry tree as I sipped my black coffee. I peeled off my cardigan and lay back in the chair; it was warm in the sun, but every now and then a fierce wind from off the sea slapped up against the cherry tree, knocking the blossom from the branches and, sitting in its lee, it was as if pale pink snow fell on me.
Good deed no. 120: checked Holy Island crossing times on the Internet for Dr Will.
Sunday, 1 May
Good deed no. 121: bought blue, bubblegum-flavoured ice cream for a friend’s three boys we bumped into.
Monday, 2 May
Lovely sunny day again, so the children and I pootled into the market town and bought a box of ice creams from Iceland. Mums love Iceland, as they say. But even after we had all had one, there were ice creams left over. There was nothing for it but to give them away to strangers. The best one had to be as we were driving away. A family were wandering the streets. I imagine they had come down into town after looking round the castle. The child with them wore a helmet and was carrying a sword, which he was waving ferociously like the best knights do. I stopped the car and wound down the window to ask one of the grown-ups if the boy would by any chance like an ice cream. Who says never take an ice cream from a stranger? The grown-up nodded. From behind his visor, the boy stopped thinking where he might find a dragon to kill, and reached out for his Magnum. That family is goi
ng home thinking Northumberland really loves its visitors.
Good deed no. 122.
Tuesday, 3 May
Am abandoning the migraine medication which the consultant prescribed. All I want to do is sleep. How can I do good if I’m asleep? You could argue that while asleep I do no evil, but that isn’t enough. I will have to rely on the good deeds to get me through the pain.
Good deed no. 123: bought expats a bread bin.
Wednesday, 4 May
I have all these great ideas that pop into my head – I should leave them there in the darkness to shrivel and die. Currently, my head is threatening to explode while I figure out how to set up a website for the Jam Jar Army. Not to mention the fact that one of the headteachers we approached to get their school on board wants a letter to make sure ‘we are who we say we are’. He is not getting the letter. How desperate a fraudster would you have to be to set up a con involving collecting coppers in jam jars? I would be the worst criminal mastermind ever.
Good deed no. 124: edited the school admissions appeal for a place at grammar school for my Yorkshire cousin’s eleven-year-old daughter.
Thursday, 5 May
Good deed no. 125: advised wildlife sanctuary on a prospective donor. (I had approached them to take Titty the Lamb, but they can’t because they are so cash-strapped. Poor Titty. I have also asked a city farm, but they say they have ‘as many sheep as we can accommodate’. It’s not like he needs an en suite.)
Friday, 6 May
Good deed no. 126: rang Kirsty re knee.
Saturday, 7 May
Good deed no. 127: kept Ellie for lunch and afternoon play.
Sunday, 8 May
Good deed no. 128: dug out contacts for someone who wants to illustrate kids’ books.
Monday, 9 May
Good deed no. 129: toing and froing between illustrator and potential contact.
Tuesday, 10 May
It is strange living by the coast. Turn your head one way and there are green cropped fields hedged round with dense hawthorn, grassy pastures where sheep graze, woodland with roaming deer, and in the background the swell of the Cheviot Hills. Turn your head the other, and it is all sea: endless, ever-changing greys and blues, washing in and out across the sands. For me the land is how we live: fixed and steady, managed and understandable; the sea, though, is who we are: changeable, immense, relentless and hard to comprehend. We come from it, walk by it, swim in it, admire it, and fear it because we have no mastery over it. Years past, those who lived here also worked it for the fish, though there are few enough left do that today. And it was the sea that gave me the idea for another good deed: I could join the crew of a lifeboat. The shame is that I seem to be the only person in the world who thinks this is a possibility.
We live a couple of miles outside what used to be a fishing village and which now makes most of its money from tourism. The village still has its own lifeboat station, however, which sends out lifeboats to rescue bendy divers or those foolish enough to drive over the causeway between Holy Island and the mainland in the belief they can beat the tide. Joining the crew seems an entirely logical choice to me. Why then when I mentioned it to my husband was there a telling silence before he said: ‘Why don’t you volunteer in a charity shop, darling?’
I rang the local lifeboat operations manager and he said they had a training exercise this evening, so along I went. I walked into the lifeboat station past the little shop selling model lifeboats and teddies, then along a metal gallery; to the right there are crew rooms, and to the left the space drops away to the boathouse where the lifeboat sits in dry dock looking huge and orange and brave. Wooden plaques line the walls with the names and years of the former lifeboats and coxswains and all the rescues that the lifeboat has gone out on. A bearded chap who helps launch the boats took me through to the room where the lifeboat men were gathered. They were ranged in seats around the room chatting to each other, and silence fell as I walked in, which was the right moment to be a foot taller and ten years younger with a willy to call my own.
The operations manager was lovely and cuddly, like a cut-out-and-keep grandad, but he wasn’t exactly biting my hand off. I may not be the ideal candidate. A five-foot-two, forty-something woman isn’t exactly poster material for the lifeboat crew. Grandad starts talking about training and the sea survival test you have to go through at the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in Poole where they throw you into a tank of choppy water and see if you drown. Physically, I’m not sure I’m up to it. I’m a terrible swimmer with a bad back and a tendency to migraine. I’m short-sighted and I never lift anything heavier than my handbag or a glass of Chablis. I wouldn’t want to get to someone who needed rescuing in a stormy sea, decide, ‘Do you know what – that looks like far too much trouble,’ lean over the boat and, instead of reaching down a hand, shout into the wind, ‘Any last words? I’ll be sure to pass them on.’
But I can’t blink. I’m here to join the lifeboat crew. Grandad meets me halfway. He offers me a ride.
First things first. I climb into the yellow rubberized boots and trousers and enormous jacket. The trousers aren’t too bad because the boots stop them trailing on the ground, but the boots must be at least two to three sizes too big, which means I have to throw one leg up into the air to clear the boot before it comes to rest on the ground, then throw the other up in the air to keep the momentum going. Another woman turns up, a young teacher in the local high school, and I breathe a sigh of relief that I am immediately less of an oddity.
We walk from the gallery straight onto the boat deck before the boat trundles out of the boathouse pulled by a tractor. I am jacketed and booted and helmeted. The tourists lining the harbour taking pictures are firmly of the opinion I am a hero. A short hero, admittedly, but a hero nonetheless. One of the guys I am standing next to is six foot five if he is an inch, and I move away from him because he is making me look teeny-tiny. My fellow female lifeguard kneels by a massive metal chain, which is held in place by a metal bracket. When the alarm sounds, you hit the bracket with the hammer as hard as you can, the bracket lifts, the chain falls away and the boat slides from its metal bed parked on the slipway and into the sea. The only problem is there are two chains and two brackets. I kneel by the other chain, take the hammer from its box and raise it over the bracket. The vision of one chain falling from the boat while I repeatedly bash away at my bracket as the boat lists to one side and lifeboat men fall from its deck like passengers from the Titanic starts playing on the YouTube channel that is my brain. The alarm goes, and I hammer the bracket so hard I’m lucky I do not go through the plank beneath. Suddenly we are in the water.
The helmsman guns the boat and it begins to plane, its pointy bit raised at a thirty-degree angle as it cuts through the water. The training exercise involves taking the boat across to Holy Island, opening up the engine, practising tying her up at the harbour and checking the shifting sandbars. Occasionally, spray hits me across the face and I try not to mind, like a real hero. The sea cuts Holy Island off from the mainland twice a day, flooding its causeway and occasionally catching strangers and the certifiably stupid off-guard. Only the month before, a car with four adults, two children and a dog had to be rescued by the lifeboat as they attempted to cross the causeway against the tide times.
I wonder why they do it. I’m out with a crew of seven and there are twenty-four volunteers in the village, including the chap who owns the crazy golf course, an IT technician, a college lecturer, a teacher, a plasterer, a plumber, a welder, a barman, a BT engineer, a few boatmen and one fisherman. I understand the boatmen and the fisherman, but everyone else? Why do they put their lives on the line? Because that’s what you do. They help the divers who get the bends or who push themselves too hard and run into trouble, surfers who get too ambitious, motorists who get caught out – like the man who took a drink too many one night and parked his van where the tide came in and was plucked from the roof of his van dressed only in his pants and shame. Occasionally, tragi
cally, there are bodies; more often there are rescues.
I enjoy the sea journey out to the island; the problem comes when we moor. The boat is tied up against the harbour wall and a wet iron ladder set against it. We are distinctly lower than I would like us to be. I eye the ladder distrustfully and wonder whether, if I slip between the lifeboat and the lichened wall, I would be pressed flat and dead or would instead slide straight down into the waiting waters and drown beneath the boat. I sling my leg with its oversized boot over the side of the boat, step into oblivion and hope desperately that somewhere my boot will find a rung. I immediately start to dread climbing back in.
I climb up and down the ladders from hell three times: once onto the island, where we stretch our legs; once off the island back onto the boat; and one final time from the boat back into harbour, which is the very worst time, and I am certain I am not the only one envisaging me slipping between the boat and the dock. Still, there is the consolation of the admiring glances of spectators. It is almost enough consolation for having to heft two of the heavy rubber skids that the boat slides up stern-first out of the water and onto its carriage. These are so heavy, I can barely lift them off the ground let alone into the trailer to clear them away once the boat is free of them. I am useless at shifting the rubber beams but, given a hose, I excel at washing the saltwater off the lifeboat. This has to be the biggest thing I have ever washed. It just doesn’t make me look much like a hero.
Good deed no. 130: wrote a press release for the village middle school on its Ofsted inspection report.
A Year of Doing Good Page 13
