A Year of Doing Good

by Judith O'Reilly

  Wednesday, 11 May

  We live a couple of miles outside the fishing village and a couple of miles outside a village with its own castle. The castle village is picture-postcard pretty with a shady green grove at its heart and an ancient church which tradition tells is built on the spot where a church was founded by St Aidan in AD 635. St Aidan was a genuine good-deed doer and patently my kind of guy. According to the Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical historian and scholar the Venerable Bede, St Aidan was a man who ‘loved to give away to the poor who chanced to meet him whatever he received from kings or wealthy folk’. I haven’t actually met a king, but even so I am sure I would give away whatever treasures he gave me. Probably. Unless the treasures were really good treasures, when it might seem downright rude to give them away. My youngest son persuaded me to go into the ice-cream parlour in the castle village, so as my good deed I cleared the window of the cups and dirty crockery for the very nice shopkeeper which another customer had carefully shifted to one side as he sat down at a bar stool. The shopkeeper said, ‘Do you want a job?’ and I need the money so much I almost said yes. I have no scruples whatsoever about getting my hands dirty, I just need more hours in my day. I have always thought that the answer to the question ‘If you were hungry would you prostitute yourself to put bread in the mouths of your children?’ was a pretty resounding ‘You betcha’. At my age and in my condition, I’d fetch about £2.50.

  Good deed no. 131.

  Thursday, 12 May

  Cryssie’s legs turn inwards slightly and if she loses muscle – as she did recently when her foot was in plaster after an operation – she won’t ever get it back. Her face is also constricted in its movement, which means she can’t smile. I was particularly worried I might not understand her because her speech is similarly constricted by her frozen facial muscles. But she wants to be a writer. And I’m supposed to help. The physical aside, what I didn’t know was how severe her learning difficulties were. For a brief moment I thought of Christy Nolan, a genius trapped in a massively physically handicapped body; and at the idea of releasing that, a Pulitzer dangled in front of me – not one for me, but one for Cryssie, which she could hold proudly as my own eyes misted with tears of a teacher who had changed a child’s life. But according to her mother she has moderate learning difficulties, so the Pulitzer’s off then.

  I have never been a teacher. I do not have the patience. So it’s strange I am teaching Cryssie in the morning, then going into the university and teaching blogging in the afternoon. I must be one of the least-qualified teachers ever. What a fraud. I had to google ‘how to write a children’s book’ while she sat next to me. I told her that to be a writer she needs to read, and she does read, which is good, but she reads the animal books my five-year-old daughter likes, which is bad. Admittedly, Cryssie is actually reading them and my daughter is having them read to her, but nonetheless I am pretty sure they are way below Cryssie’s abilities. She had three ideas for stories – one for a dog, one for a kitten and one for a rabbit. They all involved the animals getting lost or hurt and ending up at the vets or safe at home – cut-outs of what she is reading, I’m guessing – but on the bright side, she did have three ideas. She picked the rabbit one to develop, and what was interesting was that from the ideas of titles we worked up together – ‘The Lost Rabbit’, ‘The Rabbit Who Got Lost’, ‘The Rabbit Who Got Rescued’ and ‘The Rabbit Who Needed Rescuing’ – the one she picked was the last one: ‘Bunny’s Bad Day’.

  I talked to her dad when he came to pick her up. She had given up computing, but needs to learn to type so we found a programs to practise on, and we talked about finding a more challenging book to read, and I gave her some homework – to sum up ‘Bunny’s Bad Day’ in one line, then in three paragraphs. Carefully, she lifted one leg over the lintel, balanced herself, then brought the other one to join it. She picked her way through the back door and across the yard to her car, her dad close behind. The lesson was not much in the scheme of things, but it was a start and I felt OK: that a good deed meant something.

  Good deed no. 132.

  Friday, 13 May

  I was shattered last night driving home. It was very weird teaching at a university when I have never taught before. I felt like an ancient bluestocking bag-lady walking through the university dragging my little black wheelie bag with my enormous knackered laptop in it. It made me remember my friend who used to be an academic and who said what was strange was the fact you got older and fatter and balder as the years passed, while everybody around you stayed young and beautiful.

  It was the second session of the six-week course on blogging which I’m tutoring along with Tyneside IT genius Oli Wood. At least three people on the course have been blogging very personal stuff – one, who has chronic ill-health and blogs about her condition, was wheeled in by a friend who had brought her out of hospital for the evening, and a first-aider sat behind her in case she suffered an anaphylactic shock at any point. Another girl had written about recovering from a massive tumour in her chest when she has three tiny children, one of whom has haemophilia. And the third had written about being married and fancying a married man with whom the blog would have you believe she had shared a drunken moment, along with her apparent desire to do more. All of them write really well but, speaking as a blogger, even I am taken aback by the confessional nature of some of it. I know blogging can act as therapy because I’ve used it myself that way, but I am taken aback to see it from the outside.

  Good deed no. 133: recommended one of the students (keen to find a market for her writing) as a potential contributor to a women’s online magazine.

  Saturday, 14 May

  Ellie was good today. I kept her for lunch and play. Lily said she has been testing me with her attention-seeking behaviour. She advised me to take a tougher line with her, and it certainly means less faffing about. You say no as firmly as you would to your own child, and the child might ask once or twice more, but not a dozen or two dozen times till you want to say ‘OK – whatever’ or shoot yourself.

  The kid is gorgeous with her dangling ringlets and those vivid round eyes. You can tell something is amiss with her sight, though, because she stares in a fixed manner. She also falls over all the time because, however beautiful her eyes are, they only work at 30 per cent capacity. She is prone to kidney infections too, and before she gets the kidney infection, her behaviour goes downhill. What do these women think when they are pregnant and they are drinking or on drugs? Don’t they think of the consequences, the love they owe that unborn child, the care? Do they scratch at the tracks on their ruined arms with bitten-down fingernails and figure the consequences will drive on by, that there won’t be the sound of a car drawing up outside their house, and a rapping at the door, that the hoodied debt-collectors of their own addiction won’t force their way into the darkness of their womb, slip on knuckledusters and beat on the innocent, curled-up child that’s growing there?

  Surely, if there is one place a child should be able to trust their mother, it’s inside of her. But then something went wrong in me when my child died – so who am I to talk? A mother who let down her child and didn’t even know it. Perhaps that’s why I get mad. I do not know what went wrong when my child died in utero – it wasn’t drugs or drink, or pesticides on food, or lack of yoga or green tea – but these greasy-headed girls pour poisons in their bodies and make their unborn babies drink it.

  And then afterwards, when the babe is born, and offstage the social worker types ‘At risk’, the doped-up mother turns neglect into an art form. Her itch for oblivion. The conviction that there is nothing like that feeling on this earth, nothing makes her feel that good – not even the smell of her baby’s head, the curl of her fingers. Leaving her babe unchanged, alone, hungry, thirsty, in the dark – forgotten. A mother who makes promises that this wrap will be the last, just one more time but never again. Telling herself, ‘She’s quiet … asleep … won’t wake up for hours.’ But yelling, screaming, cursing when they come to
take the babe away. Shouting of love and ‘You’ve no right’ and ‘She’s my baby’. Now she’s your baby, is she? This limp and damaged child. Bad decisions; bad company; bad, bad mothers. Lily doesn’t judge, but if I had Ellie’s natural mother here, I swear by that child’s green and poorly eyes I’d slap her till she wept and wept some more.

  Good deed no. 134.

  Sunday, 15 May

  My good deed was ringing Merry. I haven’t sent her a book in a while. I must look one out for her. She sounded in good fettle, though. She is still getting counselling to cope with the extent of her grief after her one true love died, which is obviously helping, and she has set up her own gardening company and is working thirty hours a week. The anniversary is next weekend, so I must remember to send something. A card saying I remember? Flowers? A book in which nobody dies?

  Good deed no. 135.

  Monday, 16 May

  Last night as I was reading to her, my daughter started bouncing up and down, and when I asked her why, she pleaded for a telescope or binoculars. She loves animals, loves birds. I thought she must want to spot a finch, a tit, a red-breasted robin. She said: ‘That way I’ll see the aliens when they come.’

  I was not quite sure what to do for my good deed. This happens a lot less often than I expected. In fact, there are times I believe the good-deedery is out and out compulsive. In the end I decided to write to Diane’s oldest son, who is away at boarding school. He loves it there. He went when he was eight. And now he’s nine. Old enough then to be away from home? Almost a man? Maybe at eleven. Maybe at twelve. When they’re so old they do not want the kissing and the closeness and the mummying. It is a class thing. I am too working class to put my child out the door at eight. ‘Bye now, see you on your exeat.’ Genes tell me that when hard times come, I’ll need that child. I want him handy to send down the pit or up the chimney to earn the cash to keep me in my gin. I’ve written before – three times – like a distant aunt, to ask him how he is. I tell him news of me and mine, which doubtless he has no interest in hearing, and I draw him little pictures of my world – sometimes I crayon them in. His mother tells me he thinks my letters mad. I enclose slim bars of chocolate, which make them better reading – bet he doesn’t tell her that.

  Good deed no. 136.

  Tuesday, 17 May

  We’ve sent our eldest to the middle school in the village, and our younger ones are at a church first school a couple of miles away. Both are lovely, excellent schools, but is there anything you worry about more than your children? Their health, their happiness – present and future. School, college, career. Whether their hearts will get broken. How they’ll cope. Whether they’ll have children, and if you’ll be there to help. In my saner moments, I consider how happy my boy is right now – genuinely, beautifully happy. He swings his rucksack onto his back, quick-kisses me, goes out for the school bus with a smile and comes in with a smile, and I think, ‘Stop fussing, you neurotic piece of baggage.’ Then the chilled-as-chilled-is eight-year-old got up on Monday, came down to breakfast and while pouring out the Weetabix Minis into his bowl, pronounced with due phlegm: ‘Five more days of misery then.’ Today, though, my eldest boy burst through the kitchen door waving a scrappy piece of paper on which he had scribbled his results for an English test, and he scored level 5C – better than his target and better than I’d expected – and I thought, ‘Good for you. I’ll wait until tomorrow to worry some more.’

  Good deed no. 137: worked on Jam Jar Army.

  Wednesday, 18 May

  Cryssie arrived with a much more suitable children’s book than the books about kittens and puppies she has been reading. It is interesting to watch her write because she settles to it and there’s a sense of rightness while she is working. She says she feels ‘engrossed’ when she writes. The fact is her physical disabilities are such that movement and exertion have to be restricted, and I don’t think she realizes yet where she can go with her writing. That if we can lift the latch on her imagination and push open the door, she can swim with mermaids, jump from star to star, that she can be and do anything she wants. For now, though, we are sticking with ‘Bunny’s Bad Day’, a tale of a young and curious rabbit who cuts his paw on broken glass and is rescued by a little girl and taken to a vet. It is almost certain to contain universal truths.

  That was the good thing about the day. The bad thing was apparently I live too far away to join the lifeboat crew. I am both secretly relieved and horribly disappointed. Now I’ll never know if I’m made of the ‘right stuff’ – then again, that might be just as well.

  Good deed no. 138.

  Thursday, 19 May

  My geek friend Oli and I spent the day at his place building the website for the Jam Jar Army. To be strictly accurate, Oli built it and I spent the day picking my way through cables and asking whether he had any food in and if I should make another cup of tea. He said he just gets into work and looks up and it’s four in the afternoon. I’m not like that. If I don’t eat, I want to kill those puppy dogs Cryssie likes to read about. He did me a big favour by doing it because I was struggling and he has done a really good job. What is terrifying, though, is I will have to go back in and finish it off because it is only halfway there, I’ll also have to drop in the words and pics, and I don’t have the skill-set. Positive thinking. With experience I will acquire the skill-set.

  Good deed no. 139: advised a blog-course student (who wants to write a book) how to write a synopsis.

  Friday, 20 May

  It has been the best part of twenty-five years since I started work for a regional newspaper. I wore ra-ra skirts and shoulder pads, clacking out my first stories on typewriters, working in an office with strip lights and a coffee machine which piddled coffee into plastic cups so thin they scorched off your fingerprints. I was grown-up. I shared a flat with my best gay boyfriend and ate vinegared chips in bubbling, spitting, green curry sauce for tea. I was an official member of Her Majesty’s media. When I walk into the flat-fronted Georgian pile that is the offices of the Northumberland Gazette, I want to be twenty-two all over again. It smells of paper and deadlines, the oak panelling sucking away the light in the hallway as I push down the shiny brass bell to tell the nice lady behind the counter that I have an appointment with the editor.

  Paul Larkin is a tall man in his late forties with a wide smile and preternaturally white hair. He exudes calm as he tucks himself behind a desk in an empty office and listens to my burble. I have an idea. I speed-walk him through the Jam Jar Army and astonishingly he bites. Not literally. He is way too chilled to bite me. He bites on the idea. The Gazette will get behind the Jam Jar Army to raise £10,000 for the hospice. When he moots ten grand, my pleasant smile spasms into a rictus and a nervous tic starts up in my left eyelid.

  ‘Is that too much?’ he asks, and I make a rapid calculation. If I yelp and say yes, way, way too much, the cool dude will think I don’t have faith in the project, so he will lose faith in the project. I swallow and it sounds loud in my ears.

  ‘Nooooo,’ I say, trying to sound as cool as him and sliding my finger up to my eyelid to hide the tic. ‘Sounds good to me.’

  Outside, I put one hand against the stone wall and one hand on my chest and try to stop myself from hyperventilating. Is that doable? It’s madness, isn’t it? At £3 a jar we will need 3,333 jars out in Northumberland. I am going to look chronically stupid if this comes to nothing. What if we get back twenty jars? That’s £60. Larkin wants some Blue Peter-type thermometer to judge how much money they are getting in. Apparently, he used to be deputy editor on the Sunderland Echo and they raised £90,000 for charity. He said he hasn’t ever done a charitable appeal on the Gazette, so I had excellent timing.

  I am now officially terrified at the prospect of looking incompetent in front of the entire county. What is going to persuade people to ‘fill a jar with change’? Why would they? Will they if, week after week, they are reading about it in the local paper? I am going home to ring round some more schools �
� somebody has to fill these jam jars. Perhaps Al will let us take another mortgage out on the house.

  Good deed no. 140.

  Saturday, 21 May

  Ellie got in the car and announced yet again my daughter wasn’t her friend any more. What is it? I wonder. Is any attention better than no attention? My daughter ended up sobbing, and I ended up bringing the car to a dead-stop as we pulled into the churchyard and instructing Ellie very firmly that enough was enough. My daughter promptly announced she felt sick and Ellie said she felt sick too, and my daughter said she didn’t want to go to dancing and Ellie said she wasn’t going either, and I marched into Wonderland anyway.

  Buying them both a bag of chocolate caramels for the return journey was not straight out of the parenting textbooks, but it is astonishing how chewy caramels occupy little mouths for extended periods. Once they’d finished chewing, they were sufficiently blissed on a sugar high that together they sang songs from musicals and hymns from school all the way back. Consequently, when we pulled into the farmyard, anyone watching would have thought I had a real gift with kids. Yep, a real gift and two bags of chocolate caramel chews.

  Good deed no. 141.

  Sunday, 22 May

  It is a year ago exactly since Merry’s partner died. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I called. I thought she might end up sobbing down the phone because her soulmate had been swallowed up by death. In reality, I felt better when I came off the phone, because she was strong and together and laughed – even at some psychobabble rubbish I spouted at one point. I know she misses him terribly and thinks of him every day – God knows how many times, as many times as there are breaths in her body probably – but she was centred and peaceful even. Her gardening business is doing well, she is managing her money even though she hasn’t much, she has her three boys to love, and there was such devastation when he died, such grief and terror at his loss, that I want to hang a ‘Well Done, You’ golden medal shaped like a sunflower around her neck and say, ‘Congratulations on your survival. For pulling through, we would like you to have this medal as a token of our esteem, to mark the small miracle that you are still you.’