A Year of Doing Good

by Judith O'Reilly

  Good deed no. 220: filled and set right a vase of gladioli on some other child’s grave which had been knocked over by the wind.

  Tuesday, 9 August

  Good deed no. 221: now in Suffolk, offered an old lady some blackberries from a raffia punnet as she sat on a wooden bench in the evening sunshine outside the village hall with her glossy spaniel at her feet. When I’m old, I want to sit in the sun with a spaniel at my feet, lips stained with brambles, a tincture of bobbing ice and stiff gin clutched fondly in my liver-spotted hand.

  Wednesday, 10 August

  I have competition from chimpanzees. Research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, Atlanta, found that chimps will do things for each other even without direct benefit to themselves. According to the primate scientists, this confirmation of chimpanzee altruism suggests that ‘human altruism is less of an anomaly than previously thought’.

  Apparently animal behaviourists had observed chimps acting altruistically in the wild and in captivity, but such behaviour had not been replicated in scientific conditions. Chimps, then, had been regarded as ‘reluctant altruists’ who only acted ‘in response to pressure and solicitation’. But in this latest test by the primate researchers, seven female chimps with three different partners got to choose between taking a token which meant a treat for them and a treat for the partner chimp, or a differently coloured token which meant the treat was only for themselves. Most of the time they took the altruistic route and chose the win-win treat, doing their chimp buddy a good turn. The chimps weren’t related to each other and there was no immediate reciprocity involved that the scientists were aware of, which does not follow the normal way of things for altruistic behaviour among non-human primates. I expect Helena Bonham-Carter will lollop along with a banana for me any minute.

  Good deed no. 222: signed up for the online organ donation register.

  Thursday, 11 August

  What happens in this part of Suffolk is that the men go to sea in small wooden boats while the women trail round a string of Boden-dressed children for activities such as crabbing. I have been crabbing – that is to say, I have sat for an hour at the quayside anxiously holding on to one or other of my children who threaten to fall into the sea below in their anxiety to pull up a bacon-laden hook, complete with clinging crab. I have also been for a walk en famille and taken the kids out to lunch. I’ve played witches with my five-year-old girl and been to the park for a game of cricket. I’ve put my wet and muddy and exhausted son in a bath, flannelled a bloody knee clean and found chocolate to help him recover from the hurt. I’ve set my girl up with painting by numbers and ignored the mess. Tonight I still have to make tea and wrestle them into bed, and I’m already planning a trip to Edinburgh next week so my Harry Potter-loving god-daughter gets to see a comedy about Harry Potter at the Fringe and I get to see Kirsty. I am happy. I am exhausted.

  Good deed no. 223: wrote a letter to the Catholic Church telling them to compensate the victims of child abuse.

  Friday, 12 August

  Popped into an art exhibition in a Suffolk chapel which held out the prospect of art activity for the kids. As they painted paper bags, I looked around the chapel walls. Someone had done a modern twist on the Ten Commandments, with the emphasis on positive thinking. The first, ‘You shall have no other gods’, had been converted into ‘Live by priorities’, while ‘Remember the Sabbath Day’ was ‘Catch your breath’, ‘You shall not commit adultery’ had turned into ‘Affair-proof your marriage’ and ‘You shall not steal’ into ‘Prosper with a clear conscience’. You believe God goes to all the trouble of burning a bush and writing out the rules in longhand on a couple of pieces of rock, then he gets Moses to carry them back down the mountain, and you think to yourself, ‘Times change: I’m not that fond of rules. I could do it so much better.’ If only God had hung on a couple of thousand years, he could have tweeted. It’s the age of the Internet, we have the attention span of gnats. ‘Do good’ would have covered it.

  Good deed no. 224: paid a glazier to mend a broken window in a friend’s cottage. (I originally blamed the kids for breaking it playing cricket, but it turned out to have been broken already. Kids are unbearably smug about it.)

  Saturday, 13 August

  Unsurprisingly, the children squabbled ferociously in the back of the car driving home from Suffolk, but I can’t say I blame them – we set off at 2.30 p.m. and got home at 10.45 p.m. The A1 was closed, and around Middlesbrough my husband began to fantasize about having a drink when we got back. I said, ‘We’ve no wine in,’ and he said, ‘Your cousins will have left a bottle.’ This was on the grounds that we had borrowed a house in London and left six bottles and a bunch of flowers, and had borrowed the house in Suffolk and left two very expensive bottles, country market jams, tea, coffee and flowers. Wind forward the clock several hours later to the stage directions: Family collapses through the back door, wild of hair, red of eye, white of lip, husband carrying sleeping daughter and a large number of bags. Wife chases the two boys up the stairs to bed, and after a few minutes, the adults return to the kitchen.

  On the kitchen table were three very charming thank-you notes, one from the grown-ups and two from their kids. The house was sparkling and the notes lying flat on the kitchen table were beautifully written and suitably grateful. One of the boys had counted our DVDs and informed us we had 124 of them, which is always useful to know. Al picked up the notes and peered underneath them in puzzlement. ‘Your bloody, bloody family,’ he muttered as he put the kettle on for tea.

  Good deed no. 225: gave £1 to an East Anglian cancer charity at a country market.

  Sunday, 14 August

  It is bliss to be home in my own bed. The children are so taken with the novelty of home they have forgotten to squabble with each other.

  Good deed no. 226: took in Dr Will’s washing as it started to rain and dried it in my squeaky tumble-drier.

  Monday, 15 August

  My fifteen-year-old god-daughter arrived from London, thereby allowing her parents to work (for this week of the summer holidays at least). Her mother assured me that I don’t have to entertain her and she will help me with the kids. I’m unconvinced she is aware of this arrangement.

  I want to work, but I want to be at home when the kids come in from school; I need to earn money, but I don’t want to care about money. Summer holidays and working mothers are certainly not an easy mix. If you take a fortnight’s holiday together as a family, that still leaves four weeks with the children at home. What are we supposed to do in that time? Abandon work? Call in grannies and grandads – who in my case need more looking after than the kids? It is not like we still have that mindset where we can in all conscience turn them out to play in the woods with a doorstep of bread and beef dripping wrapped in brown paper and expect them home only when dusk falls – exhausted, grubby and dangling a glass jar of tadpoles. It is bad enough for me, and I work at home. Friends who work in offices confess to passing children round grannies and aunties and sending them to football academies or to learn circus skills they don’t want just to fill up one more week. We’re breeding an entire generation of kids who can juggle swords. I Box and Cox. That is to say, my husband goes into his office and closes the door seconds before I throw something heavy at it, then I give up on work. Not today, though. For some reason today I thought I would try to get something done. Fool.

  After lunch I set up my laptop on the kitchen table. Within three minutes, my daughter came in having scraped her knee and elbow falling over. Cue clean-up operation and three chocolate fingers each for her and her pal. I sent her back out with her friend. Two minutes later they were back because my daughter was complaining of pain from elbow and knee. Cue a pink milk bribe to make it feel better, and back out they went. Seven minutes later they were back in, wanting to play on the iPad. They played on the iPad and I managed fifteen minutes of work before I reme
mbered the Sky Box Office movie all the children were supposed to watch so that I could work undisturbed. I set them up with it and made popcorn. When I took the popcorn in, it turned out one of my children’s friends doesn’t eat sugared popcorn. I made admiring noises at her strength of character and quality of her strong, shiny teeth while inside cursing because all the popcorn was sugared. I went back out to the kitchen to coax unpopped kernels at the bottom of the pan to pop, and cobbled together a small bowl of unsugared, virtuous popcorn which I duly carried back in. Cue ten minutes work before my daughter and god-daughter carried out empty bowls saying the boys were demanding more popcorn. I shoved two popped corns into my ears and feigned deafness.

  Good deed no. 227.

  Tuesday, 16 August

  When we got back home from a day at the Edinburgh Fringe and lunch with Kirsty, there was a hamper waiting for us. From the cousins. For the loan of the house. It was an ‘ultimate indulgence hamper’, complete with not one but three bottles of wine – a Shiraz, a Sauvignon Blanc, a sparkling brut – alongside cheese bites dusted with Parmigiano-Reggiano, a jar of gourmet baby beets in red wine vinegar, handmade all-butter lemon curd, cocoa-dusted truffles and after-dinner coffee. ‘That’s my bloody family for you,’ I told my husband.

  Good deed no. 228: bought lunch for a friend.

  Wednesday, 17 August

  My god-daughter lost a plaited leather bracelet on the beach and however hard we looked, we couldn’t find it. She had tucked it into her jeans, which she had left on the shore as we waded into the North Sea, and when we came out it was gone. There were hardly any people on the beach; perhaps a dog snuffled around and carried it off or it dropped to the sands as she folded the jeans and an ambitious wave took it. It fell down a crack and disappeared from sight as lost things do, as lovers do, as life itself does sometimes. You forget, though, how seriously teenagers take these things. If I lose something, I shrug and count my children and reach out to feel my husband’s heart, take hold my parents’ hands, and, if all are present, I shrug and say, ‘Ah well – that other thing is lost to me. We’ll get by without it.’ For her, the sky grew grey and sadness came upon her, and I rejoiced – that a cheap keepsake could mean so much, that she didn’t know what true loss was, and I prayed she never would.

  Good deed no. 229: bought my god-daughter a new leather bracelet.

  Thursday, 18 August

  Good deed no. 230: gave a neighbour toilet roll (I love this good deed – I’d do it every day if I could).

  Friday, 19 August

  Forget trying to do any work, it is really hard to do good in the holidays. Who has time to be good when you’re a mother? Not bloody me. We are wandering round the genteel Alnwick Garden before we put my god-daughter on the train home, and there are late summer roses, and smiling elderly visitors, and giggling tots standing in puddles of sunshine and the rainbow spray of the fountains, and my eldest is in his hoodie with his football socks around his ankles, and he is going one way when I say ‘Come the other’ and splashing his brother with water even though I say ‘Stop that’ and walking up the cobbled rills to the fountain when I say ‘Don’t do that’ and lifting up the mesh grilles to see if he can get the money out people have thrown in to make wishes, and I say, ‘Stop behaving like a yob.’ He stops – armies would have stopped on hearing my voice – and he swivels his sun hat back to front and turns to his eight-year-old brother with his little finger and his index finger stuck out, grins and starts pimp-rolling out the garden.

  End of week 4 of the summer holidays and I came home from our day out, shovelled them out into my own garden so I could decompress with a cup of tea and strict instructions not-to-speak-to-me-at-all-not-one-word-not-even-if-you-break-a-leg-I’m-not-interested-you-understand, in order to recover from my children’s ability to drive me insane.

  Good deed no. 231: bought Worcestershire cousin’s son a new Harry Potter wand (him having left it behind after the stay at my house, and my house having eaten it). I’ve bought him a wand because I’m guessing he is that kind of kid – the kind who sits and does magic and reads books and occasionally picks up a rubber dinosaur and says, ‘Mummy – look, dinosaur does roar.’ My kids would use a wand to stir up noxious potions made of mud and smells to splatter on their siblings, or sharpen it for pokes and warrior javelins: ‘See how high they fly? We didn’t mean to kill that cow – seriously, how were we to know?’ Or just sit upon each other’s heads and use it to beat out the rhythm of their joyful hearts.

  Saturday, 20 August

  Good deed no. 232: lent a neighbour a bag of pasta.

  Sunday, 21 August

  The present from my cousins has given me the idea to buy one nice thing a week and fill the hamper for Christmas for the expats. I would do it for my mum and dad, but they’d just say thank you very much and promptly give it all away because they think mustard a bit racy. I grew up on meat and convenience: fish on Friday, otherwise it was sausages, pork chops, lamb chops and Sunday roasts alongside Findus Crispy Pancakes so hot they melted the roof of your mouth on the way down, Smash – mashed potato pellets you poured boiling water over to make mashed potato – and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie with suet pastry, which you cooked in its flat, round tin in a saucepan of boiling water. Ah, the 1970s – it’s a miracle we made it out the other end. It’s a miracle anything made it out the other end.

  Good deed no. 233: re-gifted a bottle of red wine from the holiday thank-you hamper.

  Monday, 22 August

  Good deed no. 234: lent butter to a neighbour. (I should wear pin-curls and a floral pinny and set up one of those turn-of-the-century shops with wooden shelves and a lift-up counter for the holidays when my neighbours come up to their houses. ‘Ah’ll put it on yer tab, Mrs Broon – ah knows yer good fer it,’ I could say, smiling at them gummily. Actually, we borrow stuff too. Usually when they’re not here, which is technically burglary, but hey, what’s a bit of olive oil between friends? About eighteen months with good behaviour.

  Tuesday, 23 August

  Good deed no. 235: let out, played with and fed the expats’ dog while they spent the day in Newcastle. Bearing in mind that the last time I saw this dog, it shat on my carpet, this good deed proves I do not bear a grudge.

  Wednesday, 24 August

  I suspect it might be time for the holidays to draw to an end. Massive row with Al today, during which I shovelled the children into the car (one of them in floods of tears), swept out of the house and drove off into the distance with absolutely no clue where I was going. I’d have driven to Paris I was in such a bad mood, but I didn’t have the kids’ passports and even if I did they’re out of date. Al had got fed up with them squabbling and decided unilaterally, even though I was in charge and he was supposed to be working, that my daughter was going to a friend’s and my sons were going to a football camp. I’m clambering out of the bath, and first my daughter comes up to tell me Daddy has rung her friend and then my eldest boy comes up to say Daddy has gone down to the village to buy them food for their packed lunch. I would have put them all in the car at that exact moment, but a. I was naked and b. my husband had the car.

  We ended up at the shopping nirvana that is the Gateshead Metrocentre, where the kids strapped themselves into some bungee contraption and bounced up to the ceiling and down again. While I watched my middle child, there was a moment at the top when the ropes slackened off and he sat there with his legs crossed, beaming and as content as any genie. The guy doing the bouncing up and down unstrapped him, and I said, ‘How was it?’ My son said, ‘I thought my stomach was going to come up my throat and out my mouth – brilliant.’

  The good deed was easy-peasy, though. We are wandering through M&S and I’m wondering just how middle-aged you have to be to wear one of their blouses when a scruffy blonde girl of about six, dressed in a black puffa jacket, comes up to me. ‘I’ve lost me nanna,’ she says, and takes my hand in hers. It is disconcerting when a strange child puts her warm and sticky hand in yours
, not least for your own children. Of course, there is no assistant in sight, and I have no idea where there’s a till, so we start wandering round and I’m calling for the nanna, thinking if this woman sees me with her granddaughter in tow, she is going to think I’m kidnapping her. So I start yelling louder, and people’s heads are beginning to turn because I’ve four children around me now and I am calling out like I’m away with the fairies. The granny appears but she’s not looking at me, she is looking at the granddaughter, and she doesn’t speak to me, so I say ‘She got lost’ in explanation. She doesn’t so much as blink at the sight of the child’s hand in mine, she just takes the kid, and another woman who looks just like her but twenty years younger and is pushing a pram nods at me.