I had to download three different bits of software and my head went bendy in the middle figuring out how to do it – occasionally, I would string together a load of pictures only to find I had no sound, and occasionally I could get the sound but only if the pictures went to black. Halfway through, one of my children came into the kitchen and said, ‘Do you think you should give up, Mummy?’ and I had been about to, I had been about to say, ‘Fuck the fucking nativity’ and then of course I couldn’t. I was trapped, just like they trapped me in this year of good deeds. I had to say, ‘Mummy never gives up’ and keep sitting there going utterly insane. This morning, I went into school with my video equipment to film the nativity, only to be told that the teachers didn’t think the filming was happening, so thanks but no thanks.
Good deed no. 339: chased up jam jars.
Tuesday, 6 December
I trailed round in the freezing winds collecting jam jars this morning. Al has been counting into the early hours and we are up another £1,200, which takes us just over the £9,000 mark. I wanted £9k for this week’s Gazette because I thought it would encourage us all to make that final push to the £10k mark. The editor wants a big story on 22 December, which is in two weeks. Two more weeks to raise £1,000 in tuppenny bits. Bollocks. I have drained the county of jam jars. I am not sure there is another one left to empty. Thank God Sophie gave me that cheque, because the stress would be killing me otherwise. I was getting disheartened, having had a fair few number of places with no returns. I was about to walk past the pub with the jars on the mantelpieces where the guy had boasted he didn’t ‘do’ charity. I stood in the cold wind, my shoulders round my ears, thinking how much I didn’t want to go in to see two empty jars, or possibly worse – two jars with only a risible amount of money in. I gritted my teeth. I was going to have to go in. I’d put the jars out. If anyone had found them and put anything in them, they had done that in good faith. I had to go in and extract my jars.
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
As the American soldiers say.
But then the nicest thing happened. As I pushed open the door into the bar and peered round the enormous stuffed Santa Claus towards the mantelpiece, both jars were brimful of coins, and suddenly I wasn’t cold any more.
Good deed no. 340.
Wednesday, 7 December
Karl arrived with his show-reel. He has just passed his driving test, so this time he drove himself up from the village rather than arriving with his mam, which he was obviously hugely proud of. The Lovely Claire has come good and dug out a contact in radio called Joel Goldman, a journalist at Newcastle’s Metro Radio, which is the big commercial station up here, with 400,000 people tuning in every week. I called him and explained that Karl had no real academic qualifications, but boy is he good on radio, and he said to send in a show-reel that he can use to persuade his station manager. Joel himself was lovely about it and apparently the station manager is one of the good guys, so fingers crossed. Today we sent off the show-reel along with a letter and his CV, and once we had done that we chased up an application he had made in September for another scheme (this one with Real Radio), found yet another scheme he could apply for, and formatted a standard letter for him to send to other local radio stations. Not counting the back and forth chasing Claire and Joel, it took more than two hours out of my day, including printing the letters out and giving him envelopes on which we wrote the addresses so all he has to do is stamp them and post them. This is in a bid to avoid the usual delay there is in the process between me asking Karl to do something and him actually getting round to doing it. I could wish that he moved faster on some of these things, that he would go knock on a few doors, but the kids who know it all aren’t the kids who need the help.
Good deed no. 341.
Thursday, 8 December
I watched as Cryssie pecked away at the keyboard this morning. Through a disabled child, I have seen our own humanity; in her mother, glimpsed the reality of perfect love. I was only ever going to get so far in teaching her how story comes from character. Admittedly I was getting more punctuation, more paragraphing, more of those odd flashes which always make me think, ‘Woh!’ But had I made any real difference to her writing?
‘Do you think this is helping your writing?’ I asked, sipping my tea. She stopped typing. She always stops typing when you talk to her. She likes to take one thing at a time – now we were talking. When we finished talking, she would write again.
‘It helps’ – I sat up straighter in my chair as she enunciated the words with care – ‘because I’m using different fingers on the keyboard.’
My self-esteem, which had poked a twitchy, pink velvet nose out of its burrow, poked it back in again. Cryssie has a literal approach. ‘I mean, is this helping your writing process, honey, not is it helping you type faster?’ Is what we are doing making any difference to who you are, how you are?
She gazed at the screen. She would like to stop talking now, like to start writing about Vikings again. There is silence and I am about to tell her not to worry, to go back to Eric the Unworthy and Goliath the Cross and his iron sword Legbiter, when she looks away from the screen again and back at me.
‘I’d stopped wanting to write any more. I left my computer lying around the house. When I started coming to you I got back into writing. It makes me feel … good, really happy that I can concentrate and make interesting stories up.’
I smile.
Good deed no. 342.
Friday, 9 December
Earlier this week, Lily rang on the way home from some training course she has gone on for parents of adopted children. She is still struggling with Ellie. Saturday was her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and she couldn’t spend it with her husband because he was away for work and she couldn’t leave the kids to be with him because Ellie couldn’t have coped; they were childhood sweethearts and it was the first anniversary they hadn’t been together. But when she rang, there was a different tone to her voice. She said they could get whatever psych help was available for Ellie (though she hasn’t got any yet), and she could get support from the GP, and go on any number of training courses which teach adoptive parents how to cope with ‘challenging behaviours’, but the realization had suddenly dawned on her that there were no magic answers.
‘This is as good as we get, I see that now’ – there was a note of wonder in her voice – ‘and I also see that it’s down to me to find a way to handle how I’m feeling because the whole family mood at any time is determined by how I react to things.’
I don’t have the courage Lily has. If I thought it was ‘all on me’, I’d blanch, desert my post and run away, away, away.
Good deed no. 343: gave some R&R to my friend’s daughter at university in Newcastle, who has come up to us for the weekend. (Tried to give her a designer dress of mine that I can’t fit into any more, but it was too big for her. Middle age sucks.)
Saturday, 10 December
The weather this week has been filthy: terrible gusting winds rattling the sash windows in their peeling frames and temperatures cold enough to freeze pig’s blood. I was lying in my bed wishing I had hidden a stapler under my pillow that I could use to staple myself and my goosedown duvet to the mattress, when the force of nature that is my eight-year-old hurtled into the bedroom yelling, ‘It’s snooooowing!’ True enough, when we pulled back the curtains, the fields between us and the sea were smeared over with a thick layer of white icing, and the cold which had been a steadfast enemy turned into a sudden friend.
Good deed no. 344: met a friend’s niece to advise her on getting into journalism. (I should open a recruitment agency. ‘Young, bright, baffled? Join Old Fart Talks Bollocks. Let Us Help You to the Future that’s Behind Us.’)
Sunday, 11 December
I divided Herman into five, baked the fifth part complete with grated Cox’s app
le, chewy hazelnuts and dark chocolate and ate him with a degree of caution. He was yummy – better yet, he didn’t kill me.
As I packed the car with my own kids and my friend’s daughter and pots of slop, it crossed my mind that my friends were not necessarily going to be delighted to find me on their doorstep with a bowl of gloop and an innocent smile. I slammed the boot before the gloop crawled out and insisted on driving.
The Lovely Claire was my first target, on the grounds that she is one of nature’s enthusiasts. Pans for the Sunday lunch steamed and bubbled on the Aga as I explained that the gloop was a thank you for helping with Karl’s work experience, and beaming, she said, ‘I’ll cook him right now,’ and I said, ‘Noooooooooo’ and explained she couldn’t cook him for another ten days. ‘I’ll put him in the fridge then,’ she said, and moved towards the fridge, and I said, ‘Noooooooooo’ and leapt to barricade the path. Her smile faltered. Her blue-grey parrot, Sybil, sitting on the back of a dining-room chair, eyed me scornfully. Sybil is as mean as Claire is good and kind, and has been known to bite ears, fingers, backs and arms. Claire wonders why I never stay long.
My second target was Diane. Diane is an altogether tougher mark than the Lovely Claire. Fortunately, she was out on a healthy forced march down to the ponies through the freezing cold with children and dogs, so I left the gloop on the side along with the instructions as a nice surprise when she came back home. She can thank me later.
I honestly thought Lily was out as well, which was why I didn’t knock on the door. Instead I did a rapid three-point turn in her gravelled yard, parked up with my nose pointing back towards the narrow bridge we had come in over, left the car running and was scrawling a note of explanation when she appeared in a beige velveteen leisure suit studded with diamanté bits. I cursed under my breath and clambered out of the car. The Ratmobile’s boot is broken at the moment; not only do you have to slam it shut as if you were closing the gates of Hell against legion slathering, leathery-winged demons, but the spring mechanism is gone, which means you have to heave then fling it wide open while remembering to keep one hand on it at all times, otherwise it is liable to fall and chop you clean in two. I handed Lily the gloop. ‘This is a friendship cake,’ I said. She held the bowl away from her as if she didn’t trust it or me. I handed her the ‘Don’t kill me’ instructions and she scanned them. ‘I’ve got to stir him and add ingredients over ten days, then pass him on?’ she said. ‘Do you not think my life is effing complicated enough?’ I brought the fourth pot back home.
Good deed no. 345.
Monday, 12 December
Diane told my husband she is only doing Herman for me, and did I realize she would have to be giving away pots of gloop virtually on Christmas Eve? I am not convinced Herman has been altogether a success. Lily rang to tell me that her rooster Lucky Lazarus got luckier: she fed him Herman the German, and did I know that, courtesy of the yeast, when chickens poop enormous bubbles, they look very surprised indeed?
Good deed no. 346: emailed my friend’s niece re her next step onto a journalism course.
Tuesday, 13 December
Good deed no. 347: chased up Karl’s work experience with Metro Radio.
Wednesday, 14 December
Ages ago, I wrote a letter to Father David Myers, the head of the Rosminian order, which Father Kit had been a member of. Then I carried the letter around in my handbag till November wondering whether there was any point posting it, thinking, ‘Who cares what I think?’ and ‘Why would they listen anyway?’ The letter said:
I’m pretty sure you will have had a lot of these letters. Letters of confusion and pain – nothing like the pain of those poor abused boys who are now men, but pain nonetheless. When news broke of Father Kit’s past (alongside his fellow priests) we were still celebrating as a family the First Communion of my eight-year-old son. We had been too busy that morning to read the papers, so friends rang to ask if we had seen the news. I have to say, Father Myers, that the sense of betrayal runs so deep that if I had read the reports earlier that day, my eight-year-old might well never have taken his First Communion.
We Catholics out here in the real world take all sorts of flak for being Catholic, you know. Intelligent friends think we should know better. We have carried on regardless and tried to ignore the anachronisms and illogicalities. The abuse, however, is something else again. Speaking as a mother of three children – baptizing them, having them do their First Communions, teaching them day in and day out that they are Catholic – I can assure you that if you lose the mothers, the game is up and you lose everything.
Perhaps you are wondering why I am bothering to tell you this. I’m supposed to be doing a good deed a day this year. My good deed today is to ask you to bankrupt the Rosminian order, sell every last pot and crucifix and oaken bench and pay those victims of abuse every penny. It wouldn’t be enough but it might just be a start.
Eventually I thought, ‘What the hell’ and posted it, and today I got a reply. Father Myers told me that ‘there are many issues, in my opinion, that are even more important than money like healing and reconciliation in this sad saga.’ That would be a no to my polite request for them to provide a shedload of money then. Nice reply, though, plenty of reassurance to me as a mother, that is to say ‘our hope for the future and … the ones who provide the next generation with the wonderful vision of the gospel of love’. Oh and an offer of a meeting to discuss the issues in depth. I hereby declare myself an official, and almost faithless, Catholic mother – hear me roar. I have done nearly a year of good deeds now, and if they had made me a better person, perhaps I’d have been able to forgive Father Kit. I wasn’t his victim and it isn’t for me to forgive him the abuse. But I am trying to forgive him for his betrayal, for the hurt I feel that he wasn’t who I thought he was, and it is hard. I am trying to remember the man who gave food to the homeless, and the man who offered consolation when my son died. I am trying.
Good deed no. 348: picked up the last jars from coastal village shops and the community centre.
Thursday, 15 December
I dropped the kids at school and went straight round to Lily’s smallholding to pluck a turkey. Usually, if you ask her for a coffee, she comes up with some lame excuse or other along the lines of ‘I have to clean out the pigsties/de-bollock a lamb/put the geese in before the foxes gobble them up.’ It would be simpler just to say no. This year, she has reared half a dozen turkeys – her first ever – and was up half the night dreading plucking them.
As I walked into the barn, Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ was on as if Lily was hoping that Christmas being here might distract us from the massive black-feathered birds hanging by their yellowing feet from the rafters. My bird had had its wattled throat cut and had been eviscerated, which required at least George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas I Was an Egg and the Very Next Year You Ate My Leg’. They were freshly butchered, which meant they were warm, which I swear to God made me feel like some sunken-eyed heavy about to torture the good guy for information. Apparently, it is best to pluck them warm because the feather follicles are open, but it took until I had plucked a hole as big and smooth as the palm of my hand before I could see it as something to eat and not as Jack Bauer. It would have helped if we had known what we were doing, since there must be a skill to it (a skill like buy a turkey from a butcher, Lily). Allegedly, you can blowtorch the feathers off, and most of the turkeys we eat are plucked by machine, but we were hand-plucking without much of a plucking clue. By the end, I had plucked the whole thing – the wings being the most difficult, and the only casualties a couple of bits on the breast where the skin tore.
I asked how things were going with Ellie.
‘Ever since I realized this was down to me, somehow I’ve got more capacity to understand – more tolerance maybe,’ she said. Some time before, as Lily had parked up at the supermarket, Ellie opened her door, climbed out and, before Lily could reach for her, ran out in front of a car, which only just managed to avoid he
r. Shaking, her almost-broken heart thunderous in her chest, Lily had gathered her fragile, fly-away daughter up into her arms and held her in a never-let-you-go kind of way. ‘A while ago if you’d asked me, I’d have said I loved her but I wasn’t “in love” with her as you are with your natural children’ – she went back to her plucking, a few torn scraps of skin exposing the raw breast – ‘but that’s not true any more. I feel exactly for her what I feel for my son. I’m “in love” with her.
‘None of this is her fault. She is trying her very best and I am too. Sometimes my best isn’t enough, but I wouldn’t change her for the world. She’s my daughter and I’m proud of her – how far she’s come. I know we’ve further to go, but I love the very bones of her. A while ago, I’d have said she was killing us. Now I’d kill for her, and I’d kill anyone who tried to take her from me.’
I used my right index finger to rub the corner of my right eye where a feather must have got in, and we went back to plucking in a companionable silence – give or take a Christmas classic. ‘Have you noticed,’ I said, reaching for the gently swinging carcass, ‘that a plucked turkey’s warm neck feels quite like a penis when you take it in your hand?’
Good deed no. 349.
Friday, 16 December
Maybe we need each other more when the economy tanks. When bills go up and jobs disappear, when winter comes. Perhaps then we know we can make the biggest difference. Maybe we need each other more too when trust slips away in our politicians, our bankers and our priests. In the hungry years then, that’s when we need the fellowship and the kindnesses we can do, one for the other. A London initiative called the Kindness Offensive, set up in 2008, has given out more than £3.5m of goods and is aimed at demonstrating that ‘kindness is more than just a nice ideal, it’s actually a viable way of existing in the real world’; while an Art on the Underground project on the Tube, the creation of Young British Artist Michael Landy, celebrates simple human kindness. In Acts of Kindness, passengers and Underground staff were invited to submit their stories of kindness, which Landy put up on posters around the Central Line stations and trains. In an interview, the artist explained: ‘I want to find out what makes us human, and what connects us, beyond material things. For me the answer is compassion and kindness.’ He defines kindness as ‘a gesture of trust between two people’ which goes beyond the self to acknowledge someone else’s needs and feelings. Among the stories of lost and found again property, struggling mothers who are helped with buggies, commuters who are helped with suitcases, there is compassion, comfort, community and a celebration of life:
A Year of Doing Good Page 29
