A Year of Doing Good

by Judith O'Reilly

  ‘I was in the pit of a severe depression, sitting on the Tube, staring at my knees, trying not to cry. I could just see the man opposite me, folding a piece of paper. The train stopped and in my lap the man placed the piece of paper, which he had folded into a beautiful little white horse. He smiled and left the train. A light appeared in the pit.’

  Good deed no. 350: took a day trip to London to visit my Irish aunty in the run-up to Christmas.

  Saturday, 17 December

  Good deed no. 351: checked on a sick friend.

  Sunday, 18 December

  Good deed no. 352: held a door open for a heavily loaded woman (who didn’t say thank you or even notice; I resisted letting it close on her heels).

  Monday, 19 December

  Good deed no. 353: organized a thank you in the paper for the designers and IT and bank staff involved in the Jam Jar Army.

  Tuesday, 20 December

  We all needed a rest, so we’d driven up to Kielder Water’s Winter Wonderland on Sunday and have been staying in a log cabin for a couple of days. The kids met Santa, rode a carousel and went snow tubing. The last activity before we were due to set off for home was ice skating. Only, my daughter fell on the ice and, when she stood up again, couldn’t move her neck.

  We headed back to the car and she cried as we put her in her seat, big fat tears falling one after the other, and we dosed her with Calpol and she was still crying because of the pain. My husband carried her over to reception to have her looked over by their First Aid person, and the next thing we know the First Aider is holding her head immobile in a cradle of his two hands for forty-five minutes while we wait for an ambulance. The road ambulance arrives with two paramedics and the air ambulance choppers down with two paramedics, and suddenly they are medevacking her out of Santa’s Winter Wonderland by helicopter on the grounds it is an hour and a half bumpy journey by road, it is a neck injury, she is six and nobody is taking any chances.

  I never want to see anyone strapped like that again. They strapped her body and her neck and her head and then strapped her neck and her head again and the only things she could move were her eyes and her hands. I went with her in the helicopter and my husband drove the boys. I am sitting in the helicopter thinking, ‘If I vomit in sheer terror, they will throw me out and I won’t be able to be with her, so I can’t vomit.’ At one point the paramedic asked, ‘When was she born?’ and I couldn’t even tell him.

  It took twelve minutes to airlift us out of Kielder and down the snow-smeared country to Newcastle, where we landed on the roof of the hospital to be met by four firemen who wheeled her off the roof, down the zigzag slopes and into Resus. Resus as in ‘Resuscitation’, as in ‘Otherwise you die’. Twelve minutes and I aged ten years. The doctor said it was soft tissue damage, that she had probably pulled or torn muscles, but there was no bone damage to the neck. He recommended ibuprofen and hot compresses and baths. And for me? I felt like saying, holding out my trembling hands. What do you recommend for me?

  Good deed no. 354: dropped change into a charity collecting tin at the Royal Victoria Infirmary coffee shop after the air ambulance out of Kielder.

  Wednesday, 21 December

  Good deed no. 355: got Karl an offer of work experience next year alongside a presenter at Metro Radio. Very impressed by Metro’s public-spirited willingness to support a local youngster.

  Thursday, 22 December

  Official declaration in the Gazette that we have made our grand total for the Jam Jar Army: £12,868 and 69 pence. Headline ‘You’ve done it!’, which Al had money on them running. The total represents a shedload of work, but it means more because I didn’t raise it – everyone raised it. I reckon around 2,000 to 3,000 people must have given. Sure, I had the idea, but the Gazette ran with it and the hospice ran with it and schools and old people’s homes and shops and pubs, Martin who has a van selling coffees at the railway station, and Sharon who saw it in the paper and started handing out jam jars and collecting them every week, and Josie the school cook who quietly left her jars of copper and silver without any expectation of thanks. Norma in the post office who handed them out to her regulars, and Mary in her café with a jar on every table and special Jam Jar Army scones, and a couple of thousand people I have never met giving what money they could.

  I did assemblies and a couple of interviews. I got the stickers and the posters organized and handed out jars myself, and Sophie’s contribution came because it was my baby, but at a certain point people were giving because they chose to, because they wanted to, because it was something they could do for each other. I went into a retirement home at one point asking them to put up a poster and take a couple of jars, but the residents were already doing it. That was a good day. A letter from the hospice says: ‘This is probably a record for us for this sort of community fund-raising effort … Community effort it certainly was and apart from the obvious financial benefits, it did help foster a community spirit.’ Even better, though, the Gazette editor plans to keep it going. He is asking readers to nominate the next charity we can collect for. Which is great. I am just hoping he doesn’t want me involved.

  Good deed no. 356.

  Friday, 23 December

  Good deed no. 357: gave a dozen jars of jam to the Northumberland Gazette editor and his reporters as a thank you for running the Jam Jar Army appeal, and wine to the local heroes in the village Barclays bank who took in all the counted change and never blinked at the number of tuppenny bags. (Have realized we’ve eaten everything I put aside for the expats’ Christmas hamper – maybe next year?)

  Saturday, 24 December

  After the excitement of the air ambulance on Tuesday, I figured we should be safe enough from harm going round to Diane’s farmhouse this morning for a Christmas Eve coffee and a piece of her very own Herman the German – only for my youngest son to go climbing on hay bales and plummet like the White Rabbit twenty-four feet down a hole in the middle of the bales to the floor of the barn. What is it with my children?

  The massive cylindrical bales were stacked three high, virtually up to the roof of the barn, in a cluster of four stacks. They had been pushed together, leaving a hole in the middle between the stacks, and when my youngest son’s foot slipped as he tried to climb to the very top, he plummeted into the darkness. My eldest ran to the farmhouse for help, and the farmer kicked away one of the bales before he and my husband let down a rope and pulled my son up – uninjured, aside from a grazed nose, but very shaken up. And all the while, I am reading books to Diane’s daughter who couldn’t be persuaded to leave the kitchen.

  The lucky, those who haven’t suffered loss, don’t know how brave we are to let our children cross a road – even holding tight to our hand, even looking first, right and left, and right again. How we must screw our courage up to let them travel in a car that might smash, bash and crash; to walk along a slippy, slidey dune all ready to smother them; to sleep in a bed when the wind blows hard against the house and trees wait to hammer down through our slated roof and crush what is within. To eat food that isn’t tasted. Nobody is more neurotic than we are about possible harm to children. When you lose a child, that is how you get, how you are left. Scared all the time that something might happen. That lightning disaster might strike again, and take that which is best in your life – that thing you love the most. If I lost another child, my heart and soul would shrivel. Even if I was walking and talking, if I was standing right in front of you, you’d be wrong if you thought that was me. That would be a stranger, because inside that skin-and-bone impostor, I’d have died, you see.

  Good deed no. 358: read books with Diane’s daughter.

  Sunday, 25 December

  My inclination is always to consider festivities a battlefield, with resources deployed so that targets can be taken and losses kept to a minimum. Life is not a war, though. Hosting a celebration is a gift I can give to the people I love. That said, today had its challenges. My eldest decided to make an early start – 2.30 a.m. early, to be pr
ecise. At 4 a.m. the excitement got too much once again and he wandered into our bedroom with the glad tidings it was Christmas morn, and wandered straight back out with tidings of his own. Groaning, I got up to find he had woken his brother who was reading in bed under the multicoloured fairy lights, which were promptly turned off in no uncertain terms with ne’er a ‘Merry Christmas, my lovie’. When I marched downstairs, an avenging spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, my eldest was lying on the sofa, hiding under a duvet – presumably on the grounds he had covered his bed with the contents of his stocking. Apparently, he couldn’t sleep after I had put him back to bed the first time (having fuelled himself with a potent combination of chocolate coins and novelty penguins). Oh, and at 6 a.m. he came back in to tell us that he had been reading his book since we’d put him back to bed. Ah, the joys of Christmastide.

  Good deed no. 359: provided a neighbour with Nurofen Gel after he dropped the grate on his finger (also laid on Christmas for nine people, including parents and expats).

  Monday, 26 December

  Went for a beach walk with my best gay boyfriend and the children. My little girl got a plastic habitat for insects for Christmas, so at considerable risk to his Australian workboots, my boyfriend dared the roil and broil of the sea to fill the habitat with saltwater and sand and we threw in a couple of rocks and twists of seaweed and two limpets. It turns out that limpets can live till they are teenagers if they are undisturbed; consequently, I feel really guilty that my six-year-old has a pet limpet. Plus it means I have taken on a couple of teenagers lying around in a plastic condo doing sweet Fanny Adams and refusing to speak to me.

  Good deed no. 360: sent flowers home with my best gay boyfriend for his eighty-year-old mother. (Technically this was re-gifting because the flowers came from someone thanking me for an earlier good deed.)

  Tuesday, 27 December

  Good deed no. 361: opened a door for a little girl who was pushing when she should have been pulling (‘Story of my life, pet,’ I should have said).

  Wednesday, 28 December

  If Jesus had never been born, chocolate manufacturers would have been forced to invent him, wrap him and sell him to small children with black and rotten teeth. My own children have eaten themselves stupid with chocolate over Christmas, but I decided enough was enough after a purple-faced, tear-splattered spat between the eldest and youngest over the exact and legal ownership of a Mars Bar: was it the rightful owner of the selection box it came from, or the person who found it lying around and built a settlement on it? My husband was physically holding them apart as a neighbour walked in with three more selection boxes. She was dutifully thanked and told to keep them for her own kids, but I notice they are still on my kitchen side.

  I have called in all the chocolate the children have left and piled it into a black bin alongside a huge tub of Quality Street. The contents include:

  four bags of Buttons

  three Crunchies

  three and a half Caramel bars

  four Flakes

  three slim bars of Dairy Milk

  four Fudges

  one Twix

  one bag of Milky Bar buttons

  twelve fun-sized bags of Maltesers

  fifteen fun-sized and two full-sized Milky Ways

  one Mars Bar

  one half-eaten tube of Smarties

  three lollipops

  two chocolate Santa lollipops

  six small chocolate novelty penguins

  ten small chocolate Santas

  two Chocolate Oranges

  forty-nine large chocolate coins

  one sugar mouse (minus an ear)

  There is nothing for it but to eat them myself. One day, they’ll thank me.

  Good deed no. 362: made a welfare call to Aunty Effie.

  Thursday, 29 December

  Usually, I start going insane round about now. This year, however, my parents have gone home unusually early, the expats are on holiday in South Africa, I have told the Yorkshire cousins who usually come up that we aren’t taking visitors, and refused all invitations from friends to pop round for tea, drinks, parties, and another for Diane’s annual beach-walk. Tra la.

  We did go down to the sales, where I tasked myself to be extraordinarily nice to everyone I came across, as a good deed. I stood back at escalators, so much so that I caused a traffic jam at one point when some bastard also stood back and we had a war of wills as to who would give way first. I stood back in doorways for other shoppers to walk right through and smiled as they did it. I engaged with shop assistants, and some of them were rather stretched by the time it got to about fourish. One assistant was abrupt with me about how long it would take to deliver a canteen of cutlery, but I was soooooooooooo nice to her that she softened completely (it turned out she had worked three eleven-hour days on the trot with another two to go, and they don’t even get paid overtime). Another shopper and I even did that classic thing of both taking hold of a sparkly bargain at the exact same moment and, bearing in mind my good-deedery, I withdrew my hand as if it was aflame. ‘You take it. I was only admiring it,’ I gushed. When we were en route up another escalator to be utterly sweet to someone else, I leaned against my husband and said, ‘Don’t you think this is such a good deed? I’m being so nice, aren’t I?’ and he sighed and said, ‘I just hope someone doesn’t hit you,’ which was not in the spirit of the thing at all.

  Good deed no. 363.

  Friday, 30 December

  Made my husband and little girl go down to the beach and free the limpets. Or at least the limpet that survived. I bet he tells the other limpets that when they came for him there were bright lights and probes, and none of the other limpets believe him.

  Good deed no. 364: cleared a disgusting dead mouse (complete with trap) from next-door neighbour’s house. The mouse had leaked gore onto their kitchen’s linoleum, which meant I had to mop it, which led to me giving the whole downstairs of the cottage a quick wipe, dust and mop-through and taking a seat cover away to wash, in case they come up for the new year.

  Saturday, 31 December

  Took more than two hours doing the last application for an internship for Karl. I doubt the lad has any idea of the time this has involved. I have advised him, written an impressive CV and two applications for formal internship programmes for him, along with letters to send to local stations asking for work experience (letters he still hasn’t sent), researched radio on the Net, dug out a college course and then talked to the college about him, as well as getting him a day’s work experience at LBC in London and the prospect of a few days at Metro Radio in Newcastle. Anyway, it is done now. I have pointed him in the right direction and given him a hefty shove. How fabulous to be eighteen and have it all to do again. Then again, how fabulous not to be eighteen and have it all there to do again.

  It was ten to midnight when I finally finished Karl’s application and before I could stagger in from the study to Al. He was making a fire in the lounge, an open bottle of champagne on the coffee table by the sofa. The fire caught and my husband stood up to kiss my cheek. Groaning, I threw myself onto the sofa. ‘Congratulations,’ he said formally, handing me a glass of champagne, his hands still grubby from the ash, ‘for completing your 365 good deeds. I’m proud of you.’ On the television, in London, Big Ben struck midnight and the first chime rang out across the city, across the crowds lining the banks of the River Thames waiting for the old year to end and the new year to begin. I have no idea what this coming year will bring. I took a sip of my champagne. One thing I do know about tomorrow, though: tomorrow, I’m not doing another bloody, bollixing good deed all bleeding day.

  Good deed no. 365.

  Epilogue

  So I spent a year doing good deeds and time afterwards thinking about what I had done and why, reading, and talking to people who know more than I do (which frankly isn’t hard). Everywhere I look, there is goodness in action – good deeds. Integral to faith is the requirement to do good for our fellow man, and in science there is an
explanation of how good deeds reward us as individuals and as a species. Is this why we are here – to do good for our fellow man? God’s design or evolution? Either which way, you don’t choose a good deed; apparently, it chooses you.

  And after a year of such good deeds, the question of whether I am a better person remains. I encouraged young people as they stumbled their way into adulthood, supported a disabled teenager in her desire to write, and helped a friend stay sane while she attempted to salvage a future for a child who deserves a chance. In between, I packed shoeboxes with toys, steamed and tagged second-hand clothes, fed the needy and bought a stranger Steradent. I found not one but two lost children, reported a car crash, paid for someone’s parking and raised money for charity – encouraging others to do the same. I disposed of dead mice and reburied the ashes of a neighbour with honour. I tried to comfort the bereaved, listened to the lonely and the sad, offered hospitality, and gave away flowers and ice cream and books, and Herman the German. None of those things of course in itself makes me a better person.