A Year of Doing Good Read online

  JUDITH O’REILLY

  A Year of Doing Good

  One Woman, One New Year’s Resolution, 365 Good Deeds

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Preface

  A Year of Doing Good

  Epilogue

  Top Tips for Doing Good Deeds

  Doing Good by Numbers

  Charities Featured in This Book

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Judith O’Reilly is a writer and journalist. Her first book, Wife in the North, was based on her blog of the same name and was a best-seller. Her second book, a novel, is living in a drawer. Her third book is this one. She is married with three children, and for one year she tried to be good.

  For my parents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A YEAR OF DOING GOOD

  Praise for Wife in the North

  ‘Funny, poignant and beautifully written’ Lisa Jewell

  ‘Genuinely funny and genuinely moving’ Jane Fallon, author of Getting Rid of Matthew

  ‘I howled with laughter, tears of recognition at every bloody page. My only problem with this book was choosing who to pass it on to first’ Jenny Colgan, author of Amanda’s Wedding

  ‘Cold Comfort Farm with booster seats. Funny, honest and moving’ Stephanie Calman, author of Confessions of a Bad Mother

  Just begin …

  Mother Teresa

  Preface

  Some years frame who you are for ever more. The year of expectation when I started my first job as a wide-eyed trainee journalist in Newcastle. The year of ambition when me and my shoulder pads moved to London. The year of desolation when I lost a child. The year of rapture when I gave birth to another son. The year of ‘What the …?’ when I moved out of the big city and up to the wilds of Northumberland. Then there was my year of doing good. When I can’t remember my name or that shoes should match, I know I’ll still remember these years, and that for a year at least, I tried to be good.

  I didn’t realize when I made the resolution that New Year what I was taking on. I’d made resolutions before, even if I can’t exactly remember what they were, but the idea of doing one good deed a day morphed into something else again. I am no kind of moral philosopher – ethics make my head go squeak – but this year made me question what a good life is, how we give our lives meaning, and what it is to love. It also taught me that people don’t always want the good you want to do, and that doing good – believe you me – is harder than it looks.

  In a way, my year of doing good was an admission of my own failings. My parents are saints, and it is tough being the child of saints. People feel sorry for the children of murderers, because they think it must be hard worrying whether you’ve inherited a genetic predisposition to kill as well as those long-lobed ears; it is worse when you’re brought up by those who are good. Really good. There is proof: the fact they looked after my gran, who lived with us till she was ninety-three; the fact my mum volunteered as a cleaner in a hospice on Saturdays, then as a classroom assistant in an inner-city school, then acted as chairman of governors at that school for years; the fact my dad visited the sick in hospital, drove busloads of the elderly to church, and that he and my mother put out poor boxes round the parish and over the years collected £20,000 for the hospice. My parents are modest, patient, and willing to do anything for anyone. Good people with good intentions living good lives. And what had I done all of my adult life? Earned a living. Married a man. Reared children. That was it, pretty much.

  There was certainly no chance my children thought they were being brought up by a saint. Too much effing and blinding when they interrupted me when I was working. Too many empty wine bottles by the back door. Too much me and mine, and not enough time or space or energy for anyone else. Still, you are raised with certain ideals when you are brought up a Catholic:

  Only have sex when you’re married.

  Have sex when you’re married and have many, many children because of it.

  Treat with all the reverence it so richly deserves the Church’s position on the equality of women and homosexuality.

  My responses to these ideals are (in order of appearance):

  I don’t think so.

  Are you kidding me?

  I do indeed treat it with the respect it deserves – that is to say, none.

  But there are other ideals I do believe in: love, compassion for one’s fellow man, charity and good deeds. Yet unless you count that sponsored swim for the hungry of Africa which I did when I was eleven, I had never done much about those things.

  Good people left me breathless and wondering. How had they got that way? How good were they, anyway? How would it feel to be good? Then I hit middle age and suddenly I wanted to be a better person and to know that I was living a good life. Not that I was a bad person; don’t get me wrong, I was all right. I did the odd thing: I helped out friends when it wasn’t too inconvenient, I didn’t litter and I never drowned a cat. But was I capable of more? Not Nobel Peace Prize more. Not OBE-for-services-to-one’s-country more. But more than this? Surely I could do more. I could do something. Plus there were my children. My three beautiful children, whom I have cherished and fed and clothed, and in whom I have attempted to instill values and a sense of morality. I owed it to them to prove that kindness, respect and patience are virtues to be acquired. That they were not just the monopoly of Granny. If I were a better person, I could teach them, not just right from wrong, but compassion and generosity, and perhaps my sons and my daughter would grow to be better people than me – do far, far better things.

  Across the world, civil wars rage, there is random death, brutal torture and appalling starvation, but not here. Here, there is plenty and there is opportunity, even with economic hard times. Perhaps especially with hard times comes the recognition that we have need of each other. Most of us are lucky, we have so much. Our children are lucky, they have so much too. My children have a drum set, computer games and a big-screen TV to play them on, they have bicycles and scooters, and a garden to run round in. They download songs and apps and complain when I drag them to the beach. My daughter has dancing lessons and rugby boots, my sons play football and watch their favourite team on Sky TV. They have everything and they want more. I have everything and want more. So much attention these days is focused on how well you parent – that God-awful question ‘Are you a good mother?’ But how can you answer that when you aren’t even clear whether you are a good person or living a good life?

  So, I decided: I would do one good deed a day for a year. It would be a start, and it couldn’t be that hard – could it? As soon as I said it out loud, I worried about sticking to it, worried about the message it would send to the children if I couldn’t keep it up. ‘Have a go and if you can’t be bothered, give up, pet.’ And at the same time as worrying about giving up, I worried about not giving up, about how inconvenient it was all going to be if I did indeed stick to my resolution. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, when ironically enough, I don’t even believe in damnation. Who goes to Hell? I do not believe any of us do. I do not look to an afterlife, or an eternity. I believe in the here and now, and if you believe in the here and now, logic dictates you want the here and now to be a good one, not just for yourself, but for others. I wanted to change myself and I wanted to change the world – one deed at a time.

  Of course there were doubts. To live is to doubt. I doubted whether you could ever really become a better person, let alone mend society; perhaps you would just be the same ol’ same ol’ who did a few good things on the way. If I do not believe we are judged by an Almighty, if I do not believe our good deeds and bad are weighed on golden scales, then I am my own judge, and
I am horribly tolerant. Could I up the stakes from doing no harm to doing some good, to living a good life? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was willing to find out.

  Saturday, 1 January

  Today was a three-hat day: a tangerine knitted beret, a black felt hat from Germany and a sheepskin Cossack number with earflaps. I’m short, so the inflated-head look wasn’t doing me any favours, but the weather on the North Northumberland coast was bitter while inside the hats where I lived was cosy and warm. Frankly, the problem wasn’t so much with how the hats looked, but that the Cossack one rendered me deaf, which was why I was bringing up the rear and walking alone. It also meant I had time to think. Every New Year I reflect on what is good and what is bad about the year that’s passed, mark it out of ten, and make my resolutions for the year ahead. Reflection, consolidation, improvement – I have considered myself a work in progress my entire life.

  What was good:

  My mother, who is in her eighties, had an operation on her spine and it helped relieve her pain. Hoorah.

  My three children are glorious.

  I have been writing a novel.

  What was bad:

  My mother’s health is still frail.

  My glorious children drive me demented.

  I am still writing a bloody novel, and everyone who reads it says it is pants.

  Old year’s score: nine out of ten (on the grounds that I am nothing if not an optimist).

  I was so deaf and so busy mulling over my New Year’s resolution that I only just heard the yelling. We were walking in a party of thirty out to the beach and the kids had abandoned the path almost as soon as we started out, and somehow, in a headlong dash through the grass, my friend’s youngest son had managed to wedge the top half of his body one side of the fence that cut across the fields, his thigh between two wires in the second section, and his calf up to his foot in another section again. Every time Al put pressure on the cat’s cradle to loosen it, the boy screamed blue murder. My husband Al is extremely good in crises. By contrast, I am useless in pretty much any emergency and prefer to panic immediately. I had already begun to wonder whether my teeth were sharp enough to gnaw off the poor lad’s leg when, with a grunt of satisfaction, Al loosened the wires enough to extract him. The boy leaned against me, still shaky, and I made ‘there, there’ noises, bending over him to rub his thigh and knee to get the circulation going. He sniffed and, hunkering down, I dug around in my pocket for a small bar of milk chocolate; he took it gratefully, peeling and eating it tiny piece by tiny piece. It was the fact he ate my chocolate that decided me. In giving him my chocolate, I had my first good deed of the year.

  Then, of course, I had to tell people. To keep a secret, you tell no one, but to keep a resolution, you tell everyone. I waited till we were back at Diane’s farmhouse.

  I cleared my throat, my back to the Aga – my bones still cold from the walk – and the others looked up at me from their empty soup bowls. The resolution I was about to make is not one I make every year, or indeed have ever made before, or am likely ever to make again. ‘I’m going to do a good deed a day for the rest of the year.’

  Across the room from me, my husband hid his face in his hands and groaned.

  ‘Highly commendable,’ said Diane. She is a mathematics teacher – sometimes you can tell. ‘Tough ask, though.’ There was a murmuring of agreement.

  ‘What makes you feel you want to do that?’ Diane’s doctor friend said in the tone she uses when she says to her patients, ‘Tell me about these voices.’

  Why? Because of how I was brought up, because I should, because I do nothing for anyone but me and mine. Doctors do good all the time. They heal – at the very least they listen. I am nothing. I am a journalist and sometime writer. I do not do anything for anyone. I am someone who bought antique-style metal letters at Christmas to spell out the words K.I.N.D.N.E.S.S, R.E.S.P.E.C.T and P.A.T.I.E.N.C.E, and when they fell off the wall – clattering and bouncing one after the other onto the ceramic hob – didn’t stick them back up because I couldn’t be A.R.S.E.D.

  ‘Was rescuing that boy your good deed today then?’ asked my husband. ‘Because technically I rescued him.’ I glared at him as he picked up a half-empty bottle of Sauvignon and gestured to Diane as to whether she wanted her glass topped up, and as he poured he grinned at me.

  ‘My other New Year’s resolution is to stay married,’ I said. ‘If at all possible.’

  Good deed no. 1.

  Sunday, 2 January

  For reasons which defeat me, people think I am hospitable, when in truth I am the least sociable person I know. I blame being an only child. Even having a husband and three children crowds me sometimes. As for Christmas and New Year, we have had family staying throughout, and – thanks to bad planning on my part – we also have to factor two of the children’s birthdays into the festive season. The next person to tell me I am the ‘hostess with the mostest’ or how much I love having people around me is liable to get a saucepan on their head. Exactly what response can you make to a guest who says, ‘You just love all this entertaining, don’t you?’ You cannot say, ‘You’re so right. Is that the time?’ and point to the door.

  He was half right, though: I do quite like entertaining – if by ‘entertaining’ you mean chatting over a glass of wine about love, life and the universe with my favourite people. ‘Entertaining’ in middle age, however, is more likely to mean other people being entertained, courtesy of me shopping, cooking, serving and then clearing up after us all. Increasingly my fondness for those I entertain is on a sliding scale of how much washing-up they are prepared to do after we eat, because if I get varicose veins, I know exactly where I’ll get them: at the kitchen sink. Not forgetting that when my parents are staying with us, as I am drying the last pan – round about ten o’clock at night – my dad usually steers my blind mother into the kitchen, saying, ‘Your mother’s feeling neglected. Make her a cup of tea and have a chat while I watch the football.’

  Having said that, I’d rather make her a cup of tea than watch my dad do it. My dad has a permanent shake in his hands because of a car crash when he was young. His shake means that when you make him a cup of tea, you have to pour it short by a good inch otherwise he will shake it out of the cup. When he makes tea for my mum, he passes it to her and his hands are already shaking, and she is patting the air, reaching for it – bear in mind she can’t see because she is blind – and I have to curl up on the sofa with a floral cushion in my mouth to stop me screaming. And God forbid you make any sort of comment about health and safety, because then the pair of them get all sniffy and start adding up just how many cups of tea they have made – and passed to each other – in their forty-odd years of marriage.

  A simple thing like mealtimes during these times of celebration turns into one long sum: today’s lunch equalled the five of us plus two (my elderly parents) plus six cousins plus one. Both of my husband’s parents are dead, he has one brother and a niece who live in West Wales (which is almost as far away from us as you can get in the UK), one uncle, one aunty and a small smattering of cousins he never hears from. I have hundreds of cousins – two of whom have just moved across the world to be close to us, and five of whom are building a holiday cottage outside my back door. I blame Irish-Catholic DNA.

  The ‘plus one’ round today’s table was my beloved friend Daniel, who lost his wife four months ago. He was brave agreeing to come, and he arrived so sad – I could see it and it is not who he is at all, and I wanted to cry for him. He tried so hard over lunch, talking to everyone and making a fuss of my mum and dad, whom he has known for years, but he is lost. Getting through the first holiday season on your own takes some doing. When my first son was stillborn at term eleven years ago, that first Christmas we didn’t see anyone or go anywhere. Aside from a walk through a bleak and wintry St James’s Park, we stayed home in London curled up in a ball all wrapped around each other. We well know how commonplace death is, that it is part of who we are, and yet, grievin
g for a son, a wife, a father, it strikes you as outrageous, undeserved, a misfortune. You are the first and only person to feel this way, to feel so deep, to suffer. In that place in you where reason sits on a wooden chair in a bare room, the bulb swinging, you know that death has come before and death will come again, but reason is small and reason is lonely when death drops by.

  Good deed no. 2: lunch with my friend who lost his wife. (Not enough. Nowhere near enough.)

  Monday, 3 January

  Everybody has left. Thank God. Really thank God. Much as I love them all – and I do love them all – thank you, God, that after the last birthday tomorrow, the festivities are done.

  We celebrated our freedom with a yomp along the beach. The afternoon sky was immense and grey above us, white clouds heavy and crowding together for warmth. Ahead, black and white oystercatchers scurried across the sands, their tiny legs criss-crossing, urgent and hungry. Yelling at each other to wait, the children scrambled through the grassy dunes, while Al and I walked together, hand in hand. We have been together more than twenty years and used to hold hands all the time before the children. Why shouldn’t grown-ups hold hands, one with the other – how else do you avoid getting lost? Mind you, my sense of direction is shocking. Nowadays we hardly ever hold hands. My hands are full of children or shopping; his hands full of phones or papers. Part of me is surprised we even remember how.

  ‘Remind me what your New Year’s resolutions were last year,’ he said.

  I dug around in the silt of my memory looking for treasure, finding only salty mud and corrugated worms. ‘To get fit?’ I offered.