A Year of Doing Good Read online

  ‘When she was back on her feet, I stared out at the sea,’ Lily said, ‘she was just sobbing inconsolably the whole time. I let out this roar of desperation and my husband said, “I’ll take her,” but I told him, “No, she needs me,” although I knew I couldn’t cope with her. She broke her heart all the way there and all the way back, her lips were blue and she was blotchy and had snot in her hair and all over her face, and I’ve been left thinking that I’m way out of my depth.’

  Lily took her to the GP. Lily cried, and as she cried, Ellie slipped off her knee to fetch her a tissue and stroked her mother’s face. ‘I’ll make it better, Mammy,’ she told her. The GP is referring Ellie to the mental health team.

  Ellie patently adores this mother – would climb into her and stay there if she could. Unborn. Reborn. I just listened; sometimes that is all the good you can do. But how do you keep giving and giving like that? Because once you make a commitment to adopt, there is no going back. It is not like my good deed for a day; this is for life. God knows I regret getting the guinea pigs, so I already know there’s no way my heart is big enough to adopt a child – Lily’s heart is, though. She would do anything for anyone, whatever the price she herself pays. Every time I’ve known someone need something, Lily is there for them with cash, practical help or an arm around them. Often she glitters when she walks. I think it’s what she wears, but it might just be her.

  Good deed no. 34.

  Friday, 4 February

  THE CAMPAIGNER

  Today’s good deed came to me. Kate, another mother at school, sent a round-robin email asking people to send on a letter to their MEPs to lobby for mandatory cameras and sensors in HGVs. They have a blind spot, which means that cyclists are getting killed. Kate’s sister Eilidh was thirty and had recently got the job of her dreams as a TV producer. I never met her, but I know that she snowboarded and skied and was the sort of person who took a big bite out of life whenever she got the chance. Then, two years ago, cycling to work in London, she was in front and to the right of a fully loaded 32-tonne tipper lorry approaching a pedestrian crossing when the lorry hit her, dragging her underneath its wheels. Pinned underneath a double wheel which had crushed her pelvis, but fully conscious, Eilidh quietly asked passers-by, ‘Please help me, please help me.’ Two hours later she was pronounced dead by surgeons at the Royal London Hospital. It is the second anniversary of her death tomorrow.

  Kate has dealt with her grief – in part at least – by campaigning for HGVs to be made safer for cyclists, in the sure and certain knowledge it won’t mend her broken sister, because there is nothing in this wide world that can bring that little sister back. Regardless, Kate and her mother Heather have shuttled back and forth to London, to Parliament, to Strasbourg, arguing and pleading and protesting. A blind spot was found on the driver’s right-hand side where the lorry struck Eilidh – the driver himself said he never saw her – if only there had been a camera, a sensor, if only, if only, if only. So why do good when bad happens? ‘People have said to me, “Why do it, when it won’t bring her back?” ’ Kate says. ‘But I don’t want it happening to other people. Imagine if it were to happen again, maybe to someone I know, and I had done nothing. That would make me culpable – it would be a sin of omission.’

  Against the railings in Notting Hill where the crash happened, there is a permanent memorial: a ghostbike painted white with wheels but no tyres, draped all about with roses and plastic-wrapped love. But Kate wants a better memorial: she wants an end to avoidable deaths, she wants other families to avoid the heartbreak and horror her own has gone through, she wants lives lived which might otherwise be lost. No amount of campaigning can change the past; it can, however, change the future. And who says hope cannot grow, unfurling leaves of green, in a soil of desolation? Who says when the worst of times come, the best in us won’t stand tall?

  ‘I will keep going till it’s safer,’ Kate says, ‘because if I don’t do it, no one else will.’ Sending a letter isn’t much, but I will do it. Why do you have to fight for something so obvious? If there were a way to make something safer, to save lives, why wouldn’t you take it? Look here at a sister’s tears, the grainy photo of a laughing, beautiful girl with platinum-blonde hair, the mangled wreck of a bicycle, its wheels spinning. Why wouldn’t you feel the grief, the absence, why wouldn’t you think – as a politician, or a civil servant, or the director of a haulage company – ‘Not on my watch. No more. Let’s change the way we do this.’

  Good deed no. 35.

  Saturday, 5 February

  I’ve had it in mind for a while to dig up a bunch of snowdrops for the little old lady who used to live in this house and who moved down to the village soon after her husband died. He was a keen gardener and made it his business to spread snowdrops around the garden, so that at this time of year, snowdrops with their tiny drooping white bells fill the lawn and the glade between the back wall and the sheep pasture. We loved him, and I always think of him when the snowdrops come. I am sure she thinks of him all the time. Together, my daughter and I found a trowel and we extracted a small bunch of snowdrops, their heads white and shy, hanging down as if they were admiring their new, leaf-green shoes.

  We drove carefully through the rain with the pot on the floor of the passenger seat, reaching down every now and then to steady it. When we got there, the little old lady was preparing dinner. I’ve dropped in before when she is cooking dinner, and black smoke will be curling from out beneath the kitchen door, but she would not dream of telling you. She sits there patiently while you drink a cup of tea, and when you’ve gone, eats ash. We didn’t go in; instead we put them by her front door on the porch, out of the cold north wind, and I told her how I think of him at this time of year when the snowdrops come.

  Good deed no. 36: said, ‘I remember.’

  Sunday, 6 February

  Went to Mass today, and strangely enough, it had a lot to do with good deeds.

  ‘And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noonday …’

  (Isaiah 58:10)

  That’s who I want to be: a light in the darkness.

  I’m ashamed to say I got into a total state getting ready to go down to London tomorrow for my uncle’s funeral. The expats have offered to babysit. Bearing in mind they don’t have kids of their own, this is astonishingly brave – or foolish, depending on your perspective. Their thinking is we did them a good turn by welcoming them home, and in turn they will do what they can to help us out. After a night with the kids, they might have a sudden change of heart on that one.

  They are sleeping in our bedroom so they can hear the kids if they wake up. But our room was in a state, and the bathroom was in a state, and the kitchen was in a state, and it all seemed endless. Diane, with a farmer husband and three children, keeps her house immaculate. She once moved out to get building work done and when she moved back in, I said, ‘It looks great. When are you moving your stuff back in?’ and she said, ‘We have moved back in.’ My house is full of junk. Full to the brim. Even if I throw it out, it sneaks back in at night with the sole intention of making my house look like shite.

  The worst thing is that, as a result of my rising hysteria, my husband got all manly and decisive (which is never good), and announced that we are going to leave at lunchtime rather than straight after the school drop-off because we have too much to do and will otherwise be up all night doing it.

  This is fatal. This means we won’t leave till midnight.

  I almost gave up on the good deeds. I was deciding that I might have to wimp out on making the world a better place due to ‘personal circumstances’, when I discovered a box of baby socks for a friend’s baby that I had failed to get round to giving her. I pulled them out, dusted them off and hey presto – a good deed. All together now, ‘One day at a time, sweet Jesus, that’s all I’m asking of you …’

  Good deed no. 37.

  Monday, 7 Februar
y

  Managed to leave home at 2 p.m. – but only because I insisted. This is roughly four hours later than I wanted to leave, and four hours earlier than my husband wanted. My husband hates extended periods away from us, and after the funeral he has to stay down in London on deadline for one of his projects. He’ll be away for three weeks, which is a long time by anyone’s reckoning. All weekend he drifted around looking miserable. ‘I love my job, but I don’t want to leave you all,’ he grumbled, as if I could rub it better and say, ‘Don’t go then, darlink.’ Unfortunately, I can’t.

  I cannot think the last time I went anywhere by train, but I love it – even with the prospect of a funeral at the other end. Hours on my own are rare, the chance of a gin and tonic, uninterrupted reading, or a DVD on the laptop. But Al had pleaded for me to drive down with him and all his work in the Saab rather than go by train, so I agreed. Even with the late start, it wasn’t too bad. We did some talking about the children, about how to pay the bills, I admired his profile. We spent time being married.

  Good deed no. 38: travelled to a funeral.

  Tuesday, 8 February

  In the church, my dad was bent over praying; his hands, which are large and red and scarred from his work as a grocer, were shaking even though one of them kept tight hold of the other. I was OK with the coffin and the photo of my uncle smiling and sitting in his allotment, but then my aunt came in, her grown-up children and their sombre-faced children filing into the front pew, and that was it. My beloved aunt’s head was hanging and she reminded me of a solitary snowdrop and I started crying and I couldn’t even look at them for fear I would get worse.

  It was a very personal service, and I particularly liked the reflection by Edgar A. Guest:

  Miss me a little but not for long

  And not with your head bowed low.

  Remember the love that we once shared,

  Miss me, but let me go.

  It finished up:

  When you are lonely and sick at heart

  Go to the friends we know,

  And bury your sorrows in doing good deeds.

  Miss me, but let me go.

  Good deeds as a way out of grief …

  I cannot even flatter myself that I brought comfort. Out of the church, in the cold sunshine, as the undertakers slid the coffin into the hearse, amid the milling mourners I hugged my widow-weeded aunt – but where were the words of comfort? Where the honeyed wisdom to mend a hurt? Fresh out. Instead, I held her in silence, unable to speak, let alone to say what she might need to hear. She was so small and thin and temporary, and the word ‘widow’ so final and immense.

  It was a very Irish affair. The crowd of people around the grave were all of a certain age and height, and they all seemed to have that short, straight Irish nose and full cheeks. A Celtic Windrush, a diaspora generation, and afterwards over lunch, as I sat with them, my dad and his friends talked about coming over from the green farms and the villages to the hustling, bustling London of the 1950s, the cranes along the Thames, bombsites and building sites, red buses in a black and white city. An emigrant generation falling between the cracks in the floorboards. Soon, no one will remember how it was to be Irish, living in damp English lodgings with sandwiches of luncheon meat, asking freckled, rosy-cheeked girls from home to jive on a Saturday night.

  I was talking to the family about trying to do my good deeds, and a bearded Irishman made the point that, according to the catechism they used to teach the children, burying the dead was a Catholic corporal work of mercy; so I nodded wisely as if I well knew a great deal about corporal works of mercy when in fact I knew nothing.

  Now that I’ve looked into it, it turns out there are corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Spiritual works include advising, consoling, comforting, forgiving, and bearing wrongs patiently. I am far too quick to advise (as are many in my family; only occasionally do you get to finish explaining the problem before the solution is presented to you), addicted to consoling (those of a morbid disposition often are) and comforting (large breasts help). I have nothing to forgive (I lie: I have a list, a long list, and when I remember where I put it there will be trouble) and I am utterly useless at bearing wrongs patiently (they just make me really mad).

  Corporal works of mercy include feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, giving alms to the poor and, as was said, burying the dead. So burying the dead was indeed my good deed for the day. It might be argued I have given alms with the monthly charity commitment, but I haven’t done any of the other stuff. Nada. Unless you count giving a stranger a Mars Bar on the train on the way home as feeding the hungry. He had wanted a Mars and the trolley lady didn’t have any and as luck would have it, I happened to have one in my handbag, so then he said he would buy me a Twix. It could have been the start of a beautiful friendship if only I was single and we didn’t both look like we had eaten a few too many Mars Bars to begin with.

  Good deed no. 39.

  Wednesday, 9 February

  My ten-year-old was off sick as per the children’s rota to stop me working. Did very little all day aside from take children to school, pick up children from school, buy a chicken from the butcher’s, tell a sick child he will feel better soon, tell a sick child TV will not of itself make him better, tell a sick child that no, he can’t go play football for his team when he didn’t go to school during the day. I’d really love to count looking after sick children as a good deed, but it’s in the job description. Maternal compassion is wearing so thin you could sieve marmalade through it.

  Instead then, I rang an aunty; elderly relatives dying all around you always necessitates a quick headcount, so I thought I’d check on the welfare of my oldest aunt. Aunty Effie and my mother are sisters. Once upon a time, like in a fairy tale, I had handsome uncles and all sorts of magic aunts: the tragic aunt who died too soon when scaffolding fell; the aunt who always let me wear her garnet rings; another (wildly Catholic, this one) who warned against reading of Borgia lust and murder ‘at my age’ (I was twelve) – or at all, she meant; and the aunt who fed me custard creams and orange squash in slidey velour seats, guarding us from matinee perverts with a hatpin … the list goes on.

  Alcohol was never served in my house as a child when the aunties and the uncles came; ‘old times’ took the place of booze and ‘Remember when …’ was the only sharpener they ever needed. When Aunty Effie visited, she brought white bags with twisted paper ears full of stripy liquorice chews with crunchy shells, and I’d lie in my mother’s bed, under pink candlewick, and chew with a black tongue in sweet lockjaw agony, while I listened to the chime of thin china cup against thin china saucer and the howling laughter of grown-ups in the paradise of downstairs. The other thing she brought was a tiny dog; my all-time favourite was Tinkerbell, a chihuahua runt fed milk-and-rusk slop with a tiny teaspoon. These days, Aunty Effie is in excruciating pain because she needs a hip replacement, still misses her husband eight years after his death, and her new chihuahua just bit her. I have told Al that I am definitely dying first.

  Good deed no. 40.

  Thursday, 10 February

  Looked out some old clothes to take into the Sue Ryder shop in the village, which is having a shout-out for donations. You wouldn’t think a small fishing village would support a charity shop, but somehow it does. I took in various jeans and a nice black lace top, a green corduroy military jacket and a new blue-and-white striped cotton dress that made me look like an overstuffed mattress when I got it home and which consequently still had the label ‘king-sized’ attached. I filled in a gift aid form and was given a card so the proceeds of my donations can be tracked and the tax claimed back on them. Having your own charity shop card encourages the thought that you might go back. When I wrote down my address, the woman behind the counter informed me she knew me and then said accusingly, ‘But you look different.’ That would be the two stone I’ve put on over the last couple of years. ‘You’ve grown your hair,’ she said, not
quickly enough. When the two volunteers went into the back, probably to look through the bag, I suddenly thought, ‘Now they’ll know the size I wear my trousers,’ and in my rush to leave the shop, walked slap-bang into a clothes rail. You don’t really want strangers knowing how big your bottom is, do you?

  The bigger problem is that the children, shock horror, are beginning to ask what my good deed was today. Oh my God. I mean it. Oh my God. That means I can’t stop. Ever. Or at least not this year. As a mother, I want to teach them resolve, I want to teach them to stick at stuff until they are through the other side, I want to teach them how to live good lives and think of other people. In theory I want to do that. Bangs head on desk.

  Good deed no. 41.

  Friday, 11 February

  It is the expat’s sixty-ninth birthday today, so I took the highly unusual step of making a birthday cake as my good deed. Despite having three children, I never make birthday cakes because I usually pull the ingredients out of my larder, cross my arms, stand back, look at them, think ‘Nah’ and put them away again.

  Good deeds requiring a bit more effort on my part, I resisted the siren call of the supermarket’s chocolate caterpillar cakes with their beaming smiles and Smartie spots, and made from scratch an ‘Ultimate’ Chocolate Cake. My first problem, having whipped the damn thing up, was the discovery that I didn’t have any matching cake tins, so I had to break and enter a neighbour’s holiday cottage. Fortunately, I have not yet set up the local Neighbourhood Watch. The second problem was the cakes wouldn’t cook. I kept pulling them out to check and they got more and more burnt on top but were still sloppy as a salty sea in the middle. Finally, I gave up and donned my padded gauntlets. I pulled them out, shucked them from their stolen tins and chopped away the charcoal frills with a serrated bread knife. Shiny, dark chocolate ganache now fills the dip where the cake rose and fell, and the uneven surface is covered in ruby raspberries and emerald-green and gold wax candles in the shape of tiny champagne bottles. Luscious, decadent and frowsy, but I suspect in the middle it is raw. I’m back to the chocolate caterpillars next time.