A Year of Doing Good

by Judith O'Reilly

  Good deed no. 12: asked a favour for someone else.

  Thursday, 13 January

  I’m working for six weeks on company write-ups about how well employers such as debt collectors treat their staff. I’ve done it before and the project always leaves me convinced I should run out and get an extremely well-paid nine-to-five job in IT and spend my day getting my feet massaged, checking on my work–life balance and dreaming of the Saga cruises I will go on courtesy of my enormous pension. Since I have spent the last two years writing a novel which I fully expect no one will ever read and which will earn me less than nothing, such jobs leave me sweaty with envy.

  I did not lift my head till 5.30 p.m., and in the interests of good neighbourliness I stumbled through the darkness along the terrace with my five-year-old daughter to one of the other cottages. Because they are not occupied all the time, they occasionally get an upwardly mobile mouse or two who scurry in from the inhospitable fields around. The last time Dr Will and his wife were up, they left a trap behind the sofa. His wife is vegetarian and his nineteen-year-old daughter Jess is vegan, and if they see a dead mouse they will keel over with regret and self-hate. I was half hoping I could check on the trap, find it empty and still count it as my good deed, but unfortunately there was a furry little critter-corpse slumped over the luscious but poisoned sultanas, his tiny legs stretched out and stiff as winter twigs. Yuk … I mean, yuk. My daughter, who wants to be a ‘singing’ vet and has nerves of steel, held the black plastic bin-bag out while I shovelled in the mouse, and together we set another trap with chocolate. Vegetarian or not, they are doing the next one themselves.

  That should have been my good deed for the day right there and then, but I was slumped on the sofa in front of a roaring log fire reading a thriller, darkness all around, when there was a rapping at the window. My first thought was the mouse was back; my second, that it was a psychopath come to slaughter me; my third was where’s an axe when you need one? It turns out living in the country with no full-time neighbours, your husband working in London for weeks at a time, and reading blood-spattered crime novels is a bad combination.

  Palpitating, I headed to the French doors and outside was the little old lady’s grandson and his mam. Karl is a broad-shouldered teenage hulk with straw-blond hair. He quit school because he was being bullied – despite the fact he looks like a Viking and is the size of a four-bedroomed house, though size of course matters little in these cases. He got low after he dropped out of a construction course at college, and the local vicar hooked him up with the community radio station. Now he has decided he wants to work in radio.

  Our friends’ kids have middle-class parents who know how to work the system; they get work experience in glamorous places which helps with their confidence and self-esteem, their university applications and their careers. When Karl drove his gran over to mine at Christmas for a cup of tea, I made an airy offer about helping him with his CV, not particularly thinking he would take it up, although I did remember to ask the Lovely Claire to see if she could get him some work experience locally. All credit to the lad, after we spoke he went to Connexions (a scheme that helps sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds get work), and they told him where to look on the computer for a CV template. He tried to call it up at home on the Internet but everything was in Arabic, so tonight he told his mother he wanted to come up and talk to me about what to do next.

  I set my computer up on the kitchen table and drafted a long list of things for him to do, including reading about what is happening in radio and figuring out what podcasting is. The community radio where he is hosting a weekly programme has links with a couple of local radio stations, so I told him to ask the woman who manages things there to get him set up with some work experience. I also had a brief look at courses, and I will check out what he can do bearing in mind he dropped out of school. I also copied over the Connexions CV template (in English), emailed it to him and told him to draft something and then bring it back to me and we would make it sing.

  Truth be told, I am frightened. I have told a seventeen-year-old without a lot of self-confidence that it is OK to want something and to try for something that is really hard to get. What happens if he starts wanting it really badly and I can’t help him get it? Wanting can eat up your soul. Good deeds should have good intentions – though it is possible to imagine a deed which has a good consequence but is poorly motivated. It is easier, though, to imagine a well-intentioned good deed which ends badly all round. I hate that expression ‘No good deed goes unpunished’. It is a misery and an excuse for apathy and neglect. I also very much hope it is not true, otherwise I am all undone and heading into a perfect storm of troubles. Is it possible that my good deeds could have a real effect? That they wouldn’t just be something self-contained and momentary, something worth little more than a brief ‘thanks’ – soon to be forgotten? Marvellous if I do a deed like that, ring out the bells. Horror upon horror if the effect it has isn’t good.

  Good deed no. 13: told a seventeen-year-old it is OK to have dreams.

  Friday, 14 January

  Despite my somewhat patchy faith, my eight-year-old is down to do his first Holy Communion. The reasons for this are:

  Having it any other way would be a matter of sadness to my parents.

  I grew up being taught about Catholic martyrs, so I feel an obligation to cascade the faith down the generations.

  Plus:

  I want to believe in God – it is just that I am very bad at it.

  Bearing in mind there’s instruction at the weekend and strict rules on attendance, my son will have to miss football and rugby. There was hell when I told him, a situation which was not helped by my Protestant husband pontificating about football being more important than religion, which meant I had to tell him that football was his bloody religion. I ended up storming out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind me and going to bed without speaking to him.

  Luckily, I came up with a plan. Bribery. I should have thought of it earlier. Straight after I dropped the kids at school, I hared up the road to Currys in Berwick. Nice though it would be if my eight-year-old son preferred to do as his mother told him and do his Holy Communion rather than what his father wants, that is to say score goals and make tries, it is not going to happen.

  This year, I refused to let the boys ask Father Christmas for an iPod touch on the grounds they were far too young and the iPod touches were far too expensive. This morning I bought him one, in return for which he has to turn up to his Communion classes with good grace. It is, after all, a mother’s prerogative to make up the rules as she goes along. I spent every last penny I had in my account. An iPod I can buy; scruples, however, are a luxury we mothers cannot always afford. The official line is as follows: you are doing your first Holy Communion for Granny (Granny being a devout Catholic), so Mummy (who is a bad Catholic) wants to say thank you for making Granny happy. It wouldn’t get him – and it certainly wouldn’t get me – through any pearly gates, but strangely enough protests over missing football dropped off immediately. Can an action which is bad if you look at it one way still be good if you look at it another? Now there is a question.

  Good deed no. 14: made my mother happy. (If I were a nicer person, I wouldn’t count making my own mother happy as a good deed – but I’m not.)

  Saturday, 15 January

  I have been worried about Lily for a while. She adopted Ellie almost three years ago when she was two (the kid having been taken into care when she was one), and Lily’s life hasn’t been her own since. Ellie looks like a fairy, with soft ginger ringlets and big hazel-green eyes like champion marbles; she is also damaged beyond belief. She asks the same question over and over again – ‘Can I? Can I? Can I?’, like a woodpecker breaking through your skull to get to the good stuff. If you look at someone else, if you talk to someone else, if you do something that doesn’t involve her – that is when she thinks you don’t see her any more, don’t love her any more, that’s when she thinks she doesn’t
exist any more, and that is when the problems start. Lily loves her, but her neediness is burning Lily out.

  We’ve shared the run to dancing classes since the girls started. Lily takes Ellie and my daughter to ballet on a Wednesday night, and I take both girls to tap and modern dance on a Saturday morning. I am putting my money where my mouth is. I am going to keep Ellie for lunch and for a couple of hours after dancing on a Saturday. That way Lily can draw breath and spend some time with her husband and son, and away from Ellie. The only problem is who gives respite to the respite-givers?

  Ellie maintains my daughter is her best friend. If my daughter has a toy in her hand, Ellie wants it, and if she doesn’t get it she ‘tells’ or says, ‘You’re not my friend any more,’ and then my daughter cries. She sits in the car as I zip up the dual carriageway to dancing and asks, ‘What happens if I open the car door?’ and in the rear-view mirror her big hazel-green eyes are bigger and greener than ever. The other day, I was still parking the car in the churchyard opposite the dancing school (despite the sign that says it is for churchgoers only) when she actually managed to open the door and start climbing out. Ellie is adorable, and Ellie melts my brain.

  Today, however, the kid was as good as gold over lunch. The only problem this time was taking her home afterwards. Lily had dashed to the shops and her husband was somewhere in the fields, so I was forced to plod through the fields with two small girls in jazzy leotards and pink frothy tutus, all of us sinking into shin-deep mud, with Ellie shrieking hysterically that the horse would bite us if he was hungry. Lily rehomed a rescue pony and also has one rescue cat and two dogs (one of them a rescue dog), two rescue geese, two rescue ducks, twenty-eight sheep (three of them orphaned lambs farmers didn’t want), five pigs (two of whom are rescue pigs), two chicken-reared ducks, one incubated duck, seven turkeys, half a dozen chickens, and a rooster called Lucky Lazarus who was born on Good Friday, died on Easter Sunday and whom she brought back to life. She names them all – not just the rooster. I have two guinea pigs called Nibble and Dark Dude, and I resent them both. I once asked her why she seems compelled to rescue both animals and people, and she described herself as ‘a sucker for a hard-luck story’. She went on: ‘I don’t like to think anyone or anything is not going to have a decent life.’

  And I said: ‘OK.’

  She said: ‘And I was raised that way by my mam – you don’t walk by someone who is suffering when there is something you could do to help.’

  And I said: ‘OK.’

  She said: ‘And when my dad left us, I was six. I remember how that abandonment felt then – and since.’

  And there wasn’t anything I could say.

  Good deed no. 15.

  Sunday, 16 January

  Good deed no. 16: rang a grown-up friend in Bristol to see if she would go out for a run with another friend’s daughter (new to the city and having difficulties settling in).

  Monday, 17 January

  My brother-in-law Rob is a natural scientist with a first from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Oxford. He is incredibly tall and incredibly clever. Occasionally, when we are driving, we pass a telegraph pole and the children will say, ‘Is Uncle Rob taller than that pole?’ and I say, ‘Yes.’ When I was telling him about my resolution, he told me about ‘reciprocal altruism’ in the animal kingdom.

  Between 1978 and 1983, Gerald S. Wilkinson (now a professor of biology at the University of Maryland and a leading expert in animal behaviour and genetics) found that vampire bats (which feed on blood at night) sometimes regurgitated blood for those who had not fed – mostly if there was a genetic relationship, but sometimes among bats who were unrelated but who ‘tended to be frequent roostmates’. Wilkinson claimed that individuals who shared gained ‘an immediate advantage in terms of increasing their own survival and sometimes the survival of their relatives’ because bats die if they fail to feed for two nights in a row. So bats will do a good deed – providing they know the other bat involved and because there’s something in it for them. (I know people like that.) There are even indications that there may be competition among bats to feed the hungry, possibly because that too increases the bat’s own chances of survival. Later, I rang and asked Wilkinson whether animals were as altruistic as people, but he has his own line in the sand and said that they weren’t. Wilkinson maintains that he knows of no persuasive altruistic behaviour among animals that goes as far as choosing to give their life for another animal (unless they are related). ‘That,’ he says, ‘is uniquely human.’

  Good deed no. 17: chased up Lovely Claire for Karl’s work experience.

  Tuesday, 18 January

  Good deed no. 18: picked up litter on the beach.

  Wednesday, 19 January

  Good deed no. 19: sorted out four school pinafores and a couple of teeny-tiny jumpers that used to be my daughter’s, and breezed into school with them for the mum who has a daughter even smaller than mine. (Ah, if all good deeds could be so easy.)

  Thursday, 20 January

  I may be imagining it, but there’s a chance my handy sort of mate is beginning to avoid me. Last week I dug out baby books for him, and today when I handed over a couple of baby-music CDs for him to give to his sister, I sensed a lot less enthusiasm. Eventually, he confessed he still has the toys in his car. Seriously? Who is doing who the good deeds around here, I want to know?

  Good deed no. 20.

  Friday, 21 January

  The early bird catches the worm and gives it to another bird; that is to say, I made a nice early start on my good deeds today. There’s a woman at school who walks with a crutch – courtesy of someone driving over her foot a couple of years ago, shattering the bones in it, which has got to hurt. It makes me wince even thinking about it, but she is always incredibly jolly, with a little blond boy and a teeny tot of a fairy-girl. I helped her once before when she was struggling with a car seat, and this morning – fortunately for me – she dropped her handbag, so I picked it up and held the little tot’s hand as she clambered up the steps of the school entrance. And when I got into school, the mum to whom I’d given the school uniforms had left me a gift bag with a bottle of wine and a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates. It amazes me how often you get thanked for doing a good deed.

  As I got ready this morning, there was an interview with Bryn Parry, the co-founder of Help for Heroes, the charity that helps soldiers wounded in Britain’s current conflicts. Their very first event earned more than £5m for stricken soldiers, and over four years they raised £100m. Puts me carrying someone’s handbag into perspective. Do I need to make some money for charity? Raising money for charity is generally as dull as hearing about other people’s triathlon training or how they minimize their carbon footprints. Who gives a toss? Not me. God forbid I have to sit in a bath of baked beans. Or shave my head. I am not abseiling down anything – I did that once off Bamburgh Castle ramparts and it was terrifying. I could go on a run but for the fact I can’t run. Perhaps I could go on a leisurely stroll, stopping off at a café for a nice cup of coffee? But there always seems to have to be a degree of suffering involved, and if I have to suffer, I whinge – a lot.

  Good deed no. 21.

  Saturday, 22 January

  Took the girls to dance again and we met up with Al and the boys for hot chocolate in Barter Books, which is the world’s best second-hand bookshop in my opinion. It used to be a railway station, which could be why so many men with beards haunt it. A model railway track runs overhead, and lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tennyson on wooden boards connect the columns of books. The original Victorian station is everywhere around – the pitched roofs, the ticket offices, the enormous clocks – but these days books instead of trains carry people away. My favourite place is an old waiting room with a glass-panelled door, which reflects shelves of books; a blazing coalfire burns in the darkness there, and a huge wrought-iron lamp hangs from the ceiling inscribed with fabled destinations – Shangri-La, Toytown, Camelot – and the words ‘et in Arcadia ego’ (or ‘I,
too, am in Paradise’).

  The only problem in this Arcadia was that I’d left my debit card at home and Al’s card has stopped working because we’d smashed through his overdraft, which left us with a £10 note to our name and loose coppers. The kids had to share a hot chocolate, while Al and I shared a coffee and bubbling, mustardy cheese on toast.

  Middle-class penury, definition 1: sharing a cappuccino in a second-hand bookshop.

  Housework in the afternoon, and then bought two escapist novels for bereaved cuz Merry on Amazon as my good deed.

  Middle-class penury, definition 2: buying books on Amazon, even though you know you are broke, on the grounds that online shopping doesn’t involve real money.

  We are official members of the ‘squeezed middle’. The Saab we drive is temporarily buggered; we are running a solitary clapped-out Volvo we call the Ratmobile due to the fact rats have eaten big holes in the back seat (real rats, not my eyeball rats), having come up through the wheel arch. We don’t eat out in fancy restaurants, don’t buy clothes and don’t go on holidays, so who spends all the bloody money? My head hurts from sums – and my head hurts enough already. I have to repeat numbers endlessly before I absorb them; there are some calculations that make my entire brain shut down and smoke come out of my rat-infested eyeballs.

  Merry, for whom I bought the books, is one of my favourite cousins. She once went on holiday with us when we were on the cusp of adolescence, and for seven whole days in the summer of 1973 we were the best of friends. Of course we grew up and didn’t speak for the next twenty years on the grounds our mothers did our talking for us, and I doubtless knew more of her business and she doubtless knew more of mine than was entirely wise, but that’s family for you.