My dad watches me struggle to find the right thing to say. Right morally, right by them, right by me. ‘You can relax. Your mother and I have talked it over and we’re not coming.’
I shake my head from side to side in case my mother’s deafness is catching. ‘You said you couldn’t cope.’ It is my turn to sound accusing.
My mother waves her hand dismissively in my direction. ‘Of course your father can cope. I’m not that much of a burden, am I, pet?’ She turns to him and my dad reaches out to take her soft hand in his. ‘We’re allowed a bad day now and then, you know. We’re feeling much brighter and we’ve decided we’d rather keep our independence and stay in our own little house.’ I bow my head. Somehow my glass is empty. ‘Of course that might always change,’ she adds, and when I look up again, she smiles innocently in my direction.
Good deed no. 111: hospitality and care of the elderly.
Friday, 22 April
Good deed no. 112: aired and gave quick once-over to the next-door neighbour’s house.
Saturday, 23 April
Good deed no. 113: arranged for transport of a second-hand TV to the expats as they haven’t shipped over their stuff yet.
Sunday, 24 April
Glorious sunshine today, and after an Easter lunch for thirteen in the garden we took the kids to the beach so they could roll their hard-boiled eggs down the dunes. There are a couple of steep-sided hollows off this particular beach which we sledge down in winter when the snow comes, and the original idea was to race one egg against the other. (They were dyed with onion-skins and food dyes so we could tell the difference between them; otherwise, racing eggs is tough. ‘The egg has it by a nose. No, it’s the other egg, with yet another egg coming down the inside on the final straight.’) For some reason, though, my boys preferred to treat their eggs like marbles, with the added satisfaction that when the red one smashed into the green one, hard-boiled eggs exploded across the sand, making the most fantastic mess.
After I had finally had enough of picking sandy yolk, rubbery white scraps and multicoloured shell-shrapnel out of the sand, we headed back to the car. Doing up their seatbelts, the kids bickered delightedly among themselves as to whose egg had made the most mess while I brushed yolk crumbs from my fingers, wrinkling my nose in disgust. I was just thinking that it would be at least September before I could face another hard-boiled egg, when through the windscreen I spotted a distracted granny supporting her wobbly granddaughter who was roller-skating along the sandy road ahead of us, the granddaughter scissoring like Bambi, leaning, bending this way and that, while passing cars heading home from the beach trundled by. Granny was concentrating hard on not letting the child fall; I, however, was concentrating on the younger girl walking alongside them. I don’t know what was in her mind – how many chocolate eggs waited at home perhaps, or the fact her sister’s flailing arms and legs were getting in her way, but all of a sudden she stepped out and around Granny and her sister and into the road – all oblivious to the cars coming up behind them. I started to open my door while wildly gesturing that she go back to the side of the road, willing her to step back. Still propping up one girl by her elbow, Granny turned back to see the trouble, hurriedly reaching out to bring the younger girl to safety. I shook my head as if to say ‘What can you do?’ as I pulled my door shut, and Granny thanked me as they passed on by.
Good deed no. 114.
Monday, 25 April
My best gay boyfriend originally comes from Tyneside and his parents still live up here. This is a good thing because it means once in a while I get to see him when he comes up to visit them. At Christmas he brings a huge bag of perfect gifts which you didn’t even know you wanted till you pull at the spiral ribbons and tear at the hospital-bed corners of the wrapping; while if he comes for supper he brings pointy crimson tulips and smooth crimson wine. When he came over today, I made him tea and he said his dad had suggested he bring over a spare lemon drizzle cake his dad had in from the supermarket. The kettle was on the hob for tea. I reached for a cake plate from the overhead cupboard and pulled out a knife from a drawer and put them ready on the table. I said: ‘Hand it over.’ My best gay boyfriend laughed as if I’d told a particularly good knock-knock joke, and said he had informed his dad that there was no way on this earth that I wanted a plastic-wrapped cake with a topping of skinny white icing and yolk-yellow dribbles, soggy with E numbers and trans-fats and gritty white sugar. It had got quite heated between the two of them. Yes I did, I said. I’d three children and a house full of guests and it so happened that I was particularly partial to cake I didn’t have to make, bake and mourn when it got ate. ‘I got that wrong then,’ he said wonderingly. He doesn’t get things wrong, my best gay boyfriend.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that we don’t say ‘I was wrong and you were right’ often enough. But life is surely too short for hurts to linger, for grudges and fond affection to wither for want of a deep breath and that single word ‘sorry’. I have known his parents for as many years as I’ve known him, and they are lovely. I said he had to tell his dad that he had been right and my best gay pal wrong. ‘I do, don’t I?’ he said, dismayed.
He rang me just now. He said he had fessed up and made his dad happy. ‘Happier than he would have been if you’d taken the cake?’ I asked. ‘Don’t push it,’ my best gay boyfriend said.
Good deed no. 115.
Tuesday, 26 April
The other day I was considering counting lunch for everybody as my good deed, bearing in mind I shopped for it, paid for it, cooked it, served it in the garden and cleared up after it (not to mention six guests were staying over). But as I had placed the roast chicken and its companion duck, crisp and bronzed like poultry gods, onto the table one brave soul said, with due respect, that he didn’t think I should count it because I’d have been laying on lunch anyway. It turns out that everyone has an opinion on my good deeds – whether I am doing enough, whether I am doing too much, whether I should be doing it at all.
But what happens if I as the ‘doer’ regard something as a good deed, but the ‘done-to’ does not consider the action a good deed at all, arguing it is more a matter of duty or obligation and should be done out of love or blood, morality or common humanity?
The doer believes: ‘I’m doing a good deed. You should watch me, praise me, thank me.’
While the done-to believes: ‘You’re doing neither more nor less than you should.’
The doer believes: ‘I’m going the extra mile for someone else.’
While the done-to claims: ‘Can’t you see me standing here? That’s not far enough.’
And of course, according to the doer: ‘I’m doing this for you.’
But the done-to argues: ‘And so you should, my dear, because I’d do the same for you.’
It’s a strange currency, this good deed. You give it, and hope you give it freely. But when it’s given, is there public gratitude? Should there be? Or is there secret resentment on the doer’s part that there is need at all – resentment too in other quarters at the obligation it places on the needy to smile nicely and say thank you? And we aren’t any of us paragons – can there be tolerance if the good-deed doer fails to do the right thing by the needy another day? Surely we have to be our own moral arbiters in this life. We can’t impose expectations one on the other or we can be certain only of disappointment. We have to make an agreement with each other that I won’t judge you to be failing if you don’t judge me to be falling short. These are complicated transactions. All I really know is that when I do something for someone else, I strike a match and with that tiny flame light up the waxen taper of my soul.
Good deed no. 116: made welcome 85-year-old Aunty Effie, who has arrived for a few days with her chihuahua. (Not the bitey one, she got rid of him. This is not the new chihuahua, this is the new, improved chihuahua.)
Wednesday, 27 April
THE VOLUNTEER
I am such an amateur good-deed doer next to Aunty Effie. Even at her
age, with a bad knee which means she can’t climb stairs, she volunteers every day of her life. Once upon a time she was a policewoman and in later life she was a court usher. Before her knee went, she used to offer victim support and act as a lay visitor in police cells, but ‘that had to stop’ because of the stairs.
Nowadays she works in a charity shop once or sometimes twice a week, and visits those who don’t have any other visitors in hospitals, along with her ‘oldies’ in the old people’s homes. When I said, ‘How old are your “oldies”?’, she said, ‘Seventy? Seventy-five?’ And I said, ‘Younger than you then?’, and she said, ‘Technically …You were always a very rude sort of child.’
Like my mum and dad, she is very holy, and takes Communion round to the elderly and infirm in their own homes. She puts priests up when they come over from India, and when she was eighty-two she went to India on her own and rode an elephant. I wondered why she didn’t sit at home and watch television. She said: ‘I feel as if I’m earning my keep – as if God is keeping me alive to do it, and when I get to bedtime, I thank God for what I have been able to do today.’
Across the kitchen table, my mum nods in agreement. A complete life is a life of service – to one’s family, to one’s God, to one’s church and community, and to one’s fellow man. When my mother started losing her sight, the first thing she did was set up a support group for other people with macular on the grounds that many were living on their own or fearful.
‘You’re all too busy,’ she said, ‘your dad and I hadn’t any money, so we gave our time, but to people this day and age, time is a very precious commodity.’ And as the two sisters chat, I am aware that this generation is distinct from mine in its eagerness to give. I do two things with my time. I look after my children and I work. That is pretty much it, because if I am not doing one of those things, I am sure I should be doing the other. Many women are caught between that rock and a hard place, trying to do their best for their children and trying to keep their job. And if they’re not working, if they’re full-time mothers at home, then the pressure is on to do it all perfectly. Our children are our gods and they are demanding gods; our home is our church. Who has time to volunteer when you are a member of that religion? Who even wants to? And what does it mean when the old folk die out? Will each generation do less and less?
I tune back in from my rising panic that society is on the point of disintegration, and my aunt is telling my mum how the nurses and carers are always pleased to see her, because they say when she leaves someone’s bedside, she leaves them cheerier than when she arrived. But she doesn’t believe her volunteering is a one-way street, that she is giving and others are taking.
‘If I had to sit on my bottom day after day, I would die, I couldn’t do that. This way, I’m not just letting life pass me by and I get as much out of it as they do because I spend enough hours on my own, and this way I don’t feel lonely.’
My mother nods. ‘You put something in, and you take something better out.’
‘Surely not,’ I said.
‘Just wait,’ she told me.
Good deed no. 117: hospitality and care. OAP count: three. Good legs between guests: one (if you don’t count the chihuahua).
Thursday, 28 April
Unimpressed by husband, to put it mildly. I was trying to make a call and the phone kept ringing out before I could complete the number. Al went very quiet and then he said there was an outside possibility BT had cut us off because we hadn’t paid the bill. A possibility! Apparently we owe £600 – which is interesting because we have absolutely no way of paying. My overdraft is bust. Al is bust. Worse yet, Al informed me that even if we pay it straight away, it takes twenty-four hours to restore the service, which takes us into a bank holiday, through into the weekend and out the other end into another bank holiday. Which means there is a chance we won’t have the phone, or indeed the Internet, restored till Tuesday. Or maybe Wednesday. Al, however, who is on dead-line and thereby useless for anything other than meeting said deadline, announced he would have to go to London and work from there. A London with phones and an Internet connection.
Because I had three elderly relations sitting round my kitchen table waiting for the tea and hot buttered toast I’d promised them, I could not actually say how I felt about the fact we had no phone line any more. Every couple of minutes Al walked through the kitchen with a face like thunder and added something to the pile of belongings he was building up on the sofa, and the four of us watched him in silence. It was a Russian play. Two wise old women, a wise old man and a resentful wife watch as a husband prepares to depart for Moscow, the cow having died that morning.
My mother slid Al her Visa card so he could pay the phone bill, I gave him what cash I had in my handbag, and my dad and Aunty Effie drove him to the station. I slammed the door after he walked out of it. Hard. As he chuffety-chuffed down to London, I brokered peace between my kids and three of their friends in a row over a computer game, while working alongside Dr Will’s teenage daughter Jess designing the Jam Jar Army poster. (Jess, of course, had to know we hadn’t paid our phone bill, as presumably did her mother and father who were up in their cottage for a few days, as did my mother and father, and my elderly aunt and Aunty Effie’s effing chihuahua.)
Finally, the poster was done, the children were playing nicely, the elderly parents and aunty nursing her chihuahua were sitting in the sunshine in the garden, when my blind mother stumbled to the doorway yelping because my dad had fallen in the garden and hit his head. Thank God Dr Will heard the commotion. He dashed out of his cottage, I sprinted down, and my dad had a nasty gash on his head and had to be guided back to a chair and crossexamined about whether he had tripped or fainted. My mother then edged her way back into the garden, arms outstretched, hands groping, having forgotten her white stick in her anxiety to get help, and started breathing as if she was going to dive head-first into a panic attack, so she needed hosing down. I wouldn’t mind, but my dad is the good one: my mum can’t see and can hardly walk with her bad back, and Aunty Effie can’t feel her leg below her knee; he was supposed to be the one at the front of the queue of elderly ducks guiding them from one place of safety to the next.
Chaos. My life is chaos. I am sliding into lunacy on a tin tray and hitting the humps so hard, my teeth hurt.
Good deed no. 118: worked towards the launch of the Jam Jar Army.
Friday, 29 April
Since everybody is up in their cottages, they have organized a barbecue. There is a genuine communality about this place when everyone is here. Women who are busy with careers in real lives share chit-chat morning coffee on wooden benches and along the stone wall to the grassy green, and bring each other up to date on the doings of their children; men help each other saw wood and mend bicycles; while little ones trail after big girls, and boys play football with each other.
‘This must be how people lived in the 1930s,’ I said to Stephanie, and I thought of women in red-brick back-to-backs warning each other to bring in the washing before the coal man came, and leaning out of windows to talk across a cobbled alley.
‘On a Sunday in Birtley when I was a girl, my grandmother used to cook her own joint and the joints of neighbours in her oven, so they could save on fuel,’ Stephanie said. ‘Then she’d carry across two plates of lunch from her own joint for old folk who’d have otherwise gone without.’
And I wonder if kindness is in the genes or whether it is taught.
Quite often, I don’t go to the barbecues. Because all I do is write and bollock children, sometimes I struggle to have anything interesting to say. Tonight’s barbecue was most astonishingly brilliant, however, because I didn’t have to shop for it, prepare it, cook it or wash up after it. We ferried in sausages and burgers and potatoes for my parents and aunty, and the kids ate God knows what. Dr Will, who had earlier in the day come in to check on my dad, leaned over and poured wine into my empty glass and I sat smoked to death by the fire pit, wrapped in two cardigans and my puffa coat
, with the cold north wind blowing against the green tarpaulin of the gazebo so hard I thought it would lift it up and ferry us all to Oz, and it was wonderful.
Good deed no. 119: gave my next-door neighbour a roll of toilet paper. (If only all my good deeds could be as simple.)
THE DOCTOR
Dr Will is tall and powerfully built. If he goes down to the village, he pops in to my kitchen and asks if I want anything brought back, a paper, a pint of milk? Occasionally, when he is up here, I drag one child or other in front of him and say ‘That rash …?’ or ‘This sprain?’ and he’ll lift an arm, wriggle fingers, say ‘How about United, eh?’ then say ‘They’re fine’ and pat a head and they’ll skip away, all hurts forgotten. ‘Why did you become a doctor, Will?’ I asked.
It turned out that his grandfather had been a GP in the Wirral with a surgery in his own house, and was still working as a locum up to the age of eighty. As a boy, Dr Will would visit his grandfather. ‘We’d be out and about together and he would bump into his patients in the street and I’d see the kind of relationship he had with them. He’d tell me stories – not so much about their medical conditions but about who they were and how they linked into the community.’
A Year of Doing Good Page 12