A Year of Doing Good

by Judith O'Reilly

  Later I checked out his comment about ‘passing it forward’. I wasn’t entirely sure at the time if he said ‘pass it on’ or ‘pass it forward’, but it turns out there is a heart-wrenching movie where a small boy decides to change the world by doing good, the understanding being when you yourself benefit from a good deed, you have to do good to someone else, and so it goes on.

  Good deed no. 207.

  Wednesday, 27 July

  THE HERO

  Another branch of Sainsbury’s, this one in Scotland, has been in contact and might be interested in using the Jam Jar Army to raise money for an ex-servicemen’s charity called the Mark Wright Project. It reminded me how Professor Wilkinson, the animal biologist, said humans were the only creatures on this earth willing to sacrifice themselves for their fellow man. Mark Wright was a 27-year-old corporal in the 3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment, who was awarded the George Cross for gallantry. The George Cross is the highest bravery award possible when not in the face of the enemy. According to the citation published in the official government newspaper the London Gazette, on 6 September 2006, while serving in Kajaki, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, Corporal Wright ‘made a conscious decision’ while ‘fully aware of the risks’ to enter a mined area in order to help a colleague who had been severely injured in a mine explosion. He made this decision knowing that waiting for a mine clearance team to arrive would take too long and that the soldier was likely to die before it was completed. Exercising command, Corporal Wright directed two medical orderlies to treat the injured soldier, ordered all unnecessary personnel to safety and then began organizing the casualty evacuation. He called for a helicopter and ordered a route to be cleared through the minefield to a landing site. Unfortunately, the leader of this task, while moving back across the route he believed he had cleared, stepped on another mine and his leg was blown off. At enormous personal risk, Corporal Wright immediately moved to help the new casualty until one of the medical orderlies could take over. He again ordered all non-essential personnel to stay out of the minefield, sent an accurate situation report to his headquarters and ensured that additional medical items were obtained to treat the wounded.

  The words in the Gazette are cool and clinical, spelling out the risk and command structures, and leaving out the dust, terror, comradeship, smell of blood and courage. More mines, more wounded men – Corporal Wright among them – till there were seven casualties in the field, three of whom had lost limbs. The citation reads: ‘Despite this horrific situation, his own very serious injuries and the precarious situation of the others in the minefield, Corporal Wright still strove to exercise control of the situation. He did this despite being in great pain and fully aware that he was in danger of bleeding to death.’ Eventually evacuated by American helicopters with winches, Corporal Wright and his men remained in that minefield for three and a half hours. He remained conscious for the majority of the time, continually shouting encouragement to those around him, ‘and several survivors subsequently paid tribute to the contribution this made to maintaining morale and calm amongst so many wounded men’. Corporal Wright died of his wounds on the rescue helicopter. ‘His outstandingly courageous actions and leadership were an inspiration to all those around him during an extremely precarious situation. His complete disregard for his own safety while doing everything possible to regain control of the situation and to save lives constitutes an act of the greatest gallantry.’ That’s a man you call a hero.

  Good deed no. 208: gave lifts to the expats from the garage and into work (their car is in the garage again).

  Thursday, 28 July

  Excellent day. I wrote a Jam Jar Army letter for holiday cottages because the company Lily persuaded to put jars in their cottages said that the jars haven’t got any money in them yet, and they wanted their visitors to have more of an explanation. In it I said: ‘… to let you into a little secret – we don’t have many people living in Northumberland, and frankly we need your help too … We hope you have a wonderful holiday. Welcome to our Northumberland family.’ I have no idea whether it will work. Holidaymakers might just feel they are on holiday and would rather spend their loose change on fish and chips than cancer. But as they say up here, ‘Shy bairns get nowt.’

  Later on, Duchess High School in Alnwick rang and told me they had around £200 for the Jam Jar Army. This is excellent, not least because staff had said they couldn’t take it on because the school was fully stocked with charitable stuff. Apparently, the kids raised the money on some non-uniform day and when they were asked what they wanted it to go on, the children themselves said the Jam Jar Army. Good on them. Plus the hospice emailed to say they had banked another £192 in Jam Jar Army funds. Plus I’ve got around £100 in jars on the floor of my kitchen, so I reckon that is around £1,500 in total so far. (Not panicking just yet about not meeting the target; I figure I can do that later.)

  Good deed no. 209.

  Friday, 29 July

  I am wondering if my mother is right and you do indeed get back more than you put in. I am only just coming out of a migraine, which can leave me feeling low, but if I’m honest I have felt better thanks to the good deeds: trite, but true. There is an emotional return in giving – who cares if that sense of well-being is down to your own body chemistry or evolution? When I rang my seventy-year-old cousin to see if her daughter wanted my house for a week, she sounded delighted that I’d thought of her, which in turn delighted me. There have been tangible returns too: flowers and chocolates and wine sent for sorting things out with the crematorium, seeing the forty-something’s feature I’d advised on printed in the magazine and knowing how delighted she would be, even that stranger telling his sons we’ll each of us have to pass the good deed along the other day.

  Good deed no. 210: pulled together artwork for the other Sainsbury’s branches in case they do want to go ahead.

  Saturday, 30 July

  Summer this year is ten days in London staying in a friend’s house while they’re away and a few days in Suffolk in another friend’s cottage. Thank God for friends who holiday abroad. We left our own house looking incredibly clean and welcoming (including a ‘Drink Me’ bottle of wine in fridge) for Worcestershire cousins who are staying there for a week. It looked so welcoming once I had finished cleaning and polishing and artfully arranging, I decided that I actually wanted to spend my holiday in my own home. Why can’t we really live like that? In a note left for my cousins, I have implied it is take-me-as-you-find-me – in reality, I have worked like a navvy to get my home looking this good.

  Good deed no. 211.

  Sunday, 31 July

  Good deed no. 212: took a photo of an American tourist – a teacher carrying a cardboard cut-out of Flat Stanley around with her on her travels for her pupils – with the Paddington Bear statue at the railway station.

  Monday, 1 August

  I changed my clothes about a dozen times today before we set out for the crematorium. What do you wear to an exhumation? I settle on a French navy linen skirt, a white T-shirt and a white linen shirt. Sensible without being too formal, with due allowance made for the steaming heat. I’m not used to summer in the city any more. The weather in London is killing me, it’s so hot.

  Manor Park cemetery and crematorium on the outskirts of London, opened in 1874, boasts of ‘serene locations both for burials and cremated remains’ with ‘open and secluded areas for private graves, a woodland burial site and a children’s private garden for burial’. As you walk in through the massive wrought-iron gates, the memorials are all desolate angels and oversized monuments to boys lost in war, like John Travers Cornwall, VC, who was sixteen when he died from his wounds after saving many lives at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and is the youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross.

  I picked up a pot of African violets, which my gran always loved, pausing in my purchase as a hearse drove through the gates followed by a cortège of mourners. Truth to tell, I was slightly hysterical at the thought of it all, which was strange becau
se I’d been perfectly OK about it up to then. I took a deep breath, and the African violet and I went into the office.

  As I waited for the manager, I skimmed the brochure they have – Hello! magazine it isn’t. Graves are sold for fifty years, with further extensions ‘available on application’; traditional grave space starts at £2,900, while reopening a traditional grave comes in at £1,400. Even in death, there’s a price to pay. Ironically, the literature reassures the reader that staff understand ‘the importance of choosing the final resting place for your loved one’. That question – where will I lie when I’m dead but not quite gone? It made me wish I had a family vault of marble with carven skulls and crossed bones for me and mine. My son is buried in an Essex grave with my husband’s parents. I’ll never lie there. My natural father, who died when I was a baby, is buried in a Yorkshire cemetery; my mother’s already said there won’t be room for me once she is down there with her second husband. Who’d want to live with their parents when they’re grown and dead anyhows, Ma? We don’t even share the same taste in music. No, I need a marble vault with my name inscribed upon the stone – that or immortality. I’ll take either.

  The cemetery manager was an efficient, kindly woman in a white blouse and a dark skirt, so at least I’d got the right dress code. We sat down in a little room decorated with illustrated pages from the Book of Remembrance and a warning to visitors to watch their footing because of ground subsidence. She had the official paperwork which gave her permission to move the ashes, and the first thing she did was apologize, all over again, through me to the family. As a result of the mistake with my neighbour, they have changed the way they document things. More importantly, in future there will be checks on the neighbouring plots, and two people rather than one will check the ashes are indeed going in the right place. You make a mistake, you make it better.

  She brought in a small oak casket with my neighbour’s name and age and the words ‘In Loving Memory’ engraved on a small plaque. Outside the office was a little buggy which we climbed into, putt-putting through the cemetery, careful to avoid the mourners heading into the chapel, the empty oak casket resting on my knee. The gardener was already waiting for us at the ‘wrong’ plot when we drew up. Introductions made, he spread out a large piece of AstroTurf and dug in his trowel. The earth was dry with the recent warm weather. He dug in the trowel again and lifted the soil out onto the fake grass. I began to panic that the rain might have washed her all away, but as he lifted out his trowel again, along with the soil was ash. Not ash like cigarette ash, but grittier – white and grey, like something you might dig into the soil to make your flowers bloom. My lovely little neighbour. I felt like saying, ‘There you are, pet.’ She’d have been so pleased to see me, and I was pleased to see her too. The gardener eased the trowel into a large brown paper bag resting in the small casket, and dug again, again and again. They don’t scatter ash, haven’t for forty years – it gets everywhere I understand; instead, they dig a hole and bury it. The gardener kept digging till the hole was more than a foot deep, and not till he had scraped every scrap up did he stop. Then I took the trowel and scraped some more. ‘There’s no chance we are getting any of the other chap, is there?’ I asked, looking up – a fair question in the circumstances. The cemetery manager said no, the other chap had been buried in 1997 and the ash disperses without trace after ten years. The gardener gathered up the ash and soil on the bright green turf and carefully poured the last bit into the bag. The cemetery manager folded over the top of the bag, and as I thanked the chap whose eternal rest we’d so invaded, they carried the casket across to the rightful plot.

  A hole had already been dug. It was deeper than the hole we had just dug – this time, there’d be no coming back. The cemetery manager drew my attention to the plaque with my neighbour’s husband’s name on it, and I went to confirm the number of the plot. No more mistakes. I said I would like to pour the ashes into the newly dug plot. One last act of neighbourliness for the best of neighbours. I wasn’t sure they’d let me, bearing in mind I shouldn’t have been there at all, but the cemetery manager agreed, so I moved around the rose bed, took the brown bag from the gardener and knelt to pour the bodily remains of my one-time little friend into her final resting place. Her final resting place. And I tapped the bag and flicked it with my finger so that nothing stayed where it should not. I lifted the AstroTurf and tipped the soil that had been dug out over the ashes. The gardener tamped down the earth and covered it over with the scraps of bark they use to keep the weeds down, and I leaned over to slide the plaque into the earth that linked her with her husband and stood to say a prayer. And I thought of her harvesting hops in Kent, the pictures of her grandchild cherubs in the living room, the names of her sons like blessings in her mouth, and I thought how simple life is, how you love whomsoever you love, and how you die, and how in the end peace comes.

  Good deed no. 213: helped a friend rest in peace.

  Tuesday, 2 August

  Good deed no. 214: took another photo – of Italians this time, climbing the hill to Greenwich Observatory. The father wasn’t at all grateful but then his face was puce.

  Wednesday, 3 August

  Alert though I am to the opportunity to do good, there are occasions when I do the deed and then think there is more I should have done. Today on the street a girl was allegedly collecting for a £600 plane ticket to get her home to Australia to visit her mother, who has breast cancer. She had it all written out on cardboard. Was she a panhandler, or was the story true? If it was true, I realized only afterwards that I should have done more. If it was a lie, can it count as a good deed if the intention to do good was there? It has to, because no one knows the consequences of a deed at the moment it is done. You might help an old lady to cross a road only for her to be mugged, help someone to a new job only for them to be miserable. Someone else’s lie or misfortune cannot negate your own good intention. But can you do a good deed accidentally, without any intention to do good? Can you be an accidental good-deed doer? I am struggling to think how, but maybe. Can a good deed come back and bite the good-deed doer? I have to hope not, but of course it can; I just wouldn’t want to think it has to.

  Good deed no. 215.

  Thursday, 4 August

  Good deed no. 216: made a donation to the British Museum (already having paid the exhibition ticket price).

  Friday, 5 August

  Good deed no. 217: sponsored Dr Will’s son in his first marathon. The only problem is he is running for the League against Cruel Sports. The website says the charity ‘works tirelessly to put an end to animal cruelty through “sports” such as hunting with dogs, live game-bird shooting and trophy hunting abroad’ and relies on animal lovers nationwide. If they find out in Northumberland, they’ll feed me to the hounds.

  Saturday, 6 August

  Had one of those serendipitous moments today when I rang my best gay boyfriend to try and arrange to see him after The Railway Children and it turned out he was going to the actual performance with his partner and his nieces. Of all the theatres in all the world you had to walk into mine.

  It transpires that there are lots of good deeds in The Railway Children – including the fact the children’s mother takes in Mr Schepansky, a Russian refugee and dissident who is lost and ill and trying to find his wife and children. (It made me think that I should find a refugee and offer them a home.) I loved the performance – partly because it addressed the fundamental human need for kindness. For instance, when the children’s mother catches influenza, ‘the old gentleman’ from the train sends them a hamper of beef stock and foie gras, and more importantly works to free the children’s father, who has been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Yet kindness is so often overlooked as a motivating factor in literature – or for that matter in life. Love, yes. Money, yes. More kindness, that’s what I say.

  Good deed no. 218: bought ice cream for someone else’s nieces at The Railway Children (hardly on the scale of taking in a refugee, but ice cr
eam cannot be overlooked as major contribution to making the world a better place).

  Sunday, 7 August

  Good deed no. 219: invited teenage god-daughter to Northumberland for a week so her mum and dad can work with an easy conscience.

  Monday, 8 August

  Visited my son’s grave in a chilly English churchyard on a grey and washed-out day, the grass long and wild across it and its unkempt neighbours – Mother Nature claiming what’s hers. The cheek – when it is me he should be calling ‘Mam’. Perhaps it is as well we live so far away. Perhaps otherwise each week I’d manicure the grass with gilt, curlicued scissors meant for a baby’s nails, or graze the grassy grave myself, biting and chewing and swallowing up what grows there. Death keeps us shackled to God. Someone you love dies. Are you willing to accept they are lost and gone for all time and for ever more? Or do you choose faith, the miraculous, the mysterious? Do you choose the trumpet sound on Resurrection Day and a sometime-someplace reunion for the innocent, the deserving, for anyone with a golden ticket and a What Would Jesus Do? button? Once upon a time in a land called Eternity, the good and righteous met again those they had loved the most in this whole world, and knowing them again, holding them again, smiling on their beloved faces, together they lived happily hereafter. So endeth the sermon. The End. Or maybe not. Maybe this here is the end, this earth mound, filled up with child bones, wild and unmown grass, this lichen-covered headstone written over with his name and gouged-out promises of forever love.