Over the next couple of days, I thought I might run a couple of excerpts from "A Year of Doing Good" here on the blog. The media narrative focussed on my good deeds, in reality the book is as much about what other people do as it is about anything I did during the year. One of the most remarkable "characters" in the book is Jean.
The Helper (extracted from "A Year of Doing Good")
I am trying to set my kids a good example, having been set the best
of examples by my own parents. I may fail. Epically, as my son
would say. Still, epic fail or not, I’ll know I tried. What happens,
though, if you don’t learn about charity and generosity from those
who should teach it to you as a child? What then? Do you grow up
hard and loveless? Or do you teach yourself what goodness is?
Jean taught herself. Standing four feet eight and a half inches in
her tiny stocking feet, 61-year-old Jean makes you want to pop her
in your pocket and take her with you wherever you go, like a lucky
charm. After twenty-seven years of working with the terminally ill
and those with mental health issues, she retired as a community
support worker because of acute osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.
Since then, two days a week for a decade, the pupils at my kids’
school have taken it in turns to sit next to Jean as she hears them
read. ‘That’s marvellous,’ she says as they stumble through the
words. ‘Superb,’ she tells them as they turn the final page. Encouraging
children when she was only ever discouraged. Boosting their
self-esteem when hers was covered over with ash and beatings. Her
arm around these children, when her own mother would never
hold her.
Jean grew up in poverty in Ashton-under-Lyne with an alcoholic
father who served in the merchant navy during the war, was
unemployed thereafter and whose mood depended on the 2.30 at
Chepstow. ‘I used to protect the kids. I can remember standing
with my three brothers behind me’ – she stretches out her arms as
she talks, as if to bar a doorway – ‘and saying, “Don’t hit them, hit
me,” and he did. That’s how it was. That’s what life was like, but
he was still my dad and I loved my dad – worshipped him. Three
weeks before he died of lung cancer – he was only forty-six – he
apologized for all he’d done, and I did forgive him – and my
mum – because you have to.’ Jean says that life was hard in the
1950s. ‘Nobody had anything after the war. It was all make do and
mend and it was all big families. I was around six and I remember
my mother saying to my dad, “We can’t send her to school – she’s
too many bruises.” You’d get a good hiding and that was one of
those things. It wasn’t any different for the girl up the road, but it
was a horrible childhood – hard and cruel. I’ve got more bad memories
than good.’
However tough life was for that ‘girl up the road’, there was
certainly no sanctuary to be found for Jean in her mother’s
arms. Jean’s mother worked shifts in a cigarette factory and as a
piecework machinist making handbags at home. ‘A grafter’, Jean
describes her as. ‘Grafter’: a word of respect – a compliment.
But compliments didn’t flow the other way. ‘I can’t remember a
word of encouragement – none whatsoever. The only thing I can
remember from my mother is her saying, “Go into the other room –
you make me feel sick.” ’ The woman had spent her war in the Land
Army, had five children in five years, ten years fallow and then two
more children. She had an alcoholic husband and worked all hours.
But there are all kinds of poverty in this world – did she work so
many hours, was she so spent, that there was never a moment for a
fond word or a loving gesture? ‘I can’t remember my mum or my
dad ever giving us cuddles,’ says Jean. ‘I tell my children I love them
every day, but there was none of that when I was growing up. That
wasn’t just my upbringing, that was the 1950s for you, but she was
a hard woman. Mind you, she had to be.’ As she speaks, I wonder
that tiny Jean was strong enough to keep growing on the inside to
the size of a giant. Years after, a woman can still feel a father’s fists
fall on her young girl’s body, however heartfelt his ‘Sorry’. You
can’t recover from the thousand tiny hurts where there should have
been a hundred-thousand-million
mother’s kisses. But you can
hold your own children tighter, cover them in the kisses you never
had, and say, ‘I love you, love you, love you, child, love you all the
more for never knowing this myself.’
When Jean fell pregnant at sixteen she was sent to a Church
of England home for unmarried mothers and their babies in Blackburn,
the girls taken together for antenatal classes but not given pain
relief in hospital during the birth of their babies and talked down to
by nurses. ‘Inside you were all in the same boat – in a lot of ways
it was better than home. Outside, though, they segregated you. You
felt awful, you had to walk down the street with your head down,
you felt shame – I still do sometimes.’ Her newborn son should have
been put up for adoption; instead – ever the protector of the vulnerable
– Jean fought for him. ‘I prayed on my hands and knees to my
dad to keep him, because you were in that home to give the child
away. I thought, I just can’t, and finally my dad said, “If you bring
this baby home, you’re not to ask me or your mum for anything
because we won’t help,” and by gum they stuck to their word.’ Jean
cleaned houses with her baby in tow while bringing up her two
youngest siblings, now one and three – siblings who when they left
school came to live with her and her husband.
I am looking at Jean and thinking, ‘Why are you here doing
good? Why aren’t you mean and angry after the start you had in
life? When your health broke in your forties, why didn’t you say,
“I’ve done enough,” rather than, “What can I do now?” Why don’t
you take rather than give?’ I ask her whether it helps her to do good
and she says, ‘I’ve seen it – I’ve been there, but you have got to
have hope, you have to know that things will get better. I am who
I am because of what I have gone through and I can never see me
not caring, not doing what I do.’ In nature, where there should be
bitter herbs and rank weeds, occasionally a tangle of wild roses
bloom: scented, startling pink and beautiful.
3 comments:
What an uplifting but also heartbreaking story. I am close to tears after reading Jean's story. Life was tough in the 50s, but for some people it was brutal.
that's it - I am buying the book...
Inspiring story. I think some people are simply born good ... and whatever injustices and wrongs are done to them, the power of the goodness endures.
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