The Lady Next Door Who Knew Everything

Or: why the smallest things turn out to be the biggest things

I've been thinking about kindness lately. Properly thinking about it, the way you do when you're past sixty and you've started noticing that the people who really shaped you weren't always the loudest ones in the room.

Growing up in a council house in East Lancashire, sharing a bedroom with three older brothers, I had a front-row seat to a particular kind of kindness — the unspoken, unflashy, no-fuss sort. The sort my mum specialised in. Tea on tap. A biscuit if you were quiet. A clean shirt if you were going somewhere that mattered, and a sharp word if you weren't grateful.

It wasn't kindness with a capital K. Nobody made a song and dance about it. But it was there, all the time, like the hum of the immersion heater — you only noticed it when it stopped.

Mrs Asquith and the boy with the broken leg

I wrote a piece a while back about the day my mate Richard got hit by a car outside the ice cream van in the summer of 1976. He'd just bought a 99 — a cone of whippy ice cream with a chocolate flake and raspberry sauce. His brother Ian was dripping a Zoom lolly on his Stretch Armstrong, and Richard, bless him, shot across the road to rescue it. Mr Dootson never stood a chance.

Richard ended up in a pool of melted ice cream and raspberry sauce, and the whole street thought he'd sliced his leg open. Carol was wailing. Wendy was shouting. His mum came running out in her pink marigolds, still stained from perming the next-door neighbour's hair.

And then Mrs Asquith arrived. The local seen-it-all, done-it-all.

"That's nowt!" she said. "Our Gary was worse than that after he fell off the coal shed."

And off she marched.

Now, on the face of it, Mrs Asquith was being a bit of a cow. A child was lying in the road. This was not the moment for competitive injuries. But I've thought about that moment a lot over the years, and I'm not sure she was being unkind at all. I think — in her brisk, no-nonsense, Lancashire way — she was telling the assembled mothers and screaming children that the boy was going to be alright. That she'd seen worse. That nobody needed to panic.

She wasn't kind in the way the cards tell you to be kind. But she was, in her own daft way, doing a kindness.

The kindness we don't recognise as kindness

Most of the kindness I've received in my life hasn't looked like kindness on the surface.

It looked like my dad coming home from the cardboard box factory smelling of damp cardboard, and ruffling my hair as he walked past. It looked like the editor of the local paper — who was, by any measure, a complete psycho — finally telling me a piece of copy was "not bad," which from him was practically a wedding speech. It looked like my future wife keeping the love poems I'd printed out at work and pinned to her notice board, in envelopes, when I was too shy to say the things out loud.

Years later, when I went back through those poems and read them again, I realised something. The kindness wasn't the poems. The kindness was the keeping.

She'd held on to bits of paper that nobody else would have thought worth saving. Quietly. For decades. And when I rediscovered them, I started writing again. Which is the reason, in a roundabout way, that I'm writing this now.

Kindness in a noisy world

I worry sometimes that we've made kindness into a brand. There are slogans on tote bags. There are hashtags. There are entire wellness industries built around being a Good Person, and a lot of them are very loud about it.

But the kindness I keep noticing — the kindness that actually does something — is almost always quiet. It's the friend who lets themselves in with the key under the garden gnome because they sensed you were having a bad week. It's the lad behind the butcher's counter who's been having an awful day and tries to smile at the next customer anyway. It's the nurse on the night shift, walking home with feet steaming in a cloud of disinfectant, who still finds it in herself to be gentle when she gets in.

None of these people are wearing a t-shirt that says BE KIND. They're just being it.

Why I wrote a book about a lady with an ear trumpet

When I wrote Maude's Magical Ear Trumpet, I didn't set out to write a book about kindness. I set out to write a book about an old lady in a yellow coat who is given a peculiar device by her doctor. The kindness crept in, the way it always does.

Maude doesn't think of herself as a kind person. She just makes the tea. She just asks the right question. She just visits the friend in hospital because she said she would. The trumpet, in the end, is a bit of a McGuffin — it's the excuse for Maude to slow down enough to notice what she'd have noticed anyway, if life hadn't been quite so busy.

That, I think, is what kindness really is. Not a feeling. Not a slogan. Just slowing down enough to hear what someone is actually saying.

Mrs Asquith would have hated this whole article, by the way. She'd have read it, sniffed, and said "That's nowt. Our Gary wrote a book about kindness and it were three hundred pages."

And in her own way, she'd have been being lovely.

About Maude's Magical Ear Trumpet

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading. Now, before I let you go, I want to tell you about Maude.

Maude's Magical Ear Trumpet is my picture book about an older lady in a bright yellow coat and a pink and yellow spotted hat, who is given a strange old trumpet by her doctor. When she puts it to her ear, it tells her how people really feel. The butcher who says he's fine but isn't. The daughter who says nothing's wrong but everything is. The friend in the café carrying something quietly. And in the end, of course, the trumpet turns out not to be magic at all — Maude was the magic the whole time.

It's a story for children aged roughly 4 to 8, but I think you'll find it's also a story for the grown-up reading it aloud.

👉 Buy Maude's Magical Ear Trumpet on Amazon

If you do read it, drop me a line and tell me what you thought. I read every message. That's the Maude in me, I suppose.