Inspired by seeing an obituary for a lovely wonderful, wonderful teacher from my childhood I’ve been thinking of the times people did something they didn’t have to do, just to be nice.
It’s to easy to focus on the bad things I thought it might be nice to have a thread of nice things people did just because they could or wanted too.
I had an appalling childhood. My parents were abusive and neglectful. My teacher when I was 6 was lovely. She used to give me her “extra” bananas or snacks in the morning or break times knowing that I was often hungry.
In the week of our school Christmas Fayre she ran competitions and blatantly made sure I won a “free” raffle ticket.
On the day of the fayre, which was the last day of school before the holidays, my raffle ticket won me a mystery hamper. It was in a lovely bag and contained those little boxes of breakfast cereals, it had crisps, and little individually wrapped biscuits. She’d even sourced the little things of milk that didn’t need to go in the fridge.
my older brother collected me and when we got home he helped me hide it and it was amazing in the holidays to be able to have secret snacks when I was hungry. I was the youngest by a long way so my siblings were much more adept at stealing food.
I only realised as an adult that my winning at the Fayre and the fact that I coincidentally “bumped into” her a few times in the summer holidays and she just happened to have odd foods leftover from picnics she’d been on weren’t at all coincidence.
She was instrumental eventually in me going to live with my grandparents.
Every Christmas for my whole life I’ve thought of that hamper. It was the best present I got.