The old sleeping bag

13 Mar The old sleeping bag

It’s about ten days since I searched in the loft for the old sleeping bag my daughter took on her gap year in Peru and put it through the wash. It was lying on top of a large rucksack that looked like new. If I were to fill the rucksack with all that I need, I’d struggle to carry it on a long-distance walk, though it was bought for that purpose. It hugged my back as I traversed the north of England, west to east, a few times; it’s lain on luggage racks in sleek modern trains as they whooshed through France, Germany and Austria and ancient grubby ones that clattered through Serbia to Bulgaria, in the boot of buses and taxis and on the floor of countless youth hostels on a journey overland to Istanbul. I suppose it’s about three years since I used it – two years of Covid makes calculating the recent past more challenging. It would occasionally catch my eye if I was rummaging in the loft for a suitcase, old files or the box of Christmas decorations; it seemed to have an expression of bafflement, a question hidden amongst its zips and pockets: “Why do you never pick me up these days?”. It reminds me of a younger, fitter me but also of a world when travel was easy. At least for the likes of us.

I re-checked the list of items needed and the address of the drop-off point then packed the laundered sleeping bag and the still-smart rucksack into a huge carrier bag together with a couple of packs of ibuprofen, lurking at the back of the cupboard but still within date. At the Ukrainian restaurant in Twickenham, I joined a queue of other, mainly female, donors with bags bulging at their feet: hats, scarves, gloves, nappies, tampax, toothbrushes still in their plastic wrappers, baby wipes, tins of baby food. In the cruellest of ironies, the restaurant is called ‘Prosperity’. I never knew of it till now, till the messages started to circulate, the refugees started to tramp westwards across Ukraine and the appeals for help came. There was something practical we could do to help, something small, yes, but something we could give.

The woman who took the bag from me smiled earnestly from tired eyes and thanked me. I would like to have asked her how she was, if she had family caught up in the conflict, if she had heard if they had escaped to safety somewhere but I was conscious of the number of people waiting behind me, the queue snaking along the street. “Good luck”, I said and left. 

As I walked back to the car, parked illegally around the corner, hazard lights flashing, I had a warm feeling inside. How generous people can be to strangers in distress. It felt like a surprise, I’m not sure why. I wondered: who are all these people, living in close proximity to me, in the same borough in south-west London, people I have never seen before and may never see again? For that moment I felt part of a community. As I drove home, I thought: ‘I must write a blogpost about this’. 

But it didn’t happen. I was lost for words. Till now.

Even this morning, finally giving into the urge to get something down, I was anxious about putting pen to paper, finger to key. What to say about it? There are a few things I need to admit. That, honestly, I’d rather hide from it all. That I shrink from watching too many news reports. Yet I believe I have a responsibility to keep abreast of what’s happening in some way. But it’s hard to watch and deal with the mix of incredulity, panic and outrage that blossoms inside. That, equally, I feel a responsibility to myself to not get submerged in the constant feed of reporting from the frontlines so as to avoid feeling enraged, powerless and hopeless all at once and all the time.  

Why did I feel less incensed and scared about all those other conflicts – Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan? Don’t get me wrong, they were shocking and disturbing and I railed at the TV screen and shook my head as I read the newspaper reports but they didn’t hit home the way this one does. Maybe it’s the saturation reporting, or the proximity at the edge of Europe, or the fact that my daughter’s paternal grandparents came from a Hungarian town that is now in Ukraine. Or is it because they look more like me? And if so, what questions must I ask myself?

None of us knows exactly what’s going on; we get glimpses. But we seem to know enough to grasp that people feel the bonds between them become stronger when their homes are under threat. And here, in a home that is, for the time being at least, safe, I had a small sense of belonging to a community of good people. I don’t know their names but I had a sense of kinship and community that is often elusive when you live in a big city like this one.

I hope the old sleeping bag keeps somebody warm, the rucksack keeps their few possessions safe, the ibuprofen make things hurt less for a while. And that between them they give a message that somebody here is thinking of them.