Collecting

My experience is that most people are generous. Not showily so, not ostentatiously generous – but quietly, reflexively open. Present them with a collecting bucket and a good cause and something in them responds before the rational mind has finished its cost-benefit analysis.

A Saturday afternoon earlier this month bore this out yet again. I was one of about thirty volunteers collecting for The Exeter Chiefs Foundation at the Chiefs’ match against Gloucester. The Foundation supports several charities across Exeter, including Citizens Advice, who organised our team. So it was buckets, card readers, and enough layers of clothing to survive a February afternoon outdoors.

The response was overwhelmingly warm. People gave. People smiled. People paused to ask which charities the Foundation supports. Taps of cards, clinks of coins, words of encouragement. The generosity of strangers.

At half-time, we took our buckets into the hospitality boxes.

In one, we were immediately welcomed. Wallets appeared, phones came out, a young boy dropped his change into the bucket with quiet concentration. Generosity as reflex.

In the next, we managed perhaps half a sentence before one of the party waved us away. No words, no explanation. Just a hand raised and lowered, and the very expectation that we would leave.

As I said to my collecting companion: clearly hadn’t read the manners manual.

To be fair, people decline for all sorts of reasons; and that’s entirely OK. A polite “not today” is a perfectly good sentence; nobody minds hearing it. What stays with you is not the refusal but its texture. The wordlessness, the brevity, the assumption that a gesture would do where even a few syllables were called for.

But proportion matters. One silent wave against an afternoon of open wallets and kind words. The Foundation and its volunteers had a good day. The generous far outnumbered the curt, as they usually do. Most people are decent. I keep finding this out, and it keeps being reassuring.