Running, jumping, climbing trees…

Waking Up To Change by Sean McGrath

This is a piece written for the Scottish charity Hazel’s Footprints, a charitable trust set up in memory of Hazel Scott Aiton, a friend who died five years ago today.

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In the middle of a warm afternoon in July 2005, I walked into one of the charity shops that line Ludlow’s jumbled Tudor high street, and emerged ten minutes later having spent £5 on a cheerful-looking toy monkey. It was a few days before I was due to fly to Tanzania, where I was due to meet a group of 25 (ish) trembling adventurers at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. The mountain was one of the very first, and most significant, goals for the newly forged Hazel’s Footprints Trust – and the monkey was going to go up with us.

The monkey was soon christened Boris. We carried him with us wherever we went and he became the star attraction for the knots of Chaga children who danced about us as we relaxed, acclimatising in the foothills. Within a week he had been transported like a relay baton to Uhuru Peak, the highest point in Africa, and three or four months later – at a charity ball in Scotland – he became the subject of a furious bidding war and was eventually sold for the staggering sum of £600.

Boris’ victorious (albeit slightly poorer) new owners were Bill and Joan Scott Aiton, Hazel’s parents. They had taken to the stuffed animal so much that they had decided to make him the Trust’s official mascot.

Boris’ meteoric rise to stardom from the shelves of Cancer Research was spectacular. He followed his assent of Kilimanjaro with a trip to Everest base camp; he was carried on sponsored walks and around marathons. In 2006, we were re-united with him once again, as we fastened him tightly to the roof rack of our mini before we set of on the Mongol Rally – a charity touring event which took us a third of the way around the world.

The point of this rather silly vignette is to explain that with Hazel’s Footprints Trust, you should always expect the improbable. The Trust is now five years old and it has evolved in so many ways that were never imagined when its founders sat down for the first time around the long dining table in the kitchen at Legerwood Farm.

The idea for Hazel’s Footprints Trust emerged in the weeks that followed Hazel’s tragic death. I still have a card from Bill and Joan which indicated that they were planning some sort of ‘fund’ aimed at helping ‘those causes that Hazel held so dear.’

Within a few months this ‘fund’ had become a trust. And in its first year there was the Kilimanjaro climb, the enormously successful charity auction, Hazel’s gap year diary was published and the first despatch of Footprinters (Ben Britton, Emma McGonigle and Michelle Davidson for the record) were funded as they set out for Nepal, China and Thailand, to a mixture of educational and charity posts.

The following year the number of Footprinters rose to 15. These Footprinters were drawn from people all over the country who were travelling overseas to work on a diverse range of projects from India to Guyana, Thailand to Haiti. Meanwhile, in far less exotic locations, volunteers were running the Great North Run, the London Marathon, climbing mountains, baking cakes, running raffles and doing just about everything in between – all helping to raise money for the Trust.

While the operations centre still remained in the downstairs office at Legerwood Farm, the Trust grew in all directions – fuelled by Hazel’s close family and supported by a vast network of her school and university friends.

The energy of the young HFT was reflective of Hazel herself. I remember meeting her for the first time, squashed in an overcrowded courtyard outside a horribly busy bar that was nestled somewhere in the winding alleys behind Saddler Street on the Durham bailey. It was the first in a series of pre-Kilimanjaro social events that we had lined up in the weeks before we left for Heathrow.

Trying to be friendly I offered her a drink, and marched off through a forest of elbows, upturned shirt collars and swaying rugby players in search of an orange juice (her) and a bottle of beer (me). It was an exhausting journey and the return trip took around 20 infuriating minutes. When I returned to the court yard, clutching the two drinks as if they were hand grenades, Hazel was already surrounded by ten or so other people half way through a loud conversation about mountains. She lowered those blue eyes at me and called out in a strange accent that I hadn’t quite deciphered:

‘Ah! There you are. Where the hell have you been all this time?’

I soon discovered that her impatience wasn’t personal, but it was characteristic. She explained that the following morning, before we were even hauling ourselves delicately out of bed, she would be rowing in the River Wear. It was the perfect introduction to the girl who was always busy.

Our friendship quickly found its feet, aided by the fact that she soon struck up an amorous relationship with my housemate. Over the next year – throughout the term times – I saw her daily, as she darted from one side of the city to the other, constantly entangled in an endless procession of rowing stints, play rehearsals, charity events, magazine articles and the odd niggling philosophy essay.

But in between these outbursts of frenzied activity, there were glimpses of Hazel’s quieter side. She was a letter writer, a reader and a note-taker – always posing nagging questions or ready with some inspiring or introspective quote. For months she bothered me to read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (I’ve tried many times and I’ve never quite got it) – explaining over and over again that it was wondrous, deep and revealing.

And all the while she had an amazing capacity to keep in contact with just about everyone. After our Kilimanjaro climb, I remember being slumped cheerfully in the wicker chair of a beachside restaurant in Zanzibar, staring out at the Indian Ocean while chewing kingfish and supping of Safari beers when Hazel strode in. She announced angrily that she was fed up with her Hotmail email service as it only allowed you to send email to thirty five contacts at a time.

‘Thirty five?’ we asked, as if she had just announced that she was from the moon.

She then sat down, and proceeded to count on her finger a list of ‘at least forty people’ with whom she was in constant contact, leaving us all suddenly feeling guilty that we had barely yet managed a single email home. It was the mark of someone engaged with life in an extraordinary way, and by a quirk of fate, these forty people comprised the bulk of the team that returned to Kilimanjaro in her memory two years later.

One of the greatest achievements of Hazel’s Footprints Trust is that it manages to echo this unique personality. Just like Hazel the Trust is outgoing and open, ambitious and worldly, energetic and quietly philosophical. The website is dotted with some of the many quotations that Hazel recorded during her life, perhaps the most poignant of which is the ancient Chinese proverb:

‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’

Five years ago, Hazel’s family took the first step by establishing this Trust in her name. Half a decade on they can only be proud and comforted by what followed. The Trust has sent volunteers to all corners of the globe, they have supported the Otjikondo Village School Foundation in Namibia and they have now established a successful outpost in London – bringing Scottish culture to the ignorant in the form of Burns’ Night Suppers and an annual Highland fling.

I can’t imagine that we’ll ever meet anyone quite like Hazel again. She was unique. But through the Trust her ideals and her personality live on – transcending all of the old boundaries of space and time. And it’s nice to think that whatever mountain we’re climbing, whichever rally we are struggling to complete, in whatever corner of the globe that we might be trying to herd schoolchildren along – that there is a little bit of her in us all.

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image credit: seanmcgrath