Our Kate Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  Our Kate

  Dedication

  1990 Foreword

  1981 Foreword

  1973 Foreword

  PART ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  PART TWO

  Nine

  Ten

  PART THREE

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  In brief:

  Her books have sold over 130 million copies in 26 languages throughout the world and still counting . . .

  Catherine Cookson was born Katherine Ann McMullen on June 27th, 1906 in the bleak industrial heartland of Tyne Dock, South Shields (then part of County Durham) and later moved to East Jarrow which is now in Tyne and Wear.

  She was the illegitimate daughter of Kate Fawcett, an alcoholic, whom she thought was her sister. She was raised by her grandparents, Rose and John McMullen. The poverty, exploitation and bigotry she experienced in her early years aroused deep emotions that stayed with her throughout her life and which became part of her stories. Catherine left school at 13 and after a period of domestic service, she took a job in a laundry at Harton Workhouse in South Shields. In 1929, she moved south to run the laundry at Hastings Workhouse, working all hours and saving every penny to buy a large Victorian house. She took in gentleman and lady lodgers to supplement her income and took up fencing as one of her hobbies. One of her lodgers was Tom Cookson, a teacher at Hastings Grammar School and in June 1940 they married. They were devoted to each other throughout their lives together. But the early years of her marriage were beset by the tragic miscarriage of four pregnancies and her subsequent mental breakdown. This took her over a decade to recover from, which she did, often by standing in front of a mirror and giving herself a damn good swearing at!

  Catherine took up writing as a form of therapy to deal with her depression and joined the Hastings Writers’ Group. Her first novel, Kate Hannigan, was published in 1950. In 1976, she returned to Northumberland with Tom and wen3t on to write 104 books in all. She became one of the most successful novelists of all time and was one of the first authors to have 3 or 4 titles in the Bestseller Lists at the same time.

  She read widely: from Chaucer to the literature of the 1920s; to Plato’s Apologia on the trial and death of Socrates (she said that here was someone who stuck to his principles even unto death); to history of the nineteenth century and the Romantic poets; to Lord Chesterfield’s Letters To His Son and the books and booklets that abounded in her part of the country dealing with coal, iron, lead, glass, farming and the railways. She disliked it when her books were labeled as ‘romantic’. To her, they were ‘readable social history of the North East interwoven into the lives of the people’. For the millions of her readers, she brought ‘an understanding of themselves or perhaps of their dear ones. Her stories do not bring in a realism in which the worst is taken for granted, but a realism in which love, caring and compassion appear, and most certainly hope. ‘This type of realism does exist,’ Tom Cookson said of her writing. There is nothing sentimental about her writing; she is unrelenting in the strong images she invokes and the characters she portrays. They were born of her formative years and her personal struggles. Many of her novels have been transferred to stage, film and radio with her television adaptations on ITV lasting over a decade and achieving ratings of over 10 million viewers.

  Besides writing, she was an innovative painter and she believed that her father’s genes fostered the strength to work hard but also, in rare moments of freedom, to strive to better herself. Catherine was famed for her care of money but had given much to charities, hospitals and medical research in areas close to her heart and to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne who set up a lectureship in hematology. The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust continues to donate generously to charitable causes. The University later conferred her the Honorary Degree of Master of Arts. She received the Freedom of the Borough of South Tyneside, today known as Catherine Cookson Country. The Variety Club of Great Britain named her Writer of the Year and she was voted Personality of the North East. Other honours followed: an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1986 and she was created Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She was appointed an Honorary Fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford in 1997.

  Throughout her life but especially in the later years, she was plagued by a rare vascular disease, telangiectasia, which caused bleeding from the nose, fingers and stomach and resulted in anemia. As her health declined, she and her husband moved for a final time to Jesmond in Newcastle upon Tyne to be nearer medical facilities. For the last few years of her life, she was bed-ridden and Tom hardly ever left her bedside, looking after her needs, cooking for her and taking her on her emergency trips, often in the middle of the night, into Newcastle. Their lives were still made up of the seven day week and twelve or more hours each day, going over the fan mail, attending to charities and going over the latest dictated book, with Tom meticulously making corrections line by line, for Catherine’s eyesight had long faded in her 80’s.

  This most remarkable woman passed away on June 11th 1998 at the age of 91. Tom, six years her junior, had earlier suffered a heart attack but survived long enough to be with her at her end. He passed away on 28th June, just 17 days after his beloved Catherine.

  Catherine Cookson’s Books

  NOVELS

  Colour Blind

  Maggie Rowan

  Rooney

  The Menagerie

  Fanny McBride

  Fenwick Houses

  The Garment

  The Blind Miller

  The Wingless Bird

  Hannah Massey

  The Long Corridor

  The Unbaited Trap

  Slinky Jane

  Katie Mulholland

  The Round Tower

  The Nice Bloke

  The Glass Virgin

  The Invitation

  The Dwelling Place

  Feathers in the Fire

  Pure as the Lily

  The Invisible Cord

  The Gambling Man

  The Tide of Life

  The Girl

  The Cinder Path

  The Man Who Cried

  The Whip

  The Black Velvet Gown

  A Dinner of Herbs

  The Moth

  The Parson’s Daughter

  The Harrogate Secret

  The Cultured Handmaiden

  The Black Candle

  The Gillyvors

  My Beloved Son

  The Rag Nymph

  The House of Women

  The Maltese Angel

  The Golden Straw

  The Year of the Virgins

  The Tinker’s Girl

  Justice is a Woman

  A Ruthless Need

  The Bonny Dawn

  The Branded Man

  The Lady on my Left

  The Obsession

  The Upstart

  The Blind Years

  Riley

  The Solace of Sin

  The Desert Crop

  The Thursday Friend

  A House Divided

  Rosie of the River

  The Silent Lady

  FEATURING KATE HANNIGAN

  Kate Hannigan (her first published novel)

  Kate Hannigan’s Girl (her hundredth published novel)

  THE MARY ANN NOVELS

  A Grand Man

  The Lord and Mary Ann

  The Devil and Mary Ann

 
Love and Mary Ann

  Life and Mary Ann

  Marriage and Mary Ann

  Mary Ann’s Angels

  Mary Ann and Bill

  FEATURING BILL BAILEY

  Bill Bailey

  Bill Bailey’s Lot

  Bill Bailey’s Daughter

  The Bondage of Love

  THE TILLY TROTTER TRILOGY

  Tilly Trotter

  Tilly Trotter Wed

  Tilly Trotter Widowed

  THE MALLEN TRILOGY

  The Mallen Streak

  The Mallen Girl

  The Mallen Litter

  FEATURING HAMILTON

  Hamilton

  Goodbye Hamilton

  Harold

  AS CATHERINE MARCHANT

  Heritage of Folly

  The Fen Tiger

  House of Men

  The Iron Façade

  Miss Martha Mary Crawford

  The Slow Awakening

  CHILDREN’S

  Matty Doolin

  Joe and the Gladiator

  The Nipper

  Rory’s Fortune

  Our John Willie

  Mrs. Flannagan’s Trumpet

  Go tell It To Mrs Golightly

  Lanky Jones

  Bill and The Mary Ann Shaughnessy

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Our Kate

  Let Me Make Myself Plain

  Plainer Still

  Our Kate

  Catherine Cookson’s personal story, Our Kate, made plain how it was she knew her background and her characters so well: she lived in it and with them, under conditions so hard and primitive that, as one reviewer of Our Kate wrote: ‘It is a vivid, raw, tenacious existence which she recollects; at times almost more than the eye can endure.’

  Being born illegitimate was only one of the difficulties she lived through, but the stigma was to dominate her consciousness until well into her middle years, when, in the calm of a happy marriage, she was able to accept all the varied influences that had formulated her character, and to write it all down in this masterful exercise in self-therapy and reconciliation.

  Our Kate of the title is not Catherine Cookson, but her mother, and it is around her that the autobiography revolves. Her mother is presented with all her faults yet, despite these, she comes out as a warm and loveable human figure. And against this background we see cast in relief the young Catherine going to ‘the pawn’, fetching the beer, being ignored because of her birth, collecting driftwood from the river and coke as it fell off the gas-carts, for she lived and struggled through the era when work was scarce and social security non-existent.

  This is an autobiography that is also the story of a period. It is a bleakly honest statement about living with hardship and poverty seen through the eyes of a highly sensitive child and woman. No one can read Our Kate without realising that good can come out of bad and hope can conquer despair, and ultimately it is a very happy book.

  OUR KATE

  Catherine Cookson

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1969

  The right of Catherine Cookson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

  This book is sold subject to the condition it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form.

  ISBN 978-1-78036-096-6

  Sketch by Harriet Anstruther

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described, all situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  Published by

  Peach Publishing

  Dedication

  To All Bairns

  To all bairns

  Who own no name,

  And who behind laughter-lighted face

  Hide the shame

  Of sin,

  Which benefited their joy

  Not a trace.

  To all bairns

  Who carry the weight of guilt

  Of censure and law,

  Who reach the Courts,

  The Borstals,

  The Homes;

  Look not in them for flaw.

  Nor yet in their mothers,

  Who were bairns,

  Or in their nameless fathers,

  Who were bairns,

  Right down the ages to time’s start.

  But seek the flaw in good men,

  Who make laws for bairns to keep.

  And having looked,

  And found,

  Ask that this law

  That breeds a stigma,

  That reeks its stench on women

  And calls her offspring

  Bastard,

  Be changed.

  Do not ask me how

  The victim’s vision is distorted,

  For in her mind

  She is still a bairn,

  And the fly-blow of a system.

  1990 Foreword

  I was seventy-five when, in 1981, I wrote the second foreword to this book. I was, as usual, going through a very bad time with hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia from which I suffer, and I remember thinking, ‘Well, there’s one thing certain; you’ll not write another.’

  Yet, nearly nine years later, here I am at it again.

  Am I surprised? Yes, in a way. However, I shouldn’t be, for if I look back over the years there seem to have been many times when I have said to myself, ‘This is it!’, only to answer, ‘Come on, you can’t leave Tom, and anyway, even if the rest of you is rotten your ticker’s all right, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with your mind . . . ’

  Now that is an odd thought, because when I first attempted to write this book, there was much wrong with my mind. First, it was bent on retaliation; secondly, there wasn’t one happy memory in it. As for telling it to forget and forgive . . . never! The result was, as I have previously said, eight drafts written over a period of twelve years, but I still wasn’t free of the past and, as I know now, never will be, for I have learned you cannot blot out an etching that has been burnt into the metal by wishing or by words. I have tried, but to no effect. I may have forgiven, but I can never forget: not only the events of my early childhood, but also those that happened during the fifteen years following on from the time I left the North to 1945 when the bubble burst; and worse still, the effect of the following twenty (not ten) years spent trying to cope with my mind.

  During these years, I can say I led two lives: one played by the Grammar School master’s wife, with the merry little dinner parties, the busy, busy housewife and mad gardener, not forgetting the novelist; while the other was fighting the battle that still reared its head and prompted retaliation for my life, particularly for the loss of my babies.

  Did it help that during this period I was inundated with letters begging for my help with how to tackle a breakdown? What could I say but tell each writer to hang on, that it would pass? ‘Tell yourself’, I would say, ‘I can beat this; I will know peace. And remember that your breakdown has been brought about by your own thinking and that therefore the only way to be rid of it is again through your own thinking, but this time positively.’ I did not say that words come easily, and results come only after a long, long, hard haul.

  I had blamed certain events in my life for causing my breakdown, but as I see it now, had I been made of tougher material my thinking would not have been affected so much by sensitivity. However, the climate of public opinion was against me from the start; I was illegitimate, and it is only if you were in the early part of this century that you can really understand what shame meant.

  As I mentioned in my previous foreword, this autobiography seems to have been of some help to many people. Its frankness has gone a long way towards enabling them to drag their own disgraceful secrets from the pain-filled cupboards of their minds.

  However, it would seem, and again in the light of public opinion, tha
t living with a boyfriend is now not only accepted, but also that no stigma is attached to the word ‘illegitimate’ which might, by some, be applied to the offspring of such an association. However, when, as often happens, a break-up does occur, the absence of a father will, in my opinion, assuredly affect the child as a child needs a man in its life as much as most women do – someone whom it can call Dad, Da, or Pop, but always meaning Father – otherwise there will be a want.

  I must stop, else I shall be going into another autobiography, and I haven’t time for that. What time is left after Tom and I have coped with my mail and I get down to another book – from bed – I spend in thinking of ways to achieve that illusive peace of mind. My search so far has pointed out to me that there are stages of quality attached to this business, and I fear the only way I could possibly achieve that for which I am striving would be if I were in a closed order and God had really taken me under His wing and wiped out the world and all its attendant vicissitudes. But as I know I shall never experience perfect peace of mind, I shall just have to carry on hoping I can make it to the lesser grade which will supply enough Grace to soothe the residue of those sad feelings which still linger, and get me through each day as it comes.