Katie Mulholland Read online

  KATIE MULHOLLAND

  Catherine Cookson

  Table of Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  Katie Mulholland

  Acknowledgements

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  BOOK FOUR

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  BOOK FIVE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  BOOK SIX

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  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 went 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 three or four 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 bedridden 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 80s.

  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

&nb
sp; 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

  Katie Mulholland

  As the daughter of a mining family, Katie Mulholland is forced to find work as a scullery maid in the house of the Rosiers. But the beautiful young girl soon captures the eye of her employer’s evil son, who rapes her and leaves her pregnant.

  Quick to dismiss Katie, the family forces her into a loveless marriage with the cruel manager of the Rosier mines. But Katie’s fate changes course when one man offers her the opportunity to make her own fortune, and to discover real love…

  Spanning Katie’s life from 1860 to the height of WWII, this is a spellbinding, triumphant, timeless drama from the pen of a brilliantly skilled storyteller.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1967

  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 1988

  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 978-1-78036-028-7

  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

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to offer my grateful thanks to my husband who first suggested that I should write a story with Palmer’s shipyard for a background. And to Mr Adrian Palmer, who answered my request for information on his family background by spontaneously lending me books and giving me an unbiased opinion of his great-grandfather, Sir Charles Mark Palmer, who was the founder of Palmer’s shipyard in Jarrow.

  And to Mr RG Wilson who spent many hours in many northern libraries delving for information covering the past hundred years in the North, and who transferred this information to me in so clear and so precise a manner.

  Also to Miss Millie Petersen, who so unselfishly offered for my use material she had gathered over a number of years, together with cuttings and photographs passed on to her by her uncle, one-time photographer on the Shields Daily Gazette.

  And lastly, but by no means least, to my secretary, Mrs Muriel Johnson, for her hard work and unceasing efforts on my behalf.

  However, I must explain that the story, as all my stories are wont to do, decided which line it intended to take, and from the beginning it dictated that this was to be the story of a woman’s life, and the shipyard and the mines and the two towns but a backcloth for that theme. Yet without all the information so kindly gathered for me by the aforementioned I could not have written the life of Katie Mulholland.

  CATHERINE COOKSON

  Loreto, Hastings, March 1966.

  BOOK ONE

  KATIE, 1860

  Chapter One

  ‘I don’t like marriage, Mama.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re saying, child.’

  ‘I do, Mama, and I don’t want to go back. I’m not going back.’

  Agnes Rosier shut out her reflection in the mirror by closing her eyes tightly. She also shut out the face of her seventeen-year-old daughter, her plain, nondescript daughter.

  Only three months ago she had sat on this very seat and looked at herself in this mirror and said ‘Thank God’. She had said it reverently, as befitted a good churchwoman. She had thanked Him for getting her daughter settled, the daughter she had imagined she was to be saddled with for the rest of her life. But the Almighty, who always answered her prayers, had arranged for Mr Arnold Noble to come visiting in the vicinity. Mr Arnold Noble was a man in his prime, a widower with two children. What caused the gentleman to become enamoured of her daughter, or which part of her had captivated Mr Noble, Agnes Rosier did not question. Had she done so, she would immediately have ruled out her face and her manners, for neither the one nor the other had any claim to charm. There were plain women, she knew, whose features had a certain attractiveness, but not her daughter’s. How this had come about was beyond her, for she herself was a handsome woman and the proof of this lay in the fact that she had passed her benefits on to her eldest son, and a portion to her second son. Theresa took after her father, at least outwardly; whom she took after inwardly they had yet to discover, for whoever heard of a mine-owner’s daughter going to a Chartist meeting? They had thought they had heard the last of Chartists in 1855 when that madman O’Connor had died; but there was an element trying to revive itself in Newcastle and their own daughter had attended a meeting and dared to voice her views at the dining table. That any girl of seventeen should talk back to her father was unheard of, but that she should bring into the open a matter that was like a gaping wound in his side was so monstrous that she had feared on that particular occasion that Mr Rosier would collapse. And if this wasn’t enough, her own brother had espied her, three miles away on the fells, talking to groups of evicted miners from the village, troublemakers, men who were more like savages and brutes than human beings. At the sight of his sister degrading herself Bernard’s rage had been almost as great as his father’s. To use his own words, he had thrown her into the carriage. Mr Rosier had confined his daughter to her room for a fortnight, and she, her mother, had had to bear the brunt of his tongue. What, he had demanded, had she bred him—a viper? A viper indeed. Then the Lord had provided Mr Noble, to release them from their impossible predicament.

  She herself had been in a
constant state of nerves until the moment when the ceremony was over, and immediately the couple had left on their honeymoon she had drunk three glasses of champagne, one after the other—a thing she had never done in her life before. Following this, she had proceeded to enjoy the reception and could remember very little after two o’clock in the morning, only that everyone voted the occasion an outstanding success.

  And now here was her daughter back home, on a visit presumably to attend the engagement ball of her eldest brother, and daring to tell her that she was not going to return to Mr Noble.

  She opened her eyes and looked through the mirror at the face that was staring at her. It was a thin face, thin cheeks, thin lips, thin eyebrows, thin light brown hair pulled so tightly back from her brow that it looked painful. But the main feature of her daughter’s face was her thin nose. It poked itself outwards; it was a Rosier nose, a feature that she had always been ashamed of. Her husband bore this affliction, as his father had before him. His father had changed their name from Rosenberg to Rosier, but he could do nothing about this stamp of heritage.

  She didn’t like her daughter’s face; she didn’t like any part of her daughter, and the thought of having her in the household again brought her swivelling round to confront her angrily.

  ‘Now listen to me, Theresa. You are a married woman with responsibilities and you must face up to them.’

  ‘I’ve told you, Mama, I don’t like…’

  Agnes Rosier now held up her hand, and through the narrow aperture of her lips she hissed, ‘Would it surprise you to learn that few women do?’

  They stared at each other. Then Agnes Rosier, composing herself and moistening her lips, asked, ‘Is it the children?’

  ‘No; I like the children.’

  ‘Does…does he keep you short of anything? I understood he was of a generous nature?’

  ‘He is.’

  Agnes looked down at her hands, lying one on top of the other on her taffeta petticoats. She did not want to ask the question, because she knew the answer; but if she did not ask it her daughter would tell her in any case, and she objected, as much as her husband did, to the free flow of words that emanated without let or hindrance from this child of theirs. It was much better to appear in control of the situation, and so she asked, ‘What is it you don’t like about marriage?’ She lowered her lids again as she waited for the answer. It came brief and terse, startling her, even although she had been aware of its substance.