A Ruthless Need Read online

  A RUTHLESS NEED

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  A Ruthless Need

  PART ONE One

  Two

  Three

  PART TWO One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  PART THREE One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  PART FOUR One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  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

  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 r />
  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

  A Ruthless Need

  Even in the heat of battle, Geoff Fulton, a professional soldier, would always carry with him the memory of the night he was on leave, when his timely intervention rescued fourteen-year-old Lizzie from the oldest of perils for a young girl, and thereby began to change her life. Lizzie came from a desperately poor home, ruled by a vicious stepmother only too ready to profit from setting the girl along the same sordid road as her elder sister had been made to take.

  The year was 1937 and the place a rural enclave of County Durham, where Geoff had been born and raised in the old farmhouse that remained the home of his parents, even though most of its land had been sold off to neighbouring Low Tarn Hall. There his father still worked as estate manager for the demanding Ernest Bradford-Brown, self-made owner of the Hall and many other properties. Anxious about his increasingly handicapped mother and seeing in Lizzie a girl of spirit, Geoff concluded that she might, with care and training, solve his problem and benefit herself. So, after a quick visit to confront the protesting Mrs Gillespie, he was soon back home with his willing protégée.

  Then, in 1943, when Geoff returned wounded from the desert war, it was to find a Lizzie he hardly recognized—she was mature and highly attractive. For her part, she soon came to realise that he too had changed. Embittered by his experiences at war and rejected by Ernest Bradford-Brown’s daughter Janis after a lengthy relationship long opposed by her irascible father, he now appeared to Lizzie to have a ruthless streak that was at considerable odds with the caring man who had, all those years ago, rescued her from poverty and deprivation.

  Catherine Cookson’s powerful novel is the story of a girl who took the chance of a new life and seized the opportunities to make something of herself.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1995

  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 978-1-78036-020-1

  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

  Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.

  Emily Dickinson 1830-1886

  PART ONE

  ON LEAVE, 1937

  One

  ‘Oh, you do look funny, Geoff; like one of those comic spies at the pictures: long black mac and black cap. They don’t look like that on your father.’

  ‘They do, but you’re used to him.’

  ‘Anyway, why do you want to put them on? It’s a dark night and it isn’t raining.’

  ‘Well, for your information—’ the tall young man leaned down towards his mother whose head just reached his shoulder, and in a confidential whisper, he said, ‘it’s like this, Mrs Fulton, I’ve been four years in the army now as you know, but in the first few weeks my dear corporal instilled into me that I had to make all me bits of brass shine, like the good book tells us, as a light before us. That was in the daytime, like. Then what d’you think the silly so-and-so said after that? “The moon shines bright on Tommy Atkins,” he said, “so no matter what the silly bugger of a science master might have told you, bullets don’t bounce off brass. Therefore, you lot of so-and-so idiots, muck ’em up or cover ’em up before you brave the night.”’

  ‘Oh, you!’ His mother, who had been leaning on a walking stick, now hung it on the back of a chair, before gripping the lapels of the black mackintosh in an endeavour to shake her son, saying, ‘You don’t change, do you? Joke, joke, joke. And anyway, now that you’re a sergeant, what d’you tell the lads under you?’

  Catching hold of her hands, he brought them together, and, using a more serious tone, said, ‘I would never dream of telling the boys anything. You don’t tell them today, you ask them. Private Reginald Johnson Smith, do you mind if I ask you to keep your kit a little tidier, as an example, you know, to the rest of the boys?’

  ‘Oh, you!’ she said again as she pulled her hands away from his; then, grabbing her stick, she turned from him, adding, ‘Sometimes I would like you to be serious for five minutes and tell me what really happens.’

  As she hobbled up the room he stared after her. From the back she could be taken for a young girl. She had always been slim and bonny, petite was the word. He could remember how she looked when he was twelve. He had always been proud of her, comparing her with the mothers of the other fellows at school. And when, as sometimes occurred, she was out riding and called at the school and pulled him up beside her, he would be transported to an age when knights in armour rescued ladies by yanking them up on to the saddle and galloping off with them. It didn’t matter, in his particular case, that it was a lady who had done the pulling; it had still given him a wonderful feeling. Then one day she had ridden too fast and tried too high a jump. The result could have been worse, she could have been on her back for life; as it was, her hip was irrevocably injured, and as time went by arthritis had set in. Yet, she had, outwardly at least, always remained cheerful; what she went through privately he could only guess. However, she had one consolation: besides having a loving husband, she had her music.

  As she sat down on the piano stool, she said on a laugh, ‘You don’t expect to catch Ted Honeysett, do you?’

  ‘What d’you think I’m going out for?’ He walked towards her. ‘I tell you, there he was yesterday, as brazen as brass, unstrapping a big attaché case from the carrier of his bike and carrying it round the back of the hotel in Durham, as barefaced as you like. And then, back he came, still with the case, looking as smug as a cat that had pinched the cream.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Ted Honeysett looking smug. Anyway, what would you do if you were to catch him?’

  ‘Put the fear of God into him.’

  ‘Oh, now,’—she cast her eyes upwards while her pursed lips expressed her derision—‘you’ve known Ted all your life. Can you imagine anyone putting the fear of God into him?’

  ‘Yes; yes, I can. There’s different ways of doing it. For instance, I could threaten to frogmarch him up to the Hall.’

  ‘Huh!’ She shook her head as she laughed. ‘I can see you doing that. What would more likely be in your mind, if I know anythi
ng, would be to frogmarch Mr Ernest Bradford-Brown down to the river and hold him under.’

  ‘I’ve been away four years, Mam, don’t forget. A lot can happen in that time. I might have changed me tune about that gentleman.’

  She smiled, saying, ‘Not you. Do you remember what you said to him when you walked out of the Hall yard, and where you told him to put his job? And you only eighteen at the time. And you know something?’ Her face lost its smile and she nodded up at him seriously as she went on, ‘He would have sent your dad packing if it wasn’t that he relies on him so much. Oh, yes, it was touch and go. And another thing I’ll tell you, it’s a good job this house was not within the boundary of the estate, or like the Rice family we would have been turfed out. He can’t stomach the fact that we own it. He’s forever on to your dad to sell it. I think that’s another reason he kept him on, because after you caused that explosion, and it was an explosion, the rest of the men stood out for more pay. They didn’t get all they wanted, but they got something, and he gave in only because he didn’t want his name to be any blacker than it already was. And look what he did to the Rices. If they hadn’t left willingly or, let’s say, quietly, he would have sacked the lot: Peter, young Michael, and Sally an’ all. And jobs not coming easy, and Bella being poorly as she is, what could they do but go? And all because weekend cottages were bringing in money. He hadn’t spent a penny on that place in years, but once he got them out he had water laid on, and electricity, and God knows what. And you know how much he got for it, together with an acre of land and fishing rights?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Four thousand pounds. A man called Kidderly bought it. He only comes up at weekends. A bit of a queer ’un from what I can gather. Anyway’—she smiled again—‘if you’re going to nab Ted, I think you’d better get moving, or it’ll be midnight before you get back.’

  She watched him pick up a piece of sheet music and flip over the page, and when he said, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. I could change me mind,’ she made no immediate comment, but continued to stare at him for a few seconds, when she asked quietly, ‘What is it? Bored?’