Slinky Jane Read online

  SLINKY JANE

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  Slinky Jane

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  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

  Love and Mary Ann

  Life and Mary Ann

  Marriage and Mary Ann

  Mary Ann’s Angels

  Mary Ann and Bi
ll

  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

  Slinky Jane

  In Battenbun, Northumberland, there live four Puddleton men—Grandpop, Old Popo, Pop and Peter. Three of them have two things in common: a squint in one eye and in the other, a glint for the opposite sex. Peter, his mother’s only joy, has no squint and no eye for women either—until one day a customer calls at his garage on the edge of the village.

  The village hadn’t seen anything like her before, and wasn’t certain it wanted to, and from the moment of her arrival, things began to happen. An eel is found in a pond where none had been known to visit before. Men creep through the woods to find this Slinky Jane, but it is not known whether they seek the eel…or this strange girl…

  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 978-1-78036-056-0

  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

  Chapter One

  The village of Battenbun lies on a hillside in Northumberland. The village proper is shaped like a half moon, with its back closely wooded, and houses two-thirds of the population of a hundred and seventy-four; which number includes Tilly Boyle’s son, Tony the halfwit, seven children of Mamie Spragg, each of whom just fails to qualify for the pseudonym of Tony Boyle, sixty women over fifty, fourteen men over sixty, eight over seventy, and one coming up to ninety.

  The last mentioned, Grandpop Puddleton, lives and has lived since he was born in the central house of the village. This house forms the keystone of the village street, and from the outside it appears very picturesque, being built of stones filched from the Roman Wall and the dead quarries, and timber that had once been part of a boat that traded along the Tyne. Inside, it consists of seven rooms, each in its own way a death trap, with ceilings so low as to brain you with their beams and floors so uneven as to whip your feet from under you. That all the Puddletons born during the past ninety years have survived is a tribute to their staying power.

  From nine o’clock in the morning till the light fails, except for meals and the calls of nature, Grandpop Puddleton sits fully dressed and with his cap on before the front window, in his armchair on the raised dais which lifts him a foot above floor level, and watches the milling world of the village pass to and fro, and also what occasional traffic deems to make a detour from the main road three miles away which leads to Allendale.

  Cuddled in the nest of the half moon is the village green—without a pump in its middle, for in nineteen forty-four, an American lorry under the influence of drink, the driver at the inquiry having denied that he was, dispensed with it. And so now there is just a stretch of grass with a ring where the pump once stood, and the grass is divided in two by the feet that will persistently cross it in the same place. Beyond the green is the road, and beyond this Mrs Armstrong’s house, which is also the Post Office and General Stores, interrupts one of the finest views across to the South Tyne. Although some miles from the actual river, the fells that run towards it, billowing with woods, heaths and lush green valleys seem but a cascading overture, spilling and tumbling, forever tumbling, down to it.

  At least that is how Grandpop Puddleton sees it, for when he takes his eyes from the interests of the street he is away once more, striding over the fells after his sheep, his dog at his heels, sometimes in the direction of Allendale, sometimes farther afield to Blanchland. Ah, Blanchland is a bonny place, as near as fine as Battenbun. Some say finer, but this is only because more folk see it, for out of the way as it is, it is easier to get at than Battenbun. But whichever way Grandpop goes in his mind, eventually he comes to the river, the bonny Tyne. Some folk madden him when they refer to the Tyne as mucky. They are the folk who never push their noses past Jarrow or Newcastle; they are the stay-at-hyems who don’t even know that there is a North and a South Tyne and have never heard of Peel Fell or Cross Fell; they know nowt about their country’s history, about its castles and abbeys, its Roman Wall, its patchwork of drystone walling, evidence of the art of forgotten men. They are ‘pluddy numskulls’.

  When Grandpop brings his eyes back to the village he can see, to the left and without glasses, the far end of the crescent where the painted sign of the Grey Hart swings. And when he turns them right, to the other point of the village arc, he can see the garage, owned and run by his great-grandson Peter. Wherever Grandpop’s eyes roam between these two points, to Miss Tallow’s house-window drapery shop or Wilkins the baker on the garage side, to Bill Fountain’s the butcher on the Hart side, or to the numerous grey stone houses that lean, bend over, or stand back independently from each other, invariably they come to rest on the garage.

  It was nearly a year now since Grandpop had been to the garage. His legs one day refusing to obey his orders had deposited him quite suddenly on his buttocks opposite the Mackenzies’ house, next door. And Grandpop had said, ‘Blast ’em!’…if they had to give out why had they to do so on that particular spot and why had he to be helped to his feet by that upstart sharpshooter of a Davy, who was out to get the better of their Peter at every turn. The Mackenzies were town upstarts, the whole lot of ’em. He’d said that twenty-five years ago when they first came here, and he still said it, and if their sickly-looking, psalm-singing, cow-faced daughter caught their Peter he’d give the whole family hell he would.

  This reference of warmth to come was not promised to the Mackenzie family but to his own, composed of his son Joe, his grandson Harry, and Harry’s family of three sons, the twins, seven years old, and Peter, twenty-eight—and of course, Rosie their mother, whom he hated, the main reason being her refusal to allow a dog in the house, not even to please Peter, and him the apple of her eye …

  Along the street, Peter came to the wide doorway of his garage and listened—over the years he had developed an ear for ‘knockings’. He held his big, dark head to one side until a little anticipatory smile appeared on his face, bringing with it the glad thought that something was wrong there.

  He could see nothing of the car yet, for just beyond the garage the road turned in a sharp curve, to become lost for miles on the fells before linking up with a main road again.

  The knocking, accompanied by a loud rattling, came steadily nearer, but not wishing to appear too eager for
what he hoped would be a job, he did not go to the end of the drive to meet the car.

  When it did come into view he almost laughed aloud. No wonder she was rattling. In the past eight years he had seen some has-beens in cars, but this beat them all. She looked older than anything that went into the Old Crocks’ race, but without any of the spruceness that was the hallmark of such cars.

  As the front wheels touched the gravel of the drive the car, with one final splutter, gave up and Peter, moving now hastily forward, looked through the windscreen at the owner before saying, ‘In trouble, miss?’

  He had hesitated between mam and miss. That the girl sitting at the wheel was a town type he could see, but whether she was old enough to be a mam or young enough to be a miss, he couldn’t at such short notice make up his mind.

  ‘Yes, she’s given up…Still, I got her here.’

  The voice was warm and high, and, as he phrased it, a laughter-making voice, but he was quick to note that it was in strict contradiction to the owner’s face. There was no laughter on her face, not even a vestige of a smile, and it was perhaps the whitest face he had ever seen…due, he had no doubt, to smart make-up. Yet why they wanted to look like that he didn’t know.

  He opened the door and she stepped out onto the drive, and again his mind was taken from the car and he thought, By! She’s thin. But it was, he also noted, a smart thinness, accentuated by a grey woollen dress pulled in at the waist with a scarlet belt. She was wearing no stockings, only sandals, and his eyes lifted quickly from the matching scarlet of her toenails up to her shoulders, on which lay the ends of her long, straw-coloured hair. It looked damp, even wet, as if she had been sweating, and it lessened a little the effect of her overall smartness.

  ‘Has she been like this long?’ He inclined his head to the car.

  ‘About a mile back. I felt her hit something in the road.’

  He nodded understandingly. The car was an Alvis, one of the early type, and likely had a low oil sump. ‘I’ll push her in and look her over.’ As he spoke he went behind the car and with his back bent he slowly edged her up the drive and into the garage.