The Mallen Streak Read online

  THE MALLEN STREAK

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  Cover

  Titlepage

  Table of Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  Books by Catherine Cookson

  Description

  Copyright

  PART ONE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART TWO Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  PART THREE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  PART FOUR Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  PART FIVE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Aftermath

  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

&nbs
p; 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

  The Mallen Streak

  Mallen of High Banks Hall had many sons, most of them out of wedlock. But to all of them, he passed on his mark—a distinctive flash of white hair running to the left temple known as the Mallen Streak. It was said that those who bore the streak, borne by the sons generation after generation, seldom reached old age or died in their beds and nothing good ever came of a Mallen. The lives of all those connected to the family, by blood or otherwise, was touched by the Mallen curse.

  Thomas Mallen, heir of High Banks Hall, found himself a ruined man as he faced disaster and financial ruin in the turbulent 1850s. Amid scandal and disgrace, he was forced to sell the Hall and adjust to a new and very different mode of living. With him went his two young wards and their indomitable governess. Then into their lives came the Radlet brothers of Wilbur farm, one of whom bore the unmistakable Mallen streak.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1973

  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 978-1-78036-101-7

  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

  PART ONE

  THOMAS MALLEN

  One

  High Banks Hall showed its sparsely-windowed back to beautiful woodland and the town of Allendale in the far distance, whilst its buttressed and emblazoned and many-windowed face looked out over formal gardens on to mountainous land, so austere and wild that even its short summer beauty brought no paeans of praise except from those who had been bred within the rigours of its bosom.

  Away to the south lay Nine Banks Peel; to the north was the lovely little West Allen village of Whitfield; but staring the Hall straight in the face were the hills, for most part bare and barren and rising to miniature mountains which, on this day, Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of February, 1851, were thickly crusted with snow, not white, but pale pink, being tinged for the time being by the straining rays of a weak sun.

  The Hall was fronted by a terrace bordered by an open balustrade, its parapet festooned with stone balls, and each pillar at the top of the steps which led to the drive was surmounted by a moss-stained naked Cupid.

  The doors to the house were double and of black oak studded with large iron nails which gave the impression that it had withstood the attack of a fusillade of bullets. Over the door was a coat of arms composed of three shields, above it a Latin inscription had been cut into the stone which roughly translated read: Man is compassionate because he gave God a mother.

  At first the inscription appeared to have religious connotations, but when dissected it proved to many to be blasphemous.

  Thomas Wigmore Mallen, who built the Hall in 1767, had himself composed the inscription and had explained to those interested the deep significance of the motto, which was that God, in the first place, had been created of man’s need, and the need had been brought about by the frightening mystery of both birth and death; more so the latter. And knowing that no man came into the world except through woman, man felt compelled to be compassionate towards the omnipotent image he had created. Therefore, even in pagan times, even before Christ was heard of, man had given to his particular deity a mother; but with this difference: she was always untouched by man, a virgin who could nevertheless give birth.

  Thomas Wigmore Mallen was an avowed atheist and the devil took his soul. Everyone knew this when he was found stone dead seated against a tree with not a mark on him, his horse cropping gently by his side.

  It was said, among the hills, that the Mallen streak began with Thomas Wigmore Mallen, but then no-one hereabouts had known his forebears for he had hailed from away in the Midlands. However, it wasn’t long before he had spread his mark around the vicinity of his new house. No matter what colour the hair of a male Mallen, the white streak started from the crown and thrust its wiry way down to the left temple.

  Strangely, the streak never left its mark on the women of the family, and again not on all the males either. But it was noted that the Mallen men who bore the streak did not usually reach old age, nor did they die in their beds.

  Yet the present owner of the Hall, Thomas Richard Mallen, nicknamed Turk by his friends, seemed to be an exception, for he was hale and hearty at fifty-five, and on this day his voice could be heard booming through the length of the house, calling on his guests to get ready and to have sport while it lasted, for in two days’ time the hare-hunting season would end.

  The guests had not come to the Hall merely to join the hare hunt, most of them had been there for the past three days. They had come originally for the wedding of Thomas’ daughter, his only daughter by his second marriage.

  More than half the county, they said, had been invited to the wedding, for it wasn’t every day that a Northumberland miss married an Italian count, even if a poor one; and Thomas Mallen had gone out of his way to show the foreigner how things were done in England, especially in the north-east of England.

  The festivities had gone on for two full days…and nights; only an hour ago four carriages had rumbled away, their occupants hardly able to stand on their feet. And this went for the women too. When Thomas Mallen entertained, he entertained. Mallen was a man, everybody said so. Could he not drink three men under the table? And had he not fathered more brats in the countryside than his bulls had heifers? Some mothers, it was said, were for ever dyeing their youngsters’ hair with tea, but some children, one here and one there, seemed to be proud of the white tuft, and the evidence of this had just now been brought to Thomas by his son, Dick.

  Dick Mallen was twenty-three years old and in looks a younger replica of his father, but in character there were divergent traits, for there was no streak of kindness in Dick Mallen. Thomas could forgive and forget, life was too short to bear the inconvenience of malice. Not so Dick Mallen; Dick always repa
id the slightest slur with interest, creating an opportunity to get rid of the debt, which might have been only a disdainful look, or snub. Yet a snub to young Mallen was worse than a blow; it indicated condemnation not only of himself, but also of the house. Both Mallens were laws unto themselves; whosoever dare question that law—and there were many in the county who did, a few openly, but the majority slyly—would be brought to book by the sole male heir to High Banks Hall.

  Thomas’ two sons by his first marriage had died, the second of them only last year, since when Dick Mallen had gambled more, drunk more, and whored more, three very expensive pastimes, and over the last three days he had excelled himself at all three. Now prancing down the main staircase with very little sway to his gait, for he, too, could hold his drink, he paused and shouted into the throng below, which looked for all the world like a hunt meeting without the horses. ‘D’you hear me, Father! He’s arrived: your hill nipper’s arrived. I glimpsed him from the gallery.’ He thrust his arm backwards.

  Most of the faces down below were turned upwards, and the ruddy countenance of Thomas Mallen was split wide in a grin, showing a mouthful of blunt teeth with only two gaps to the side, and he cried back at his son, ‘Has he now? He’s early; the passes are still snowed up. Well! Well!’ He now turned to the dozen or so men and women about him. ‘Do you hear that? My hill nipper has arrived, earlier than ever this year. November when last he came, wasn’t it?’ He was looking across the hall now at his son who was threading his way towards him.

  ‘Nearer December.’ Dick Mallen pulled a face at a friend and dug him in the ribs with his elbow, and the friend, William Lennox, who could claim relationship with another of that name who was Lord of the Bedchamber to Prince Albert, pushed his young host in the shoulder, then flung his head back and laughed aloud.

  In his twenty-eight years William Lennox had stayed in all types of country houses but he would swear that he had never stayed in one quite like this where everything was as good as a play. He turned now to a man at his side who was thrusting down a dog from his thigh, and said, ‘What do you think of that, eh? He wasn’t lying in his boast, his bastards do risk the mountains just to get a peep at him.’