A Dinner of Herbs (The Bannaman Legacy) Read online

  A DINNER OF HERBS

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  Cover

  Titlepage

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  Books by Catherine Cookson

  Description

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  PART ONE Chapter 1

  PART TWO Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  PART THREE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  PART FOUR 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
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br />   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

  A Dinner of Herbs

  A legacy of hatred can be a terrible force in life over which not even an enduring love and all the fruits of material success may prevail. Catherine Cookson explores this theme in a major novel that will absorb and enthral her readers as irresistibly as any she has written.

  Roddy Greenbank was brought by his father to the remote Northumberland community of Langley in the autumn of 1807. Within hours of their arrival, however, the father meets a violent death and the boy is left with all memory gone of his past life.

  Adopted and raised by old Kate Makepeace, Roddy found his closest companions in Hal Roystan and Mary Ellen Lee. These three stand at the heart of a richly eventful narrative that spans the first half of the nineteenth century, their lives lastingly intertwined by the inexorable demands of a strange and somewhat cruel destiny.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1985

  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 978-1-78036-037-9

  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

  Better is a dinner of herbs where love is,

  than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.

  Proverbs XV.17

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Mrs Ida White of Langley and to Mr Jack Young, also of Langley, for providing me with supplementary information covering the area as it was in the early nineteenth century; not forgetting my debt to Forster’s Strata for guidance on lead smelting.

  To Tommy Bates, whose Langley Dam

  inspired me to write this story, my warm thanks.

  PROLOGUE

  One

  Peter Greenbank threw back his head and sniffed; then, looking down at the small boy he was holding by the hand, he said, ‘There’s the smell. God, yes! It’s a stink. I smelt and tasted it as a boy. It’s a different smell altogether from the coal dust; it chokes you does the smell of smeltin’. And they built a wall round the mill thinkin’ to keep the smell in. Did you ever know anything as daft as that?’

  ‘Are we far from this place now, Da?’

  ‘Far from it…Langley? We’re in it, boy, we’re in it. You are standing now in the Barony of Langley, although I can see why you don’t recognise it from my tales of it, for by! it has changed. Oh yes.’ He nodded his head now. ‘That was all open land there’—he pointed into the distance—‘but now they’ve got it under trees. And it’ll be pleasing to look upon when they reach their age, which won’t be for a year or two yet I’m thinking.’

  ‘Is it far to this house, Da?’

  ‘Why? Are you weary?’

  ‘No, no,’ the boy lied valiantly as he looked up at the tall man, a mixture of awe and adoration showing on his face. This was his father who had come back into his life not three days ago and transported him into a wide new world. He was five years old when he had last seen him and he remembered him vividly: he had stood by the side of his mother on the Newcastle quay and waved frantically to him as his boat sailed down the river to Shields, from where it would go into the wide sea. Now he was seven and a half years old and the man looked the same to him exactly as on the day he had waved him goodbye: he was tall and strong and bright of countenance, with big dark brown eyes. His mother had always said he himself had his father’s eyes and would one day be exactly like him. He wanted to be like his father. Oh yes, he did. So he added now, ‘I could walk ten miles…more, twenty.’

  His father cuffed him gently on the head but in doing so knocked his cap off and when they both stooped to pick it up their brows touched for a second and they looked into each other’s eyes and laughed. Then hand in hand again, they walked on over the narrow uneven path in silence for some way until the boy said, ‘The castle, Da, will I see the castle?’

  ‘In two minutes you’ll see the castle, boy.’

  And it was after exactly two minutes that Peter Greenbank brought his son to a halt and pointed, saying, ‘There it is, over there…the castle.’

  The boy stared long and hard at the pile upon pile of stone, and when he made no comment his father said, ‘Well, what d’you think?’

  ‘It’s old.’

  ‘Aye, lad, it’s old.’

  ‘And it wants mendin’.’

  The tall man burst out laughing as he said, ‘Right again, it wants mendin’.’

  ‘Does nobody live there?’

  ‘Not any more. You’re disappointed in the sight of your first castle?’

  ‘It isn’t me first castle, Da; there’s a castle back in Newcastle, a fine one.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, you’re right.’ Peter Greenbank cuffed his son’s head again. This time the boy grabbed at his hat with both hands, and once more they were laughing together. ‘Well, come on,’ said his father; ‘it’s evident you’re not impressed. We’ll have
to see what you think of the smeltin’ mills.’

  ‘That’s where you said you used to work, Da.’

  ‘Aye, that’s where I used to work.’ Peter Greenbank nodded his head and kept it nodding for the next ten paces the while his mind went back to his days in the smelting mill. He had gone there when he was sixteen after he had left the coal mine up on the hill, and it had been a case of from bad to worse. They had lived in Allendale at the time and he had walked the four miles every morning, hail, snow or blow, and dragged himself back the four miles every night. For six days a week all he had seemed to do was work, eat and sleep. He hadn’t, at that age, drunk heavily like the other workers, many of whom had further to walk, some living as far away as Hexham, but some of them never reaching home because there was an inn that acted as a halfway house, and a load of beer on top of their physical weariness would cut off their legs, and so they would sleep where they fell, perhaps in a barn, until the next day.

  But he hadn’t as far to walk as had his father, because he worked in the mines up towards Allenheads; at least he did, until the day they carried him in his box to the cemetery, another victim of the lead.

  It was after his father died that his mother moved them near to Catton. This still left him two miles to walk, but that seemed nothing. Yet, he had never been settled in himself after his father went and he had become obsessed with an unusual craving: he wanted to go to sea. But he knew he couldn’t do this because he was his mother’s only support.

  When he confided this niggling desire to Mr Makepeace, who was their nearest neighbour, the old man had said, ‘Thee must be mad, lad. You might think the lead and the coal mines an’ the smeltin’ mills bad, but the work in them is child’s play, aye, child’s play, compared with what you have to go through afore the mast.’ And he was speaking from experience, he’d said, for he had been at sea for ten years when he was young.

  It had never been known for any man in his own family to take to the sea; his grandfather had often talked to him, not only of his own father but of his grandfather too. They had all been bred on the land and died on the land: first as farm workers on the big estates; then, wanting a more independent life but not an easier one, they took to the mines. So he did not know from where it came, this craving within himself for the sea. But not many days after his mother died, he packed his bundle and gave what pieces there were in the house to Kate Makepeace, who was by this time widowed, and the rest to Bill Lee who had just got married and had a one-room shanty round the other side of the quarry from Kate. Then he had made his way to Newcastle, thinking that all he had to do was to go to a shipping office and sign on; that was the procedure, so he understood.