The Mallen Litter Read online

  THE MALLEN LITTER

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  Cover

  Titlepage

  Table of Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  Books by Cathrine Cookson

  Description

  Copyright

  PART ONE KATIE 1885 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  BARBARA Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  MICHAEL 1888 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  THE IDIOT Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  PART TWO Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART THREE THE EDGE OF THE EARTH Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  WAR Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  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 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 Litter

  The Mallen Litter is the third and final part of the multi-generation story of the Mallens, which began with The Mallen Streak and continued with The Mallen Girl.

  From generation to generation bad luck and misfortune had befallen each and every member of the Mallen family. Passed from son to son, each had been cursed with a dramatic white streak in their jet black hair. It seemed as though the ghost of old Thomas Mallen himself lived on in his unfortunate descendants.

  Barbara had no visible streak to identify her as a Mallen but she spent her life trying to forget her parentage. When her triplets—the Mallen litter—were born, there in one of her sons was the unmistakable sign of the Mallen streak. How long would she have to wait to see if history would repeat itself?

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1974

  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 978-1-78036-103-1

  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

  PART ONE

  FULL CIRCLE

  KATIE 1885

  One

  The night was hot, and the rank, acrid smell of packed humanity hung over the narrow streets like an oppressive canopy of evil.

  Miss Katie Bensham lifted her skirts as she stepped across an open drain running from the middle of a back lane, then almost skipped aside to avoid the onrush of a group of barefoot excited boys chasing a dog which had no less than five tins tied to its tail. Turning, she cried after them, ‘Stop that! Do you hear me? Stop that!’ but even before she had finished speaking they had disappeared from her view up yet another narrow street, and she stood listening to the fading sound of their cries for a full minute before moving on again.

  ‘Education!’ She snorted the word aloud.

  In 1880 when the Government had at last made it compulsory for all children to attend school she had thought in her enthusiastic naivety that this would solve all problems, especially with the young; but whereas some parents would react with: ‘Eeh! It’s a good thing, it’s a chance we never had; I only hope we’ll be able to keep the bairns there,’ too many others said, ‘What they after, them up there, eh, forcin’ them to school? You can’t fill their bellies with readin’ an’ writin’. Anyway, they’re havin’ it too easy the day; why, me, I was in the dye works at seven.’

  Dye works, gas works, mills…mills, mills. Wherever you looked, mills. But she of all people shouldn’t despise mills; all the benefits she’d enjoyed during her life had been derived from her father’s mill. Yet it was because her mother, like her father, had come from surroundings similar to these she was walking through now that she had turned her back on the privileged way of life.

  With the death of her mother five years ago she had been thrown emotionally back, as it were, into the past. suffering for her mother’s early beginnings as her mother herself never had; all her mother had ever wanted from life was enough to eat, a good fire, and the company of her man. When she had been lifted bodily from the poverty of the Hulme district of Manchester into the affluence of 27 The Drive, on the Palatine Road, and from there to High Banks Hall in the County of Northumberland, her spirit had not moved but had remained in the place where it had been born, and no amount of good living had made an impression on her; not even the presence of Miss Brigmore, the governess, had had any effect on Matilda Bensham.

  For some time now Katie Bensham had been aware that she was leading a double life, at least in her mind.

  Three times a week she went to the Morton Rooms from half past seven in the evening till nine to take adult classes. Some of her pupils came straight from work at eight o’clock, and there they sat learning to write their names; before they knew their alphabet she taught them to write their names: Mary McManus, Jane Gorton, Florrie Smith, Ada Wilkinson. She had twenty-seven in her class and only two with Irish names, McCabe and McManus. On Saturday nights she took a reading class for the advanced pupils; this was a mere courtesy title for in five years she had found not one person who she could say was outstanding. Sometimes she thought it was her way of teaching, for there were others in the town who could brag of their classes giving birth to scholars and orators, young men who spoke for the unions; even the Sunday schools seemed to achieve better results than she. She guessed, and knew she guessed rightly, that being a mill-owner’s daughter she was looked upon with suspicion; not even the fact that her father was such an owner as Harry Bensham, who himself had come up from a worker, could encourage those who sought knowledge to patronise her classes; and so those who did come to her for instruction were of very low mentality. She doubted if even Miss Brigmore could have advanced them more than she herself had done.

  But what troubled her even more than her failure was the realisation that in the work she was doing, she was doing against the grain, for she had recognised through her continual self-dissecting that she lacked the quality necessary to the pioneer; also the tenacity and selfishness, this last and very necessary ingredient that pushed every other obstacle aside but the main one, the cause, if one was truly committed.

  What she had learned during her years of pressured good works was that most of the people who lived in these warrens thought little beyond food, shelter and warmth, and it was the scarcity of these that blighted their lives, and not the necessity to read or write.

  She knew that if she gav
e up the venture tomorrow the little good she was doing would not be missed. And she knew she would give it up if it wasn’t for one person, and this person wasn’t her father, or Miss Brigmore, her one-time governess, who was now his wife, or her elder brother, John, but Willy Brooks, the man she was going to marry, the man who, like her father, had worked his way up from the mill floor.

  Five minutes later she emerged from the warren of the narrow streets into a neighbourhood where the houses were two-up and two-down, their high-walled backyards leading into narrow alleys. Whenever she looked up these cobbled back lanes to the endless back doors accompanied by their own particular dry lavatories and coal hatches she was reminded of Brigie’s arithmetic lessons, dot and carry one, only here it was dot and carry two.

  She crossed the main road, itself a barrier between classes, for beyond the accumulation of shops, public houses and churches lay the terraced houses of the upper working class, and they had to be upper for they were lying against the skirts of the lower middle class. But here again was a barrier of open ground this time, green open ground, and leading from it the carriage road and the residences of the mighty.

  No-one referred to these particular dwellings as homes or houses, they were residences, and were you writing a letter to the head of a residence, you always, unless you were very stupid, added esquire after his name.

  No. 27 The Drive lay well towards the middle of this superior patch of Manchester earth. It was the house where Katie had been born and she thought of it more as home than she did of High Banks Hall in Northumberland where she had lived from when she was four until she was nineteen.

  She considered it was just as well she had always retained an affection for her first home for here she was to spend her married life, at least that’s how she had thought until about a year ago; or was it before that? When had she begun to change? When had she seen Willy as he really was, and as others saw him, the upstart son of her father’s butler? Since she was a girl she had viewed him through a romantic vision, seeing him as someone like her father, an ambitious, brash, pushing individual, but an honest one. She had even judged him to be much more intelligent than her father, for it was her father’s first wife who had brought him a mill, whereas here was Willy at twenty-nine, under-manager of one of the most prosperous mills in the town, and he had got there by his own efforts. But of late she had been asking herself whether he had achieved this position through intelligence or cunning; sucking up was the local phrase. But one thing he had made her quite sure of, he was not going to be content with being under-manager once they were married; oh no, he was for a partnership. He hadn’t put it into so many words but she had acquired the power to read his mind; a look, a gesture, and she could divine his thought. He didn’t need to open his mouth. She also knew that although he loved her, and she hadn’t any doubt about this, he naturally saw her as the key that would open the door to big opportunities.