Maggie Rowan Read online

  MAGGIE ROWAN

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  Maggie Rowan

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE Chapter One: The Wedding Feast

  Chapter Two: The Proposal

  Chapter Three: A Man’s Past

  Chapter Four: The Oddities

  Chapter Five: There Are More Ways of Killing a Cat

  PART TWO Chapter Six: Maggie’s Son

  Chapter Seven: Beattie Watson

  Chapter Eight: By Any Other Name

  Chapter Nine: Mother and Son

  Chapter Ten: Boswell Cottages

  PART THREE Chapter Eleven: A Bit of Jollification

  Chapter Twelve: The Thinnest Strand

  Chapter Thirteen: The Full Circle

  PART FOUR Chapter Fourteen: The Law of Opposites

  Chapter Fifteen: The Hope Block

  Chapter Sixteen: The Last Extremity

  Chapter Seventeen: The Child

  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 T
hursday 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

  Maggie Rowan

  This is the story of the mining folk of County Durham; a story rich in human pathos in the portrayal of the families and homes of the men who go down the pit.

  There were plenty around Fellburn who said Maggie Rowan was as plain as a pikestaff, a woman consumed with jealousy at her sister’s good fortune in marrying well. But Maggie Rowan, with her dogged determination to succeed, had two raging ambitions beneath a cold and forbidding exterior: to become the mother of a child whom she could love and to escape from the life of the miner’s cottage to one of the big houses on Brampton Hill.

  When she marries the easy-going Chris Taggart, her marriage is planned shrewdly and without sentiment. Like her, he is considered the ‘odd man out’ and, for that reason, the only one likely to have her and who unleashes her hidden desire to be loved.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1954

  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 978-1-78036-025-6

  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

  Dedication

  To Peter and Michael Lavelle, my two cousins, without whose technical help and guidance this book would certainly not have been written; to Peter for leading me to the coalface and answering my endless questions; to Michael for supplying me with most valuable data; and to Jimmy Tiplady whose descriptive reminiscences lent colour to my thinking: and to those miners whom I saw working in the bowels of the earth and who evoked so much of my admiration that my fear became lost under it.

  Author’s Note

  Fellburn is fictitious, as are all the characters in this book. Place names have been used merely to form a background; and pitmatic dialect has been used only here and there to give atmosphere.

  PART ONE

  MAGGIE

  Chapter One: The Wedding Feast

  Maggie Rowan looked out of the scullery window and over the little back garden to the rising land where the allotments began. But her eyes did not see what they were looking upon; for like her ears, which were filled with the sounds of laughter and merriment coming from the room along the passage, her eyes were seeing only the picture of that room…her sister Ann, all decked in white, sitting at the head of the table with her husband, David Taggart, and all down one side of the table the members of the Taggart family: his mother, fat, slipshod Kitty, laughing her way through life like a halfwit; his father, Sep, a loud-mouthed blusterer; and his brothers, Pat, Alec, Bert, Fred…and Christopher, not to mention the eight-year-old twins; and interspersed between the men, their women. Of the men, only Christopher was still not married; so it could be said they were all married now, for there was no likelihood that anyone would take him, with his hump and his great head and his spindle-legs and big feet.

  The Taggarts had always irritated Maggie. As far back as she could remember they had overflowed from their own house, next door, into this one. If it wasn’t Kitty slipping in to see her mother, it was Sep and the lads to see her father.

  The thought of her father brought that strange feeling into the pit of her stomach again; and deliberately she lifted her mind from him, and almost ferociously she tackled the dishes in the sink.

  She did not turn round when the door opened and her mother came in; nor did she answer when Nellie Rowan said, ‘Leave them, lass; I’ll see to them after.’

  She heard her filling up the emptied plates from the table behind her, and when her mother left the scullery, the laughter from the room came even louder to her ears, and she flung round to close the door. But with her hand on the knob she paused.

  The door leading into the scullery was at the other end of the passage from the front door, and halfway along the passage, one on each side, were the doors leading into the kitchen-cum-living-room and the front room. From where she was standing she could see part of the wedding table through the open door of the front room. Her father was on his feet toasting the bride, and his voice, thick with the pitmatic, came to her:

  ‘Here’s to you both. And may ye be as good a wife, lass, to Davie as your mother’s been to me. And may you, Davie, be a better husband than I’ve been.’

  She saw him look across the table towards her mother who had just sat down, her gaze lowered towards her plate, and she wondered, not for the first time, why he should always seem to knuckle under to her mother, even at times seem to be afraid of her.

  Sep Taggart’s voice put her teeth on edge as he called, ‘What’s up with thoo, George? Want pat on back? If thoo were half as good a marrer as thoo art husband I wouldn’t have to work me bloody…’

  ‘Sep, no language! Mind where you are.’ Kitty Taggart’s voice came from somewhere beyond Maggie’s vision. And her husband replied with mock aggressiveness, ‘Who’s using language! Dost want me to come over there and clout the gob for thee?’

  On this the laughter grew louder; the talking and chaffing became an unintelligible noise, vying with the shrill cries of the children’s voices from the kitchen where they were being regaled with their portions of the wedding feast.

  Her father sat down; and now she could see her sister. To her, Ann looked, in her finery, like a dressed-up doll. For weeks and weeks there had been talk of nothing but that dress; it had been impossible to lay a pin anywhere for patterns and pieces of material. And for what? To show off for a couple of hours. They couldn’t even afford a honeymoon and had been able to furnish only two rooms of the house they had rented; and tomorrow Ann would have to bang his pit clothes, because even for his wedding he dared not lose more than one shift. And who knew, next week he might be like scores of others, on half-time, or even stood off. Yet that empty-headed noodle
could spend her money on a wedding dress…and underclothes and nighties!

  ‘Go on; why don’t you eat, man?’ It was Pat Taggart calling to his brother. ‘How d’you expect to get through your first neet, man, let alone the morrer’s shift if you don’t eat?’

  ‘That’s quite enough of that, Pat!’ It was her mother’s reprimanding tone.

  ‘Aw, it’s a weddin’, Aunt Nellie.’

  ‘There’s no-one more aware of it than me.’ Again her mother’s stiff tone.

  ‘Take no notice of him, Nellie. Or you, Ann.’ It was Kitty Taggart now. ‘Look here, me lad, I’ll wring yer lug for you, as big as you are, if you don’t behave yersel. It’s the whisky talkin’. And what’s your wife doin’ if she can’t keep you quiet?’

  ‘Aw, Ma; gi’ ower naggin’. Ann can take a joke. An’ it’s her weddin’, isn’t it, lass? An’ this time next year we’ll be gathered for the christening. What d’you say, Ann?…Mind, there’s triplets run in wor family. Did ye knaa that?’

  ‘Shut the gob!’ It was Sep Taggart’s order to his son; and on it Maggie closed the door.

  Turning to the sink, she flung the dishcloth into the water. Damn them! Damn and blast them all! With their laughing and yelling, with their jokes and innuendoes, the senseless, ignorant lot! Why had she stayed off work? They hadn’t expected her to, and it would have been all over when she came home. But no; she must needs torture herself one fraction further. Always it was like this, rubbing salt into her own wounds. Why did she always seek pain? Would she never learn? It was as if in opposition to her own iron will that some stronger force would thrust her where her eyes could see and her ears hear things that would set her blood tingling with desire, until the desire itself would melt in the furnace of her being before hardening into one solid block of pain.

  Her head drooped on to her chest. She knew the desire that drove her to be here this afternoon was the same that led her into the back row when she went to the pictures in order to witness and silently upbraid the lovers about her; it was the same desire that drove her into Newcastle on a Saturday night so that she could linger on the streets. Had she lingered on the High Street on a Saturday night in this town she would have been the butt for the jests of every lout in the place and food for scandal among the women. That would be after they had got over the shock of Maggie Rowan, she with the face that would put off any man, being possessed of normal desires. The summing up would have been that she wanted a man badly…Could she blame them?