The Dwelling Place
THE DWELLING PLACE
Catherine Cookson
Contents
Cover
The Catherine Cookson Story
The Dwelling Place
BOOK ONE Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
BOOK TWO Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
BOOK THREE Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
BOOK 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
Chapter 13
BOOK FIVE Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
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 Dwelling Place
Cissie Brody grew up on a tenant farm where life was a continual struggle for survival. When she was only fifteen, the fever swept the English countryside, leaving her to cope with the death of her parents and the care of her nine younger brothers and sisters. They were evicted from their cottage and forced out with hardly a shilling to their name.
Rejecting the offers of town officials to care for the children in the workhouse, Cissie is determined to keep the family together and manages to move them to a cave-like dwelling place on the Fells. Then one afternoon as she is returning home, she is attacked by young Isabelle Fischel and raped by her twin brother, Lord Clive Fischel. Nine months later she bears him a son.
Despite offers of wealth and comfort from the young peer’s father, Cissie refuses to give up the child until one of her younger sisters faces imprisonment in the House of Correction for a childish misdemeanor. But it is through love and friendship that Cissie is taught not to fear the world beyond the dwelling place.
Set against the rough class-divided society of Victorian England, this vigorous Gothic narrative portrays a young woman who uses her intelligence and determination to defy the circumstances of her birth and to gain wealth, respect and happiness.
Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1971
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 978-1-78036-041-6
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
BOOK ONE
THE DWELLING PLACE
One
The cottage had two rooms. It was one of ten in the hamlet of Heatherbrook in the County of Durham, and, up to two hours ago, it had housed thirteen members of the Brodie family; now three of them were dead.
Cissie Brodie stood in the dim light of the death-smelling room and looked at the bodies of her parents, dressed in white calico shifts, lying side by side on the platform bed; and at their feet, hardly longer than their four bare soles, lay the baby; and her fifteen-year-old brain was refusing to take in the situation.
That the fever should take her mother she could well understand, for with each child she had got weaker, and the one born two days ago had been too much for her, together with the fever. But that the fever or any other ailment should kill her father was something that she could not understand; for, as far back as when she was four, she could hear him bragging about his strength, for he was head and shoulders bigger than any agricultural worker for miles around. When three years ago the fever had taken John, aged eleven, Nancy, aged ten, and Peter, aged eight, her father had said it was because they had no constitution, they had taken after their mother. He had pointed to Cissie, saying, ‘You had it and it didn’t take you; no, because you take after my side, and we are strong, we Brodies.’ But he hadn’t said this in front of her mother, because his nature was kind.
And now he was gone—strength, constitution and all. What was she to do? What was to become of them? Besides herself, there were nine of them left; the eldest, Jimmy, was only ten and the youngest, here in her arms, was but eleven months. How was she going to feed them? She didn’t think about housing them; her father had been bonded by the year and the house was part of the contract.
As if the thought of food had been conveyed to the child, it started to whine; and she shook it up and down in her arms, saying under her breath, ‘Ssh! There now. Ssh! There now. Ssh! Ssh!’ while all the time she stared at her parents.
Last week Farmer Hetherington had let them have all the turnips they could eat and two quarts of skimmed milk a day, but she was sensible enough to know that the farmer’s generosity was forthcoming only because he expected her father to be back at work this week.
A section of her mind, planning ahead, thought, Perhaps he’ll take Jimmy on the farm, not just stone-picking or crow-scaring. But on this she sighed, knowing there was little chance, as they were standing grown men off all around.
‘Cissie.’
She looked down at the child tugging at her skirt and whispered, ‘What is it?’ and Charlotte, aged five, her brown eyes wide, her lips trembling, said, ‘I’m gonna be sick.’
On this, Cissie’s eyes ranged helplessly around the half circle of children, all facing the bed. Jimmy, Mary, William, Bella, Sarah, Charlotte, Joe and Annie, in that order. Then, her eyes coming to rest on Charlotte again, she hitched Nellie further up into her arms before she said softly, ‘Go down to the burn and get a drink. You go with her, Sarah. Go to the clean part, mind, where it comes out of the rock; don’t go near the river, mind, not even to put your feet in.’ The river, Parson Hedley said, was where you caught the fever.
Sarah, a year older than Charlotte, nodded her thin face, so like that of the man lying on the bed. Then, taking her sister by the hand, she went towards the door; and, as she reached it, it opened and a woman entered and, going up to Cissie, said under her breath, ‘Get rid of the lot of them. Here’s Matthew Turnbull from Benham come over to measure them.’
Cissie looked at Mrs Fisher, who acted as midwife and layer-out of the dead not only for Heatherbrook but also for the other hamlets within a radius of three miles, and she nodded her head once; then, turning to Jimmy, she said, ‘See to them, Jimmy, will you?’ and he, as if marshalling a flock of sheep, spread his arms wide and guided the silent children through the doorway and past the big broad fellow who was standing waiting to come in.
Matthew Turnbull had to stoop his head to get into the room, and he sniffed audibly and coughed as he glanced towards the bed. Then he turned and looked at the girl with the child in her arms. At this point, Mrs
Fisher, twisting her apron straight on her hips, said, ‘Ah well, I’ll leave you to make your own arrangements.’ She nodded from one to the other, then went out.
Cissie looked at the man. She hadn’t seen him before. Mr Proctor, the carpenter who usually made the coffins for round about, had died of the fever three days ago. She swallowed deeply before she asked, ‘How much do you charge?’
He stared at the lint-white face before him, the two round brown eyes seeming to be lost in their sockets, the nut-coloured hair sticking wet to the forehead, the child’s hand alternately opening and shutting over the point of the small breast beneath the faded print bodice, the bodice and skirt themselves hanging as if on a clothes prop, so thin she was.
They had told him that she had been left with nine bairns to see to; well, she wouldn’t manage that for long; the workhouse gates would open wide for the lot of them. It was the first time he had seen her but not the first time he had heard her name. Parson Hedley had mentioned the name now and again to him. ‘Joe Brodie,’ he had said, ‘there’s a man who would have done things given the chance.’ ‘And a compassionate man,’ he had said. Had he not found his wife when she was twelve years old working in a coal pit in West Riding? She was a distant relation of his, half cousin, but he had brought her from that life, and not only brought her, he had bought her from her people for a golden sovereign and had fetched her to his home, a cottage on the outskirts of Jarrow, and there she had stayed until she was sixteen working in the fields, which must indeed have appeared Elysium after her experiences down a coal mine from the age of seven. And on the day she was sixteen Joe Brodie had married her. Joe Brodie, Parson Hedley said, had always wanted to learn and had been determined his sons should too. He hadn’t been bothered about his eldest girl because, after all, there was really no necessity for a girl to read, but the two eldest boys he had sent every Sunday to listen to Bible readings preparatory to their learning their letters. But now all that would be ended.