The Black Velvet Gown Read online

  THE BLACK VELVET GOWN

  Catherine Cookson

  Table of Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  The Black Velvet Gown

  PART ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  PART TWO

  One

  Two

  Three

  PART THREE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  PART FOUR

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  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

  Kat
e 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 Black Velvet Gown

  There would be times when Riah Millican came to regret that her husband had learned to read and write, and then shared his knowledge with her and their children. For this was Durham in the 1830’s, when employers tended to regard the spread of education with suspicion. But now Seth Millican was dead and she was a widow with the need to find a home and a living for herself and her children.

  The chance of becoming a housekeeper didn’t work out, but it led to a job in Moor House with a scholarly recluse obsessed with books and education. The effect of this environment on her daughter, Biddy, who was not only bright but willful, started a chain reaction that should have opened many doors to her future but instead created many problems for the pair of them.

  The Black Velvet Gown is the compelling story of a mother and daughter, often at odds with each other, facing the need to challenge and fight the prejudices of an age—a narrative of great power and diversity that has become one of Catherine Cookson’s major achievements.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1984

  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 978-1-78036-039-3

  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

  THE JOURNEY

  One

  The pit shaft would have been in their backyard if the pit rows had had a combined backyard, but they stood one behind the other, separated only by the ash-middens and the new innovation, the wooden-box privies.

  The rows had dainty names: Primrose, Cowslip, and Dog Daisy. There were twenty-five cottages to each of the first two rows and thirty-three to the third row, Dog Daisy. The residents in Dog Daisy considered themselves lucky because from their single window in the downstairs room and their similar but smaller one in the upstairs they could view the fells, and on a clear day see the top of the mast of a ship going down the river.

  The pit community was like one large family, yet, like a family, separated through marriage. So did the inhabitants of each row combine to gather together and preserve their own interests; until a time of calamity hit them, when, just as would a family at a funeral, all three rows would group as one.

  They were all well aware, even as tiny children, from where calamity sprang. It came out of that hole in the ground: it came out through water or fire, and it didn’t even provide some men with the dignity of a funeral, not under the open sky anyway; it buried them, certainly, under mausoleums of stone.

  But the latest calamity to strike the rows hadn’t come from the mine. It was a strange new calamity, like a fever, but worse. It emptied the stomach both ways and brought water from the pores like tears from the eyes, and had a strange name: they called it cholera.

  The scourge had passed now, but there were four men, two women, and three children less in the rows.

  Seth Millican had been the first to go; and the one, they whispered, who had brought the disease to the rows. And all because he must visit that man in Gateshead who had taught him his letters.

  Pride went before a fall, they said when he had died. He had been an overproud man, had Seth Millican, and not because of the work he could do with his hands and because he set the pace down below at the coalface, but because he could write his name and read the Bible. But his pride had stretched too far when he refused to let his eldest son and daughter go down below, and the boy ten and the lass nine. No, it had to be working in the fields for them, under God’s sky. And he hadn’t been shamed into doing it, even after Parson Rainton had told him that God allotted man a certain free time to enjoy the sun and light according to the station in life to which he had been appointed. And it was known far and wide what answer Seth Millican had given to Parson Rainton. ‘To hell with that idea,’ he had said. And it was also said that the parson hadn’t cursed him in words but in his look, and his look had borne fruit. And it was also said that Seth Millican would now be sorting his ideas out in hell.

  Then there was Seth Millican’s wife Maria, known as Riah. She had come as an intrusion into the row, for she was the daughter of a fishwife from Shields. And, as everybody knew, such a marriage wasn’t a good thing: those who sailed over the land and those who crawled under it could never meet.

  But Seth Millican and Maria Riston had met, and married when he was twenty-six and she but sixteen, and in the ten years since they had reared four of the eight children she had given birth to. Such was her stamina.

  Unlike many women in the row, Riah still carried herself straight. Her stomach wasn’t flabby; her hair still retained its bright auburn shade; her eyes still flashed; and her tongue, it was said, could clip clouts, so sharp was it. And it had sharpened since her man had died, especially when directed towards Bill Norsecott.

  Others had turned their eyes on her, but the one who seemed unable to turn them away was Bill Norsecott. And it was this man who was under discussion now in the Millicans’ two-roomed earth-floored habitation that was called a house.

  Riah stood to the side of the table, one hand on the edge of it, the other spanning her hip. Her head was up and back and held slightly to the side as she looked at her brother-in-law and said, ‘I’ve told you, Ted, if Norsecott was the last man on God’s earth I wouldn’t let him touch the mud trail on me skirt. What you’re proposin’ in order to provide meself with a roof is for me to take him and his nine bairns on. Ted—’ Her face screwed up until the eyes were lost in their large sockets, and now the lips spread away from her teeth as she finished, ‘Man, there’s no room in that pigsty for them lot never mind me and my four. Fifteen of us in that hovel! Oh’—she now shook her head slowly from side to side—‘I thought you had a little more respect for me, Ted Millican, than to propose that.’

  Ted Millican, so unlike his deceased brother in all ways in that he was small in stature and of a poo
r intelligence, muttered now, ‘It’s either that or the road, Riah. If Seth had died in the pit there might have been a chance of them transferring you down to The Mouldings, but even those have gone to the new men coming in. He didn’t die in the pit though, and so there’s no chance they’ll let you stay here. Brannigan’s coming along any time now to tell you to get. That’s why I mentioned Bill, in fact.’ He stumbled on now, ‘Well, it’s like this, I…I had a word with him and he’s willing to take you and…’

  Before he could draw breath for the next word, she almost screamed at him, ‘Willing to take me! Bill Norsecott, that snotty-nosed, dirty, drunken numskull willing to take me. Go on, get out, Ted. Get out afore I lose me temper altogether…But wait, let me tell you this: I’m not goin’ to wait to be put out, I’m goin’, an’ back to me people. And if I have nothing else there, I’ll have fresh air, for I can tell you now, I’ve hated every day I’ve been on the doorstep of this pit, with the mountains of slag getting nearer, an’ the middens and the folks an’ all. Aye, an’ the folks an’ all, who had the nerve to look down on my Seth because he wanted to make somethin’ of himself and his family. If it hadn’t been for the respect I had for him and the kind of man he was, I’d have up and went in the first months of me marriage. And one last thing I’ll say to you before you go, Ted. I notice that you and Mary Ellen haven’t offered us shelter. There’s only two of you and your two lads, and one of them’s courting and will soon be gone.’

  She watched her brother-in-law now hang his head before he said, ‘’Tisn’t that I didn’t think of it, Riah, ’tisn’t that, but you know Mary Ellen. You and her has never seen eye to eye, and, put under the same roof, there would be hell to pay.’

  Riah’s attitude changing now, she sighed, then said quietly, ‘Yes, I know that, Ted. And I feel if it had been left to you things would have been different. But don’t worry about us. I’m capable of seeing to me own. I always have and I always will.’

  The man stood at the open door now and looked into the roadway where the April showers coming over into early May had left puddles in which tiny children splashed their bare feet and cried joyfully in the play, being as yet unconscious of the dark days ahead. ‘When are you goin’?’ he said.