My Beloved Son Read online

  MY BELOVED SON

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  My Beloved Son

  PART ONE One

  Two: 1932

  Three

  Four

  Five

  PART TWO One

  Two

  Three: 3rd September, 1939

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  PART THREE One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  PART FOUR One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  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

  My Beloved Son

  Ellen Jebeau married a man who did little but dream, and who then died with debt his only legacy. Whatever else her marriage had lacked, however, she had her son Joseph. Ellen resolved he should have all in life she had missed and to achieve that end, she would stop at nothing.

  It was Sir Arthur Jebeau, her late husband’s brother, who came to her aid, and soon Ellen and Joseph were living at the old family seat at Screehaugh. It was a convenient arrangement, one which Ellen was not slow to recognise could work to her advantage, for Sir Arthur was a widower and Screehaugh had no mistress…

  That was in 1926, but the working out of so many increasingly intertwined destinies would continue for twenty more years and only come to a final resolution with Joseph Jebeau’s escape from the traumatic heritage of his mother’s ruthless ambition and the emergence of his own true self.

  My Beloved Son is one of Catherine Cookson’s most compelling and deeply moving novels.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1991

  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 978-1-78036-074-4

  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

  To Bill McBrien who, in 1950,

  tactfully sorted out a tax demand for

  £2 10s 0d on the first novel of an

  irate and raw beginner, and has continued

  along the same lines

  over the past forty years.

  Thank you, Bill.

  PART ONE

  1926

  One

  The tall woman lifted the small boy from the railway carriage and into the flurry of drifting snow being blown from the top of the train; then, as she stood looking first one way and then the other along the small platform, two men came hurrying through a far door and made their way towards her. They were muffled to the eyes. It was the man in the check cap with the ear flaps who spoke, saying, ‘My dear Ellen, we’re just in time!’ He had taken her hand but, without pausing in his greeting, he had looked down on the little boy, saying, ‘Here we are then!’ then turned back to the woman and, still without pausing, said, ‘Where’s your luggage? In the van? See to it, Dick.’

  For the first time the woman spoke, saying quietly, ‘I’ve only two travelling cases with me’—she motioned back into the carriage—‘the rest were sent on three days ago.’

  ‘Three days? Never arrived. Well, let’s get going. Oh, I am pleased to see you, Ellen. But the weather! I don’t know how you’re going to put up with our weather after the south. If it isn’t the weather, it’s wars, if it isn’t wars, it’s strikes. What are we coming to?’ He laughed loudly now as, with one hand on her arm and the other holding that of the child, he guided them towards the exit, then through the booking hall, and outside to the car, which had a small trailer attached to the back.

  The snow appeared to be falling in a thin, vertical spray and as he helped them into the car he said, ‘Be a bit of a rough ride, but we’ll get through; at least I hope so.’ He laughed again; then shouted to the man who was now strapping the luggage on the trailer: ‘Get a move on, Dick, if you don’t want to walk.’ Again he laughed, and the small boy, looking at him as he was on the point of closing the door, laughed too, a high, squeaking laugh that brought two responses: the man cried, ‘That’s it, boy. That’s it. It’s a good sign you can laugh,’ and from his mother a whispered remonstration: ‘Don’t giggle, Joseph.’

  The child stared up at his mother for a moment; then screwing himself along the seat he began to rub at the window with his gloved hand, until his mother spoke again: ‘The snow’s on the outside,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  She now smiled at him and shook her head as if in amused despair.

  The man called Dick had taken his place in the front of the car, which now started with a jerk that brought them all forward in their seats, and again the child laughed, but this time Ellen Jebeau did not check him, only put her hand out quickly to arrest his fall. Then, pulling him close to her side, she put her arm around his shoulder and slowly allowed her body to relax against the back of the seat, while her eyes remained on the man in front of her, her brother-in-law, Sir Arthur James Jebeau, whom she had met only twice during the five years she had been married to his younger brother; and she pondered now, as she had done then, on the difference in their personalities. This man was garrulous, full-blooded, alive, a doer, while her late husband had been in all ways his opposite, a dreamer of dreams that never came true. His last dream had killed him, and in a foreign country, attempting again to make money overnight in an enterprise that took most men a lifetime to accomplish: the making of wine.

  She wondered how they had come together in life, because her own character was as far removed from her husband’s as was his brother’s. She never dreamed dreams; she had desires, strong desires that were based on practicality, not on flimsy imaginings. In a way she was not sorry Joe had died, for sooner or later there would have been a parting. She knew in her heart that if she had had any money of her own that parting would surely have happened. Yet that wasn’t the whole truth; the custody of the child would have been the deciding factor as to whether she went or stayed. But this decision had mercifully been taken from her. She said mercifully, but she certainly hadn’t thought that way when she found that he had left her a legacy of debt and a smothering mortgage on the old, cold, grim farmhouse to which he had taken her with such pride, as if presenting her with a royal palace.

  A month ago the man sitting in front of her had come over to France and seen to the burial of his brother, leaving her sufficient funds to clear up his affairs: also he had spontaneously offered her a home u
ntil such time as she would want to make plans of her own.

  Beneath her mantle of mourning the offer had brought not only relief but a certain form of joy. Her brother-in-law had been a widower for five years and he had so loved his wife that he didn’t seem ready to replace her. His home, she recalled, was beautiful, and lying awake at nights in that dreary, bare farmhouse, she had pondered with not a little envy why one brother should live in such style while the other, mainly through his own fault, should live in a way that was no better than a peasant’s.

  And what was bringing more comfort to her now was the thought that there wasn’t even a housekeeper as such running the place; the wife and daughters of the groom, who was now seated next to his master, managed the place, so there was no person in charge to contend with, no mistress for her to feel subservient to.

  Her head sank into her shoulders, and she let out a long slow breath as she saw the future stretching out from the narrow confines of winters, as it were, through springs into high summers. But being of the character she was, she knew that springs would bring storms, as would the summers also. But one thing at a time, she told herself, one thing at a time: she was beginning a new life, not only for herself but for her son. Instinctively she pulled him closer to her until he whimpered, ‘Mother, you’re hurting my arm.’

  It had taken them an hour and a half to reach the house. She had seen none of the landscape through which they had come; she could only recall it from the past journeys and think that she had missed nothing, because the barren hills and scree slopes would have presented no picture of grandeur to her.

  She did glance at the façade of the house and her eyes lifted to the blackened strip of stone of the old chimney and noted the smoke billowing out of its tall pot.

  Then she was in the hall and there all around them was bustle: there was the fat face above the equally fat hulk of Jessie Smith smiling a welcome that did not touch her eyes; her daughter Mary, a nineteen-year-old, unlike her mother, thin and wiry, her head moving slowly up and down in welcome and, also unlike her mother, smiling with her eyes. They helped her and the child off with their outdoor things, while opposite them stood two boys, silent and embarrassed-looking as their father talked to them non-stop: ‘It’s getting worse; we won’t be able to move tomorrow. Did you get the animals out? If this keeps up and they don’t exercise, their bellies will burst. Well, don’t stand there like stooks, speak to your aunt. Martin and you, Harry, you remember your aunt, don’t you?’