The Tide of Life Read online

  THE TIDE OF LIFE

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  The Tide of Life

  PART ONE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART THREE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART FOUR Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  PART FIVE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART SIX Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  PART SEVEN 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<
br />
  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 Tide of Life

  Sep McGilby always said that Emily Kennedy had a happy face. And at sixteen, Emily had a lot to be glad about. She loved her job as maid-of-all-work to the McGilbys, and the only cloud on her horizon was her anxiety about her delicate younger sister, Lucy.

  But when the invalid Mrs McGilby dies, and Sep killed in an accident soon after, Emily and Lucy are forced to leave South Shields to look for work, which they find at Croft Dene House.

  The household of Croft Dene House, where Lawrence Birch ruled as master, was a strange one, and as Emily became more deeply involved with the family’s affairs, she grew rapidly to a young woman, needing all her strength of will and character to get her through. And whatever else happened, she clung grimly to a scrap of philosophy that carried her through the bitter struggles of her new life.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1976

  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 978-1-78036-045-4

  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 Harold Stinton, and to his son John for whom I wrote my first boys’ story.

  LIFE COMES IN LIKE THE TIDE

  ON A ROAR FROM THE SEABED,

  And is already dying before its ebb.

  Existence is the time it takes for the shingle to be wet,

  And yet,

  Are they deluded,

  Do they lie,

  Those blind with courage

  Who shout above the spray,

  Never say die?

  C. C.

  PART ONE

  SEP

  One

  ‘You nearly ready for the road, Emily?’

  ‘Yes, Mr McGillby.’

  ‘That’s it then. And it’s a nice day, so enjoy yourself. Take a walk in the park and see the ducks on the pond.’

  They looked straight at each other and smiled, the thirty-five-year-old ruddy-faced man and the sixteen-year-old girl whose mass of light brown hair just missed being blonde and who, for all her youth, already wore it in the adult mode of a screwed bun on the back of her head. She was tall for sixteen and showing promise of a good figure. As yet, however, it wasn’t the figure that most people noticed, but something about her face; not because it was beautiful, even though the thick rims of eyelashes lent a depth to her already dark brown eyes; nor was it her wide-lipped mouth; nor yet the warm tint of her skin; for their combination did not as yet spell beauty, but what, without question, they did combine to was an overall brightness as if the face were illuminated from within.

  Sep McGillby often thought about his maid-of-all-work’s face, describing it to himself as a glad face; and this he considered to be the right description because she was glad.

  He had been made to wonder too, of late, what life in this house would have been like without her; she had become like a beloved daughter.

  He turned away from her now, saying, ‘You’ll look in on the missis before you go, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh aye, of course, Mr McGillby. Of course.’

  ‘Away you go then.’

  Emily did not immediately make for the stairs that led upwards from behind a door at the far end of the kitchen, but she watched her employer moving towards the front room, and when he had closed the door she rolled up her sleeves and went into the scullery. There, turning on the single tap, she ran some water into a tin dish that stood in the shallow brown earthenware sink, then washed her face with the blue-mottled soap, the same that she used for scrubbing the floors, and with damp hands smoothed down her hair from its middle parting in an attempt to make it conform, for it was the most unruly hair, and bits of it would keep springing out from her bun and from behind her ears. This worried her because Mrs McGillby didn’t approve of hair that wouldn’t stay put.

  When she had come out from the scullery and was crossing the kitchen towards the staircase door she was arrested by a peculiar smell, peculiar that was to this particular house. She looked towards the sitting-room door for a moment, then bit on her lip to stop herself from grinning widely. Mr McGillby was indulging in a smoke. She hoped he had the sense to open the window, because if that smell wafted upstairs there would be skin and hair flying. Well, not skin and hair. Mrs McGillby didn’t row, that was she didn’t shout, but she had a way of saying things that had the same effect on the listener as if she were bawling.

  She now ran on tiptoe to the end of the kitchen and gently eased the bottom window upwards for about six inches or so. That was another thing that wouldn’t have been allowed if Mrs McGillby had been on her feet; the windows were never opened because of the dust.

  She paused again as she made her way to the stairs, her eyes slanted towards the sitting-room door while wondering yet again where he hid his baccy. She hadn’t found a place in the room that he could use as a hidey-hole, and he wouldn’t have dared carry it about on him because Mrs McGillby had a nose like a ferret.

  She went quietly up the steep dark stairs now to the small landing, which had a door on each side. The right-hand door led into Mr and Mrs McGillby’s bedroom, the left one into her own room. Once inside her room she squeezed past the iron bedstead and towards the chest of drawers that was wedged between the foot of the bed and the window sill.

  Opening the top drawer, she took out a clean blue print frock. Divesting herself of her bibless holland apron, striped blouse, and serge skirt, she got into the dress; then she changed her house slippers for a pair of boots, their ugliness being almost hidden by the hem of the dress.

  From the second draw
er she took out a straw hat and two long hatpins, and when she had secured them in the hat it sat dead straight across the top of her head. She now lifted her coat off a nail on the back of the door and put it on. Lastly, she took out a clean handkerchief from a box on the top of the chest of drawers, together with a brown worn leather purse. This she opened, looked at her week’s wages of one and sixpence, which again aroused in her the thought of how lucky she was; then snapping the purse closed and, holding it and the clean handkerchief in her hand, she went out of the room, took the three steps across the landing, tapped on the bedroom door before entering and saying with a smile, ‘I’m ready for off, Mrs McGillby. Is there anythin’ you want doin’ afore I go?’

  Nancy McGillby was propped up in bed. She had been propped up in bed for two years now and she took it calmly because it was God’s will. God had seen fit to give her a complaint. Why, she didn’t question, but believed firmly that the answer would be given to her when she entered the other life—in the mansion He had prepared for her all knowledge would be hers and the rewards for her suffering and patience would be bountiful.

  In answer to Emily’s enquiry Mrs McGillby said, ‘Let me see if you’re tidy,’ and on this Emily walked towards the window and stood, her arms extended from her sides, before turning slowly about. It was when Mrs McGillby viewed her back that she said with a note in her voice that spoke of patience tried to the edge of endurance, ‘That hair! You’d imagine I’d never spoken to you about it. I’ve told you to wet it to keep it down, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs McGillby, but it dries.’

  ‘Well, there’s only one thing for it, if you can’t keep it under control you’ll have to have it cut off.’

  Each feature on Emily’s face seemed to stretch; the gladness was wiped from it. She gabbled now, ‘Eeh, no, Mrs McGillby, don’t say that! I’ll see to it, I will; an’ I’ll snip off the frizzy bits that stick out, I will.’