The Invisible Cord Read online

  THE INVISIBLE CORD

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  The Invisible Cord

  PART ONE One

  Two

  Three

  PART TWO One

  Two

  PART THREE One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  PART FOUR One

  Two

  Three

  PART FIVE One

  Two

  PART SIX One

  Two

  PART SEVEN One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  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 Invisible Cord

  It was a wartime white wedding but it was not a love match. Annie Cooper married George McCabe for one reason only: she was expecting his child. Her own parents accepted the situation with a kind of pained resignation. The easy-going McCabes, and especially George’s rumbustious mother, just took it in their stride. But Annie was a girl of spirit and determined to make the marriage work. George might not be all that bright, but he was good-natured and a hard worker once given a shove in the right direction. Annie applied herself to that task as she matured into a woman of character and resource. The family prospered even as it grew. She bore George four children, but it was the first who always held her heart in the hollow of his hand.

  From early childhood, Rance was a problem. There were traits in his character that were hard to excuse or even understand, but whatever trouble he got into, Annie would forgive him. Mother and son were bound together by an invisible chord; invisible but strong enough to become a noose for both of them.

  Spanning a period of nearly thirty years and set against a background of the Tyneside towns, The Invisible Cord is a novel of great power and warmth that explores several different kinds of love with a strong dramatic narrative that wholly engages from first page to last.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1975

  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 978-1-78036-062-1

  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 WHITE WEDDING

  One

  ‘Who said I shouldn’t wear white?’

  ‘Nobody, Annie, nobody.’

  ‘Don’t tell me nobody. You wouldn’t have the bareface to come out with that on your own, Mona Broadbent, so don’t tell me that nobody put you up to it.’

  ‘Nobody put me up to it, it was just something that I…Aw you, Annie; you’re like a ferret.’

  ‘Then there was something said then? Who said it?’

  Mona Broadbent sucked in her thin lips, pushed her thin fair hair first over one ear then over the other, and wagged her long melancholy face at Annie Cooper, her best friend, as she would tell you again and again if you had a mind to listen, her only real friend. More like sisters they were, she would say, having started school together at St Peter and Paul’s, Tyne Dock, having changed schools together when both their parents shifted to High Shields, and having left school together in 1940 and got their first job together in Culbert’s biscuit factory. Then, a year later, again they made a move together; this time into the munitions works, where they got almost twice the money and enjoyed a bit more carry-on. They were still in the munition works, but separated for the first time because they had been put on different shifts.

  It was three weeks ago now when Mona, as she would have told you, got the shock of her life on Annie informing her, out of the blue, that she was going to be married. And who do you think to? Georgie McCabe. Georgie McCabe, that big galoot they had known all their lives…well, anyway since they had moved to 114 Weldon Street.

  Mona couldn’t get over it. Annie and Georgie McCabe! Him a cook in the R.A.F. stationed in some god-forsaken place called Madley. A cook mind you, and he could burn water! Lorry driving was his trade and they’d made him a cook. As her da said, he was Hitler’s best friend, a fifth columnist working through the guts. Fry the blokes’ eggs in axle grease, that’s what he would do. Her ma, too, said Annie must be mad or gone soft in the head, for if anybody in their street could pick and choose it was Annie. Her ma was very fond of Annie; they were all very fond of Annie; because Annie was good-hearted and jolly. You couldn’t be dull for long where Annie was. And now she was going to marry the dimmest bloke in the street.

  What was up with her? That was the question she had asked Annie three weeks ago. ‘What’s up with you, Annie Cooper?’ she had said. ‘There’s Peter Riley, and him first mate. Cock-eyed he’s been when he’s come home these last two trips squintin’ at you. And then there’s John McIntyre; he’s not to be sneezed at, neither on the parade ground nor off it. He’s a sergeant already and they say he won’t stay there.’

  It was at this point that Annie had turned on her like she had never done before, telling her to shut her mouth, she was marrying Georgie McCabe because she wanted to marry Georgie McCabe, and if she, Mona, didn’t like it she knew what she could do. Then she had banged the door in her face.

  Now here she was demanding to know why she shouldn’t be dressed in white when she knew flaming well why she shouldn’t be dressed in white; and she said exactly that to her.

  ‘You know flamin’ well, Annie, what Katie Newton was sayin’ an’ I was just tryin’ to break it to you gentle like. But I see you’re in one of your moods again so I won’t beat about the bush. I heard her sayin’ to Florrie Turnbull that it was no use using a white oven cloth to take a burnt loaf out of the oven.’

  ‘Burnt loaf! Just wait till I see her, I’ll smack her cheeky face for her. I’ll go right up to her, I will, and I’ll take my hand right across her…’

  Annie’s voice stopped abruptly, her hand dropped from its demonstrating position, her chin dropped onto her chest; she sat down on the bedroom chair with a plop and there was silence in the room until she raised her head and looked with pleading eyes at Mona and asked, ‘Does it show?’

  ‘No, no, Annie, it doesn’t at all, you’re still as flat as a pancake.’ Mona’s voice was soft.

  Annie screwed up her eyes tight and got abruptly to her feet, then walked towards the window, saying, ‘You were never a good liar.’

  As she stood looking out of the narrow aperture of the blackout curtains she heard the bed springs creak as Mona sat down. Only once before had she been made conscious that the bed springs creaked, that was the night when Georgie McCabe had eased himself down beside her. She had tried to push him off but not too much; no, she had to be fair, not too much.

  They had sneaked away from Hilda Tressell’s wedding. Everyone from their p
art of the street had been to Hilda Tressell’s wedding. Her da was paralytic, and her ma had had a drop an’ all. It was her da who had made her drink the whisky, and that on top of the sherry had made her go daft. They had cleared the floor and she had done the Highland fling by herself until Georgie had joined her, and then everybody had laughed fit to burst.

  Georgie had given her another whisky, and she’d had more sherry, and when she felt a bit sick he took her outside. She couldn’t remember why they had made for home or who suggested it. But she could remember them stealing up the street and the creaking of the bed as he lay down beside her.

  It was the first time it had happened to her and she had cried, and then she had really been sick. The next morning, even while she felt terrible, she had knelt by the bed and prayed to Our Lady not to let anything happen to her. She had gone to late Mass, and Georgie was there. He had looked a little shamefaced but what he said to her was, ‘You’d think I’d get out of bloody church parade on leave, wouldn’t you?’

  She remembered thinking, him just coming out of Mass and swearing; but then Georgie’s swearing was like God bless you! He punctuated everything with bloody. His mother and father did too. Yet she wasn’t unused to swearing; her da could hold his own at it, at least when he was upset about something. But he never swore like the McCabes, and her mother never swore at all. Her mother was a bit prim, except when she had drink on her and then she let her hair down. She herself took after her mother in a way, not that she was prim, far from it, but once she had taken drink her hair came down too.

  When she had told her mother she was going to marry Georgie she had just stared at her, stared and stared at her, but she hadn’t opened her mouth to ask why, yet her eyes had held the question…and the answer. It was a full five minutes later when she had asked, ‘When is it to be?’ and she had answered, ‘Soon. He’s getting a forty-eight.’ And that had been that.