Our Kate Read online

  As this will be my final foreword, I shall now say thank you and goodbye to all those kind people who have loved OUR KATE.

  Catherine Cookson

  1981 Foreword

  It is eight years since I wrote the previous foreword. And what has happened during this time? At first, I am inclined to say, ‘Nothing much’. And then I think of my mail that comes in daily from different parts of the world, the main theme of a first letter generally being concerned with Our Kate and, often, of the way it has affected the writer’s own life. It has given some the courage to go on in spite of adversity; others it has made face up to the fact that they need no longer carry the guilt of illegitimacy. The book has opened the door on tragic secrets and swept clean the mental torment that has been festering for years.

  I must admit that when I wrote Our Kate I didn’t do so with the idea that it would help anyone but myself. As I’ve said, I wanted to alleviate my own torment. Yet, I am humbled by the thought that what I have written has made such an impact on so many people.

  The simple poem I carried with me when I left the North is called Believe This; but I included only two verses in Our Kate. There is another, and perhaps the most important, which goes:

  The word impossible is black.

  I can is a flame of gold:

  No whining heart; eyes look not back;

  Be strong, oh Will, and bold;

  You’re winning though the journey’s slow,

  You’re gaining steadily each day.

  Oh Courage, what a warmth and glow

  You shed along the way!

  The word impossible is black.

  I can is like a flame of gold . . .

  It shone through our Kate herself and left its shadow on me.

  Catherine Cookson

  Northumberland, June 1981

  1973 Foreword

  WHY DOES ONE WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY?

  In my case the answer is simple. I had to get out of my system this thing that, in 1945, had driven me to a breakdown and which, ten years later, was still with me.

  Although the book took twelve years to complete and I rewrote it eight times, each attempt became more and more therapeutic as I deleted the bitterness from it. But when, at last, in 1969 it was ready for publication, I was in two minds whether or not to withdraw it. Yet I knew that my cure would never be complete unless I could openly associate myself with two words, two words that had been my secret shame for so long, namely, ‘illegitimate’ and ‘bastard’.

  It is now four years since the first publication and as Kate would say, ‘Eeh, lass, it’s been an eye-opener! I never knew there were so many . . . BASKETS in the world. It’s a comforting thought, isn’t it, hinny? That you’re not alone.’

  The thousands of letters I have had since the book came out – from young people as well as from those of my own generation – have proved that, indeed, I am not alone. Yet it is small comfort to know that even in this day and age there are countless people still suffering from the stigma.

  Catherine Cookson

  Hastings, December 1973

  PART ONE

  THE LONG CHILDHOOD

  One

  Now you’re married I wish you joy,

  First a girl and then a boy.

  Seven years over,

  Seven years after,

  Now’s the time to kiss and give over.

  When I first danced around the lamp-post and sang the above words I was about five years old. I was fifteen when I asked myself who had written them.

  ‘Seven years over, seven years after, now’s the time to kiss and give over.’

  Eeh! They were bad words. Fancy saying things like that in a bairn’s song.

  ‘Now you’re married I wish you joy. First a girl and then a boy.’ That was all right; I liked that part because I wanted first a girl and then a boy. But above all things I wanted to get married. It was nothing to do with having a husband, nothing at all, I just wanted to be called Mrs, because our Kate wasn’t called Mrs.

  I was born in Number 5 Leam Lane, at the bottom of Simonside Bank, Tyne Dock. Tyne Dock is, or was at the time, just what it says, a dock on the river Tyne. Where the river flows into the North Sea the towns of North and South Shields stand, one on each bank. South Shields is connected with Tyne Dock; upriver Jarrow, Hebburn, Pelaw, Felling and Gateshead all follow; on the other side of the river is North Shields, then follows Howdon, Wallsend, Willington Quay and Newcastle. Both banks were lined with shipyards, chemical works and factories.

  Simonside Bank was just a cluster of houses within three minutes’ walk, under five great slime-dripping arches, of the actual dock gates; and yet we were on the verge of what was known as the country. A few minutes’ walk up the hill from our house were the big houses. There were about half a dozen of them, and above them a farm and a little country school and church.

  The first group of houses on the left going up the bank was confined between two house-shops, one at each end. One was kept by the Lodges, the other by the Lawsons. In the middle was a public house. I never knew it called anything but ‘Twenty-seven’, because I understand there were only twenty-six staiths in the docks and the bar being a place where the men eventually docked became twenty-seven. Our house was next to the bar. On the opposite side were two houses and a blacksmith’s shop.

  Simonside Bank was shaped like a bent funnel, the broad end opening onto the main road between Tyne Dock and Jarrow. Where the funnel curved and narrowed sharply to mount the steep bank, there was, on the right-hand side, a row of houses perched high on a terrace. On the left-hand side, just beyond the Lodges’ house and shop, was the gasworks, and directly above this, the Dixons’ cottage.

  The Dixons were people on a different social scale altogether from the McMullens. I was only once in their house, it was on a Saturday morning and I found myself sitting on a chamber in their front room. I had been carried there after my Uncle Jack had grabbed me by the hair and dashed me against a wall. Jack was eighteen and roaring mad drunk; he was fighting my step-grandfather, who was, if anything, more roaring and more mad than his only son. I must have tried to separate them – I was to do this very often during my childhood – and Jack had thrown me out of the way. They both loved me and would never have consciously hurt me. But there I was sitting on the chamber and crying my loudest, not because I’d nearly had my brains knocked out but because I was in the Dixons’ lovely bedroom and I had wet my knickers.

  On the high terrace, I remember only two families; the Richardsons, with daughters Sally and Polly, and one son; and the Watsons, with a son, Willy, and a daughter, Eva. It is Willy I remember playing with, in the gas gates as we called the rough space beyond the big gates that shut off the works and the gasometer itself. I used to run around the rim of the gasometer fascinated and frightened by the foot of water dividing it from the enormous tank. I rarely went beyond the gasometer itself, except one morning early, when I went with our Kate to the furnace and saw it being raked out, a great red terrifying mouth that belched a funny smell. It filled my mouth and clogged my nostrils and as we walked back to the house, Kate now carrying two buckets of hot cinders with which to start the wash-house pot, I told her that I felt the funny smell on my tongue. ‘You’re daft, bairn,’ she said.

  I have a pale memory of hanging over the wall of the gas gates and looking down onto the steep curving road of Simonside Bank. Opposite, against the high terrace wall that buttressed the bank, lay a bike, and somebody was lying on the road. It was a young lad who had come down the hill at speed and, attempting to round the curve too fast, had been thrown off his bike and hit the high wall. I think he died on the road, but I remember them saying that he cried for his mother and that she had been dead for years.

  The Richardson girls grew up to be fine, well-dressed women. I can hear Kate skitting at their mother, always with the same phrase, ‘If you talk properly you’ll get nice clothes.’ And why not? But in those days, to say anything like that turned you at once into
an upstart. Yet underneath, Kate had the same desire for me, that I should talk nice, be different and have nice clothes. I was full of admiration for the Richardson girls and they were always very nice to me.

  But most people were nice to me. Yet I was always fighting against something I couldn’t understand. Eventually I realised I was fighting against what people were thinking underneath the niceness, that I would go the way of my mother. Then they would have said, ‘Well, what can you expect? What chance did the lass have, I ask you?’ It was this I fought against, their pity. I wanted to be looked up to, respected, even envied, not – pitied.

  One day when I was three, and walking through the arches from the Docks – from a very small child I was used to going about on my own – I saw someone coming towards me whom apparently I didn’t want to meet for I crossed over the road and, turning my face to the blank, black wall, walked sideways until I was past them, for I knew that if I couldn’t see them they couldn’t see me. I was to follow this pattern for many years; whenever I didn’t want to face up to some reality, I would turn my face to a wall; and always I would see a picture, which became the focal point of my striving, because it presented to me a different way of life. It showed me a big house peopled by ladies and gentlemen, and surrounded by cars, horses and servants. Of course, I was in the picture, dead centre.

  The people who lived above us in Leam Lane were called Angus. I remember them because of the cow. The cows being driven down from the farm at the top of the bank, probably on their way to the slaughterhouse in South Shields, were frightened one day by the old rumbling tram that plied on the single-line track between Tyne Dock and Palmer’s shipyard in Jarrow. One of the trams, tearing out from underneath the arches at all of five miles an hour, frightened the animals and they scattered round the back lane. One, out of terror or curiosity, came into our backyard, and finding Mrs Angus’ staircase door open mounted the stairs.

  The first indication the herdsman had of the whereabouts of the cow was Mrs Angus hanging out from the upstairs front window screaming blue murder. Had the cow decided to go straight down the narrow front stairs, which dropped from the six foot landing, speculation was ripe for years afterwards as to what course would have been taken to get it up again, but the cow, being a sensible creature, just left her visiting card, which covered the landing, turned round and went out the way she had come.

  The story of the cow was repeated again and again and again over the years in our house. Anything with a trace of humour in it was squeezed to death, and even the dead remains were kept hanging and were laughed at.

  The McMullens were either laughing or rowing.

  Although rows were not a daily occurrence in the house – the money coming in was not sufficient to provide for such regular relaxation – they were certainly a weekly affair and put the stamp on the McMullens in the dockland area. Old John and young John were characters – fighting characters. But, of course, they were not alone.

  Then there was my grandmother. She was a tall woman, with a round, somewhat flat face. Her hair was parted dead centre and pulled painfully tight into a knob on the back of her head. I can see her with an apron on and a shirt blouse which was always buttoned right up to the neck. I have a picture of her standing with me in the doorway of a house in William Black Street. She looked a hard woman; I think from what my mother told me she was, at least towards her. She was very old as I remember her, being in her middle fifties when I was about seven or eight. And when she went out she wore a bonnet and a big cape. She too loved me.

  She had had five daughters by her first husband, my real grandfather, who was a very good man and a Brother in the Catholic Church at Jarrow. He died, in his early thirties, of consumption. There were no pensions in those days, so my grandmother and the five girls were kept for a time by my great-grandmother and grandfather, a respectable, highly esteemed couple, possessors of a smallholding and lavish table. But my grandmother, still a young woman and wanting independence, married again. This time a dashing Irishman, John McMullen, who had served in India and who had just come out of the army with a bit of money. Perhaps the real reason she married him was to enable her to stop working in the Puddling Mills at Jarrow, where the owners supplied milk or beer at break to keep the women going. For here death met you early.

  All I know of my step-grandfather’s background is that he hailed from somewhere in the bog country of Ireland, was one of triplets, and had thirteen brothers. He could neither read nor write, but could tell you the price of all eatables. My mother remembers his other two triplets coming to visit him shortly after he had married my grandmother. She said she remembered them because they brought the girls a big bag of pomegranates, and the next morning they got their backsides smacked because of the pomegranate stain on the bedclothes. It is interesting to recall that my mother had real bedclothes over her at that stage in her life for this luxury didn’t last long under the care of John McMullen. Yet let me be fair to him, he was a good worker . . . when he could get it. He would walk right from the top end of Jarrow to the docks, a matter of about six miles there and back, for one shift.

  My mother tells me that she can remember my grandmother, together with her sisters, Mary, who was younger, and Sarah, who was older than her, doing this walk at ten o’clock at night to take their stepfather’s supper to the dock gates. It would be twelve o’clock when they got back home, and this journey was often done in the snow, and at times barefoot, for by now there was no-one to provide the extras. Two of the girls died before they were fourteen and my mother used to say it was a blessing in disguise.

  During one period of great depression – this was when my mother was a child – me granda worked in the workhouse, breaking stones at a shilling a day. The shilling was paid as a voucher which had to be taken to a grocery shop, and if anyone dared to ask the shopkeeper to put in a penn’orth of baccy he was likely to lose the voucher altogether.

  Looking back, I see me granda acted according to his lights and values, and who is to blame him for his values when, for a ten-hour shift unloading iron-ore boats, his trousers wet to the thighs, he got three shillings and sixpence.

  My Aunt Sarah and my mother went into ‘place’ when they were twelve years old. Of course they had done work long before this, but it was mixed up with school – that is when they attended, for sending three children to school meant threepence a week and you could make a dinner for that with a penn’orth of pot stuff (vegetables), a penn’orth of peas, beans and barley, and a penn’orth of pieces. What did it matter if there was sawdust sticking to the black congealed blood on the meat or that it was just a piece of the beast’s lungs – it made a dinner.

  They had also begged bread from door to door. I used to envy my mother having experienced these things because I longed for such poverty that there would be no money left for drink. My mother used to tell me of being sent out to beg for bread one day – she was not the only one begging at that time in Jarrow. Her feet were bare and bleeding, the calves of her legs split with keens. At one house a compassionate woman took her in and gave her a pair of boots and stockings, and she went home, forgetting about the bread. Her delight in the boots, although her feet were paining even worse from their pressure on the keens, was short-lived, for her mother took them immediately to the ‘In and Out’. It was an appropriate name, for you would pawn, say, your man’s suit on a Monday to meet the rent and if you hadn’t the money to get it out on the Friday you would take in something else to help retrieve it. Brass candlesticks, mats, fire-irons, even the stone dish you baked the bread in. One thing was always going in to get the other out.

  My mother’s first spell of actual service was in a house in Stanhope Road, Tyne Dock. I think they were butchers. There were four sons, and the washing was colossal. She couldn’t reach the top of the poss-tub to wield the poss-stick, a great wooden beater on four legs, three to four feet high, so the woman had a stool made for her. She did all the housework, all the washing and all the ironing. She work
ed from half past six in the morning until late at night, with half a day off a fortnight, and all for half a crown a week, usually subbed a month or two ahead. She stayed there a year. The tale of my mother’s first place stayed in the front of my mind even as a child, and when I went into service I thought how lucky I was to be treated so differently. But only for a very short time.

  I was born when Kate was twenty-four and the life she was made to endure because of me would have driven anyone less strong not only to drink but into the madhouse. The cruelty of the bigoted poor has to be witnessed to be believed. It has to be lived with to be understood.

  When my mother, sick to the depths of her soul, as I know now she was, had to come home from ‘her place’ and say she was going to have a baby, The Fathar, as he was always called, was for killing her – she had committed the unforgivable sin. Yet when I was born and she had milk fever and her breasts swelled to bursting, the fathar was supposed to have saved her life by sucking the milk from them. It seems incredible to me that she should have looked upon this act as something almost heroic for, remembering him as I do, I can see that he would have enjoyed this operation – he was a frustrated, licentious man. His antidote against this, which the ailing health of me grandma could not alleviate, was drink and a dirty tongue, which he used against all women. Yet I must say that only on rare occasions did he let himself go in my presence, at least when he was sober. I feel grateful to him for this, for he had been known to make even the toughest women in the New Buildings blush.