Our Kate Read online

  It is true to say that Kate never left the house to return to her place with anything except a return ticket in her purse. Should the Fathar or Jack be in the house, which inevitably they would be when there wasn’t any money floating around, she couldn’t see them doing without a drink. She was a big soft-hearted goof. It was strange, too, but she rarely touched drink then.

  In these days working men, should their wives be ill, will set to and see to the house, but in those days a man went out to work and that, to his mind, was enough; the house and all in it was the woman’s task, and it lowered a man’s prestige if he as much as lifted a cup. The lower down the working-class scale you were the more this rule applied. Even many years later I heard me granda describe a man as the nappy washer because he had seen to the house when his wife was confined to bed with her first baby. The neighbours usually did this chore with or without pay, more often without, because in those days neighbours did not expect to be paid. Both me granda and me Uncle Jack would have let their clothes go rotten on their backs before they would have washed them; as for cooking a meal, even if they had known how to, they wouldn’t have lowered themselves to the level of the fire, or the gas stove. Man’s rightful standing in his house was a thing to be guarded, to be fought for; no weakness or emotions or kindly instincts must touch it. Our men didn’t even mend the boots, Kate had to do that. With the last on her knees and a mouthful of tacks she would hammer away, soling and heeling the big ugly working boots, and after a day that would have worn out two women.

  So there came a time, because me grandma became ill – this was shortly following the night Kate pulled me from the lamp-post – that she had to give up her limited liberty and come home to be jack-of-all-trades. Had there not been myself to use as a hold over her she might have refused, yet I doubt it, knowing Kate.

  She worked for everybody, and anybody. Besides nursing me grandma and attending to fleeting lodgers she went out and did days washing or cleaning, paper-hanging and painting, ceilings and staircases, she even replaced window sashes and whole window frames and for never more than three shillings a day. So it is little wonder that the hopelessness of her life, looming so large before her drove her to an antidote to enable her to go through with it. Yet her ready smile, her joking, and pleasant disposition never gave away what she felt about some of her employers. It was only years later that I knew how she had hated doing for ‘those worse than yourself’.

  Besides having a lovely face she was beautifully built, with a skin the equal of which I have never seen, pure milk and roses. She had two great azure blue eyes, with dark curving brows. Her hair was brown and abundant and she had a wide generous mouth full of strong teeth with which she cracked brazil nuts until she was seventy. But it was the mouth that showed her weakness, with a top lip full to slackness. She was of a dominant nature, yet this was balanced by an innate softness; she was very forgiving was Kate. She had in her a sense of humour to which she gave rein on every occasion. She was more beautiful when she was serious; there was a depth to her when she was serious, and it was the depth in her that attracted me.

  I never knew her to be without swollen ankles, but this did not mar a woman in those days for the skirts came down to the top of the shoes. Her left ankle had been swollen, she told me, since she was a small child and it caused her left foot to flap slightly inwards as she walked, but her walk was stately, yet tripping – she always seemed to be on the point of a run. Constitutionally she was as strong as a horse, yet in some strange way this constitution refused to carry drink, for, from the first glass of spirit she drank, her personality changed for the worse. After three glasses she became, not our Kate; but someone of whom I was deeply ashamed, whom in my early years I came to fear, then hate; then wish dead, yet all the time loved, loved because she was the only thing that was mine; even while I disowned her in my mind I loved her. This clash of emotions presented itself to me for the first time one Saturday afternoon.

  I had been to the penny matinee at The Crown in Hudson Street, Tyne Dock. I loved the pictures because at the pictures not only did I see, through my half-covered eyes, beautiful ladies being tied to railway lines, where they lay in agony from one Saturday afternoon until the next waiting for the trains to come crashing over them, or the hero, who had already escaped death countless times, at last caught and tied to within an inch of a madly spinning saw, but I also saw gracious ladies and gentlemen in big houses, surrounded by cars, horses and servants, exactly like the pictures I conjured up on the wall when I turned my face away from life, away from all the nasty things. I never covered my eyes with my fingers and peered through the penumbra of fleshy light when I looked at pictures like this at The Crown but I would stare wide-eyed and open-mouthed into the wonder of another world, and because of this other world I didn’t like Ben Turpin, or Keystone Cops or, later still, daft people like Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin always filled me with embarrassment. The poor desolate creatures he portrayed were too near to something inside myself. No, I never, even when I grew up, liked Charlie Chaplin. I just liked pictures of . . . ladies and gentlemen.

  At four o’clock on this particular Saturday I came out of The Crown and was walking in a happy daze down the Dock bank. I was walking backwards, which I often did when I was happy, and I turned swiftly on hearing my name called and bumped my nose right into a tram standard, to the great amusement of some of the onlookers. Then through my dazed vision I saw, coming across the road from the direction of Bede Street, our Kate, and there was something about her that startled me. Something in her walk. I thought I was seeing things funny because I had bumped my nose. She looked down at me, smiling widely, and her eyes looked smoky and she clutched my hand as we went down the Bank towards the tram terminus. When there, she began to talk and laugh. Her talk was thick and her words fuddled, and her laugh made me lower my lids. And it came to me in a sickening revelation, that our Kate was drunk. She walked up and down as we waited for the tram, and as I looked downwards I saw her left foot give a more abandoned fling to itself when it left the ground. This action of her left foot was scarcely noticeable when she hadn’t taken anything, but once she touched spirit it went not only to her head but to her left foot. This was the first time I became aware that there isn’t a part of the body or mind that remains unaffected by spirits. And it was on this day that I first felt the sick feeling in my chest, the sick feeling that was to remain with me for long periods until as recently as twelve years ago when she died.

  Kate was a good walker and rarely took the tram between Tyne Dock and East Jarrow, but this day she was for getting us both on the tram, and I became filled with panic. I didn’t want to get on the tram where everybody would know us, so I must have inveigled her into walking home, because I can see myself going through the arches by her side and comforting myself with the thought that . . . well, she’s only our Kate, she’s not me ma, for I knew that the greatest disgrace in life was to have a ma who drank. It didn’t matter so much if your da drank, most da’s did, but to have a ma that drank made people talk about you; like they did about some women in the docks. ‘They could drink it through a dirty rag’, only the word used wasn’t as ordinary as dirty.

  There are blessed blanks which cut out many memories of my childhood; the remainder of this day is lost but I do know that the comfort I gave myself was of short duration.

  I had up to that time called me grandma ‘ma’ and I continued to do this until she died, and me granda I called ‘da’, but this relationship was straightened out for me very forcibly when I was playing with some children at the top corner one day when I was seven years old. There was a chimney breast on the end of the Richardsons’ house in which we used to play shops, and the ingredients in the shops were provided by broken bottles and china, which was called boody. We would break up pieces of coloured glass and divide them into heaps to represent butter, bacon and groceries, and all sorts of taffy and sweets like Cissie Affleck had in her shop; everlasting strips, sherbert dips, tiger
nuts, aniseed balls, chocolate drops, scenty mixtures, lucky bags. In the business of playing shops, and buying and selling with our glass and boody merchandise, there was always a little shoplifting done. In this particular instance a prized piece of green glass from the bottom of a bottle suddenly disappeared from my shop – somebody had swiped it when she came to buy. Naturally I made a hue and cry about the robbery and accused a girl much older than myself.

  ‘If you don’t give me back me boody I’ll go and tell me ma about you, so I will!’ I said.

  On this she shot me into the awareness of living by sticking her face close to mine and bawling at me, ‘She’s not your ma. If ya want to know, she’s your grandma . . . your Kate’s your ma and she drinks, an’ . . . YOU haven’t GOT NO DA, me ma says so.’

  ‘I have so, you’re barmy. Me da’s in our kitchen this minute.’

  ‘He’s not your da, he’s your granda. An’ he’s an old sod, me ma says so.’

  ‘EEH! What you said! He is me da. I’ll go an’ tell him. He’ll sort your canister for you so he will. He is . . . he is me da. He is! He is! You’re a cheeky bitch.’

  ‘He isn’t. You haven’t got no da.’

  ‘You haven’t got no da! You haven’t got no da!’ The others took it up.

  No-one, unless he has been through a similar experience and has had the security of parents wrenched from him, can have any idea as to the force of this impact. How it shatters for always the whole world of childhood and reverberates through the rest of life.

  When I hear of children being told they have been adopted and of their apparently strange reaction to this knowledge, I understand. I understand the feeling of fear of not belonging. The dreadful feeling of the ladder on which you climb up out of childhood being whipped away from you. The ladder gone, the hands that have been holding you on it are gone too, and you are left without support, left to fall into depths out of which you can emerge only after years of blind groping and struggle, if at all. Such is illegitimacy.

  This mad startling piece of news petrified me, yet sent my mind into a questioning dizzying strange world in which everybody’s name was changed. The feeling drove me into the lavatory.

  The lavatory was the only place in our environment where you could lock yourself in and be alone. That is, if there was no-one next door and you weren’t made hot and blushing by the sounds, to which you would add your imagination. The lavatory was a dry one – a misleading term – with a long wooden seat with a hole in the middle and, if you kept the lid on, it was a wonderful place for musing and meditation. Once having made yourself comfortable you looked out through a space between the top of the door and the framework onto the grey, sloping, slated roof that covered the wash-house and the staircase of the upstairs house, and if you were lucky you saw a grey bird hopping about – we called them grey birds because we didn’t know their real names. Here you were shut in and became lost in a world apart, a secret world. That is, if the lid was on. If it wasn’t and you fell into a state of musing, which often happened, you could be aroused by the back-lane hatch being lifted and the scavenger rudely thrusting in his long shovel. Many a time has this catapulted me from the seat to hide my face against the door, leaving my bottom exposed.

  So this day of revelation sent me flying into the lavatory, and there I sat picking the scaling whitewash off the wall and asking questions to which there were no answers. How could me ma and da not be ma and da? How could our Kate be me ma? An utter impossibility. Our Kate couldn’t be me ma because she wasn’t married and you couldn’t be borned without a da, could you now? It was all so simple. They were barmy. They were telling lies, all of them, lies, lies. And they were cheeky bitches, every one of them.

  After picking quite a lot of plaster off the wall I decided there was only one thing for it. I would go and tell our Kate what they had said, and she would come out and skelp their cheeky faces, so she would. This last was wishful thinking indeed for Kate never took my part in any battle that I remember, perhaps because, before this particular day, I got into few scraps, and following this day, she was always too busy threatening to wallop me for what I had done to some playmate or other.

  Impelled by the thought that I must straighten this thing out I slunk out of the lavatory and stood at the bottom of the little alleyway looking up towards our kitchen window, where I could see Kate darting to and fro between the table and the fireplace. I got no further, for as I watched her I knew I would not tell her anything, nor ask any questions. How it came about I don’t know, but as I looked at her I knew our Kate was me ma. And I turned with bent head and slunk back into the lavatory and there, sitting on the seat, my hands pressed between my two skinny knees, I tried to sort out this terrible thing. Our Kate was me ma and she drank; the shame was unbearable. But what about me da, where was me da? You must have a da. You must. I felt the urge now to stamp into the kitchen and say, ‘Our Kate, where’s me da, me real da?’ but I remained sitting with my hands pinched between my knees. And as I sat it came to me that I was right, everybody must have a da, you couldn’t be borned without a da and you couldn’t live without a da. I must have a da because me da had suddenly turned into me granda.

  Now who would I pick for a da? Who did I know? My Uncle Alec, my Aunt Mary’s husband? I liked my Uncle Alec. He lived in number thirty at the top end of the street. But he was my cousin Jack’s da, he couldn’t be me da. And anyway I wanted somebody different for a da. Mr Affleck down the road? No, Mr Affleck drank too; I knew about this. But it seemed that Mr Affleck had a right to drink because he was swanky and their Cissie kept the shop. Then what about the tall lanky minister up in Simonside Church? No, not him. My head went further down, my knees pinched harder. I was playing a game with myself for I had known from the start whom I was going to pick for me da – the doctor, Doctor McHaffie.

  Doctor McHaffie had his surgery in Stanhope Road. He had brought me into the world. He had attended me grandma and granda and anybody else who was ill in the house and I don’t think he ever received a penny for his visits. Nor were we, as far as I can recollect, in any doctor’s club.

  Doctor McHaffie was a very attractive man and he must have been young, or youngish at this time. What was more, he had a car and it was this car that had brought him into my picture on the wall. By this time the pretence game was well on its way and most of the children who were in my class in Simonside School were aware of all our wonderful possessions: the motors, horses and servants; the big house and the grandeur therein; and a number of them had dared to disbelieve me.

  Doctor McHaffie was the only man I knew who possessed a motor. There was another doctor who rode up Simonside Bank in a funny cab with a hole in the top and a driver at the back. This doctor used to shout through the hole in the top of the cab. I always thought it was very funny and I knew that he wasn’t a patch on our doctor because he hadn’t got a motor.

  It is strange about Doctor McHaffie and the car, for when thirty years later I wrote my first novel, the hero was a doctor who had a car, and he brought an illegitimate child into the world; and he loved her and in the end he married her mother. Later still, the scene that was to take place outside the school gates gave me the opening for the first of the Mary Ann books – A Grand Man. So, likely, in the first place the car was the main reason for me bestowing on the doctor the questionable honour of fatherhood.

  The day I made this public could have had nasty repercussions, yet I never heard of any. I was going back to school in the afternoon; Doctor McHaffie had been to the house to see me granda who had a very bad leg at the time, having had an accident in the docks. The Doctor stopped the car on the road and asked, ‘Are you going to school, Katie?’

  I said I was and when he told me to get in beside him I stood as if I was struck dumb. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said. ‘You’ll enjoy it.’ Oh, I enjoyed it all right; and when he drew the car up before the school gate, there, around the gate and in the road, were my school fellows. I sailed out of the car, that is
the right term, sailed out, and didn’t touch the ground until I was in their midst, and not even then.

  ‘There! What did I tell ya? We have got a motor.’

  They gaped at me and my head went higher. ‘You wouldn’t believe me, Mary Morton, would you? An’ you an’ all, Nellie Boyle, either. An’ you won’t come to me party. An’ now say I’m lying when I tell you that’s me da.’

  I pointed to the moving vehicle and I watched the eyes turn swiftly towards the disappearing chassis before turning back to me. I cannot remember anyone saying, ‘Don’t be daft, that’s Doctor McHaffie.’ I had proved we had a motor, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I driven up to the school gates and got out before their very eyes? If I said the Doctor was me da, then he was me da.

  Indeed, this episode could, as I have said, have brought about disastrous repercussions because there were some women in the New Buildings who licked up gossip. They had just to get hold of a thread and by the time they had finished it was a hawser, ironbound at the ends. I am sure if Kate had known what I had said she would never have looked him in the face again. She had great respect for the man, and I feel now that he must have had compassion for her from the moment he brought me into the world, and he must have pitied her as he watched what could have been, or was still then, a beautiful woman both in looks and nature disintegrating under the pressure of hard continuous work, poverty and inner shame and loneliness.

  Anyway, the doctor became me da. He is dead now, and I have one regret that I didn’t tell him of the questionable honour I, as a child, bestowed on him.

  But the teachers must have heard about the incident of the doctor and the car, for my beloved Miss Nesbitt brought me low one day when she asked if anyone in the class could get a motor horn to put on Father Christmas’s sleigh. We were practising for a Christmas concert at the time. When no-one answered her request she looked at me and said, ‘What about you, Katie? Couldn’t you lend us the horn off your motor?’ If she had thrown a knife at me from where she stood, thin and young, behind her desk, she couldn’t have hurt or surprised me more. She had exposed me for what I was. Everybody in the class knew that the teacher knew that I was a big liar. After this I may have stopped talking about our motors and horses and servants, but in my mind I still turned to the picture on the wall, and my adopted da had a permanent place in it.