‘Kate, there’s something I want to show you - something you should see. It’s in Mary’s dressing table.’
Kate wiped her face on her sleeve. What had the girl been up to now?
‘You shouldn’t be poking your nose into her things. She’ll wipe the floor with you if she finds out. Where is she, any road?’
‘Out shopping down Jarrow. Haway and look!’
Warily, Kate followed her daughter into Mary’s bedroom, where her sister never let her polish. It smelt pleasantly of eau-de-Cologne, and the bed was covered in a pretty pink bedspread. She felt a stab of envy as she watched Catherine pull open one of the gleaming mahogany drawers and reach to the back. She pulled out a muslin bundle tied up in string. Untying it, she held out the contents. It was a wad of paper, grubby-edged. Letters.
Kate’s stomach turned over as she took them. She knew the spidery writing.
‘Stoddie,’ she whispered. ‘What’s he doing writing to our Mary?’
‘Not Mary,’ Catherine said quietly.
Then it hit Kate. They were addressed to her. She sat down on the bed before her knees gave way. Sifting through them with trembling hands, she asked in confusion, ‘I don’t understand. What are they doing here?’
‘Look,’ Catherine pointed, ‘the dates on them. They were written years ago - during the war. For some reason he sent them here.’
Kate’s insides squeezed. ‘I told him to - but I thought he’d stopped. Mary never said.’ The full enormity of what her sister had done began to dawn on her. ‘She kept them from me!’
With trembling hands, Kate pulled out the top letter from its flimsy envelope, almost reluctant to read it. But she had to know.
‘Dearest Kate,
How are you? It’s weeks since I heard from you. How is the bairn? I keep the picture she drew me in me top pocket. Please thank her. It keeps me cheerful. It’s cold here now, but we don’t complain. Must be twice as bad for the lads in the trenches. I miss you and think of you always. Write to me when you can and let me know you still think of me. Fondest regards,
Stoddie.’
Kate’s eyes welled with tears. He had cared for her after all. She forced herself to read the other six letters. They grew increasingly despondent, reproaching her for not writing back. The final one, dated in the summer of 1916, was full of hurt and regret.
‘... I see from your silence that you never thought of me in the same way I did think of you. I am sorry if my letters have not been welcome. I shall not write another. Send my best wishes to the lassie.
Yours aye,
Jock Stoddart.’
‘What do they say, Kate? Are they nice letters?’ Catherine asked eagerly.
Kate bowed her head in misery. She could have had him! He could have been married to her now, instead of some widow friend of Molly McDermott’s. Catherine could have had a proper father. Kate fought down the desire to be sick. Her own sister had hidden these letters from her and robbed her of a chance of happiness! How dare she?
Kate’s wretchedness turned to white-hot fury. With a roar of pain, she picked up Mary’s bottle of eau-de-Cologne and smashed it against the large dressing-table mirror. Glass splintered into a hundred shards. She launched herself at the row of ornaments and brushes, scattering them to the floor, cutting her hands with broken glass.
‘Stop it!’ Catherine cried in alarm. ‘You’re bleeding!’
But Kate could not stop. She turned and set about the bed, pulling off the pink bedspread and ripping it with her chapped and bloodied bare hands. Catherine tried to intervene but her mother shoved her out of the way. Only the sound of the front door clicking open and shut halted the storm of destruction.
Mary stood looking in at them, her hat half removed, her expression frozen in disbelief.
‘What you doing in my bedroom?’ she demanded in annoyance. Then as she registered the devastation, her face slackened in horror. ‘What the devil. . .?’
Kate sprang at her like a demon possessed. ‘You hid his letters!’ she howled. ‘You hid my Stoddie’s letters!’
‘How dare you go through my things?’ Mary went on the attack at once.
‘They were mine,’ Kate choked. ‘You did it out of spite.’
‘I did it for your own good,’ Mary declared. ‘Father would never have let you marry him - he was Scotch and a Protestant. I was saving you from a whole heap of bother.’
‘Liar! You just couldn’t bear to see me happy with a man, could you? If I’d married Stoddie you wouldn’t have been able to lord it over me. You’re a selfish, spiteful bitch!’
‘You’re the spiteful one,’ Mary spat back. ‘All those cruel things you’ve said about my Alec being a conchie and a yellow-belly and not doing his bit for the war. I hated you for that - you and Jack - you were the ones lording it over us. And as for Jock Stoddart - he was just a common stoker, a loud-mouth and a drunkard,’ she sneered. ‘Jack said he was always going with other women. He was just leading you on. Would never have married you in a month of Sundays.’
Kate could not bear such a thought. She flew at her sister, grabbing her linen coat. They tussled and the sleeve tore. Mary screamed and ducked away, but Kate seized hold of her hair and pulled hard, a clump coming away in her hand. Mary jabbed fingers in Kate’s face. Blinded, Kate stumbled but took her sister with her. They rolled on the floor, kicking and scratching and swearing their pent-up hatred.
Catherine, appalled by the spectacle, tried to intervene, but got knocked out of the way. She picked herself up and ran out into the street, looking for help. But she could not bring herself to ask a neighbour to intervene. It was too demeaning. So she ran down to Number Ten and roused her grandfather from dozing in his chair.
‘Come quickly, they’re killing each other!’ she panted, pulling him up with all her strength. ‘Please come, Grandda.’
John limped up the street to Mary’s house, where the noise of their fighting could still be heard. He barged between the two of them, flinging Mary aside and hauling Kate to her feet.
‘Your mother would turn in her grave to see the pair of you,’ he bellowed. ‘What’s come over you?’
They glared at each other, but neither wanted to explain to him.
‘Get her out me house,’ Mary hissed, her hair dishevelled and her face bruised.
‘Don’t worry, I wouldn’t stop here another minute if it was the last house standing in Jarrow,’ Kate said contemptuously.
‘Haway,’ John barked, ‘you’re coming home with me. I knew you wouldn’t last two minutes with her.’
Without another word, Kate hobbled out after her stepfather and down the stairs. Catherine gave a regretful glance at Mary’s spotlessly clean kitchen, shrugged at her aunt and followed them out.
Chapter 48
The sisters did not speak to each other again for months. Kate suspected that Catherine called round to her aunt’s house occasionally, for she would sometimes wander in with her cousin Alec in tow, pretending they had met in the street. Kate was fond of the boy and fed him scraps of baking, but never mentioned his mother. Her anger eventually died down to a smouldering resentment that flared only in drink.
At such times, she railed against life’s unfairness and lashed out at her daughter for ever having brought the letters to her attention. Better never to have known, was Kate’s bitter thought, though deep down she knew Catherine had only been trying to please her. The girl had not known the content of the letters and could not have guessed the trouble it would cause by bringing them to light.
Their relationship was as full of quick-fire argument as ever, but Kate was secretly admiring of her daughter’s stubborn determination to get on in the world.
Shortly after leaving her cleaning job, Catherine had astonished both her and John by announcing that she was setting up in busin
ess painting silk and satin cushion covers and tray cloths.
‘But you can’t paint,’ Kate was disbelieving.
‘I can so!’ Catherine declared. ‘I had a lesson off Amelia at church. I’m ganin’ to paint birds and flowers. You can buy these transfers.’
‘Where you getting the money for this?’ Kate demanded.
‘I’ve got deposits off me new clients,’ Catherine said gleefully. ‘I’m buying the materials the morrow. Amelia’s ganin’ to help me chose.’
Within a week, Catherine had completed ten orders for people from church and had begun to canvass neighbours and friends. Despite the creeping slump on Tyneside and the shutdown of Palmer’s ironworks, she found more work than she could cope with. She would sit up late at night, eyes straining over her miniature paintings of flowers and fruit in the dim lamplight in order to finish a job in time for someone’s birthday. Sometimes, if she was not too tired, Kate would sit up and sew the finished pieces into covers or stitch pieces of lace to a mantelpiece cloth.
At such times they worked together in companionable silence as the gas lamp hissed and rain spat down the chimney on to the fire. Occasionally Kate would sing snatches of songs from the war or old favourites such as ‘Thora’. Once, she caught Catherine looking at her with tear-filled eyes. Kate stopped singing.
‘What’s wrong, hinny?’
Catherine said quietly, ‘I wish it could always be like this - just you and me ...’ She broke off unable to say that she wanted her mother to herself, without warring relations or drink or the censure of the outside world - all those things that kept them apart and fed the animosity between them. The shame of her illegitimacy was seared into her soul, but at moments like this Catherine could pretend that they were a normal mother and daughter with no one sneering at them.
‘Just you and me?’ Kate smiled at her ruefully.
‘Aye,’ Catherine blushed, and bowed her head.
Kate reached out and covered Catherine’s hand with hers. ‘You’ll always have me, hinny,’ Kate said softly, ‘always.’
When Catherine glanced up, she saw that her mother’s eyes were glistening with tears too. They smiled at each other, and for a moment, all the bad times of quarrelling and accusation receded into the shadows.
Without another word they carried on working, Kate humming quietly, each wishing the closeness they felt would last.
***
1922 wore on and Catherine turned sixteen. In a week or two, she would be forty, Kate thought. As she stared in the mirror hanging over the wash basin in the scullery, she was startled to see the beginnings of Rose’s haggard face looking back. She remembered her own mother at this age, old and care-worn after hard years when John worked little and she lived on the scrapings at the bottom of the pot. They had been living in Frost Street, or was it Napier? One of a series of dismal, overcrowded dwellings they had inhabited briefly like tinkers before having to move on. Rose must have been about forty when work had picked up and they had moved for a while to the luxury of the New Buildings and its veneer of respectability.
And she had been about sixteen; Catherine’s age. Kate sighed to think how full of energy and life she had been then, eager to work hard and see a bit of the world beyond Tyne Dock and Jarrow. Eager for love. Always singing. Sometimes she studied her daughter, head bent over her endless paintings, a frown of concentration on her wide brow. Auburn hair glinting. She was far more contrary, one minute playing the clown with her friend Lily, the next anxiously censorious and scurrying off to Confession. The girl could scowl like Father O’Neill yet laugh like a music-hall comic.
What would her daughter do with her life? She had sudden flashes of talent, such as her painting and a head for carrying words. She could recite verse after verse of poetry and song. Yet she did not strike Kate as a happy girl, one that could enjoy life and really let herself go once in a while. Kate blamed herself for much of the shortcomings in Catherine’s life, but she would not be blamed for that. She at least had known how to love, to seize each moment of joy, however fleeting. She had regretted bitterly Alexander’s abandonment of her, but she had known a man’s love and had returned it generously. She knew Catherine was far too cautious and devout to make the mistake she had, yet she pitied the girl if she never allowed herself the thrill of falling in love.
A knock on the back door startled her out of her reverie.
‘Come in,’ she called, quickly pushing back her tousled hair behind its pins.
The door pushed open and a broad-shouldered figure filled the doorway, the dazzling July light behind him throwing his face in shadow. Kate’s heart pummelled in her chest. The familiar wave of hair, the stocky upper body. Alexander! How long had she waited for this moment? An eternity.
‘Is it you?’ she gasped.
The man moved forward and threw down his bag.
‘Kate?’ he said quizzically. ‘I didn’t mean to give you a fright.’
Kate’s insides churned in disappointment. It was only Davie McDermott. How foolish of her to mistake for one instant this burly man with his chiselled face still grimy from the engine-room for her long-lost lover.
‘Oh, Davie,’ she said flatly, ‘haway in.’
If he minded her half-hearted welcome he did not show it. The seaman offered at once to refill the hod with coal while Kate made him a cup of tea. She busied herself at the stove, trying to rid her mind of Alexander. How had he come back so vividly to her after all this time? Would she never be rid of this hold he had over her thoughts?
She hardly glanced at Davie or noticed what she should have. Catherine saw it the moment she came in from delivering a parcel of cushion covers.
‘Who’s died?’
Kate turned from stirring the bean broth. Davie was fingering a black arm band self-consciously.
‘My Molly,’ he said quietly.
‘Your wife?’ Kate cried in pity. ‘That’s terrible. What happened?’
‘Heart gave out - she’s always been delicate.’ He paused and Kate realised he was finding the subject difficult, so just nodded.
‘When did it happen?’ Catherine asked.
‘Turn of the year - I was away at sea.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘ “Always away at sea when I need you,” that’s what she used to say.’
‘You couldn’t help that,’ Kate said kindly, ‘and you did your best by her.’
There was an awkward silence, which Catherine broke. ‘I’ll say prayers for Mrs McDermott at Mass,’ she promised.
Davie smiled in gratitude and nothing more was said on the matter.
But when Kate’s birthday came and Davie was still ensconced at Number Ten, Catherine sparked off a row.
‘How long’s he stopping?’ she demanded crossly. ‘I cannot work with him spreading out his newspaper on the table and lying around sleeping half the day.’
‘The poor man’s got nowhere else to gan,’ Kate pointed out.
‘He must’ve other family,’ Catherine retorted.
‘Molly never gave him bairns - though I think he would have liked some. He was always canny to you when you were young.’
Catherine ignored this. ‘When’s he going back to sea, then?’
‘I don’t know.’ Kate grew impatient. ‘But I’ll not have him driven out by your black looks. He pays his way - which is more than you can say for most men round here now the steel mills are closed.’
‘He drinks it all away,’ Catherine muttered with disapproval.
‘That’s his business what he does with his wages!’ Kate cried. ‘He’s a right to a bit of fun after months stuck below deck grafting hard.’
‘He’s still in mourning.’
Kate was riled by her pious tone. ‘Well, we’re ganin’ down the Penny Whistle to meet Maisie for me birthday whether you and the priests like it or not!’
Catherine stormed out and up the street to Mary’s. It infuriated Kate that the girl always turned to her waspish sister when she was angry with her. No doubt Mary fuelled the fire of her daughter’s discontent. Maybe it was Mary who had turned Catherine against Davie these past weeks, in revenge for last year’s attack over Stoddie’s letters.
But when Davie came in from washing in the backyard tub, grinning bashfully in an ill-fitting suit of Jack’s, Kate determined to enjoy her birthday. John, who could no longer walk easily into town, was content with the jug of beer Davie bought him before they left.
They came home late, singing and laughing from a merry session in the snug of the Penny Whistle, Kate linking her arm through Davie’s to keep her from tripping on the uneven cobbles. At the top of the bank, they stopped and looked out over the dark river and the hunched cranes and gantries of the yards.
‘Look at that, Kate,’ Davie said with awe in his voice. ‘That bit of river never ends, does it? Carries on out to sea - goes on for ever and ever.’
Kate giggled. ‘Never heard you talk all philosophical before,’ she teased.
He laughed self-consciously. ‘That’s what I used to think as a lad. Just get on the sea and you can go anywhere you like - free as a fish.’
Kate was suddenly struck by the familiarity of his words. Where had she heard such dreams before? Alexander. He had talked of the sea like that, as a way to freedom. That’s how he had probably escaped from her and their unborn baby.
‘That’s what he used to say,’ Kate blurted out.
‘Who?’ Davie asked.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ She felt foolish.
He took her arm and pulled her round gently. ‘Do you mean Pringle-Davies?’
Kate gasped. ‘How do you know his name?’
‘You told me once.’
Kate tried to turn from him. ‘I shouldn’t have been so daft...’
Davie held on to her. ‘I’d heard the name before - I was sure of it. But I never said anything, ‘cos I couldn’t remember how.’
THE JARROW TRILOGY: all 3 enthralling sagas in 1 volume; The Jarrow Lass, A Child of Jarrow & Return to Jarrow Page 84
