THE JARROW TRILOGY: all 3 enthralling sagas in 1 volume; The Jarrow Lass, A Child of Jarrow & Return to Jarrow

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘Would you like to walk in the garden?’ Catherine asked.

  ‘Very much,’ he smiled, holding out his arm.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she took it and clung on to it for the short walk along the drive.

  ‘They tell me I’ve been here five weeks,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Nearly,’ Tom agreed. ‘It’s a very short time really. You’ve been through so much, Kitty. You must give yourself all the time you need to get better. I’ll be based at Madley for some time yet.’

  She stopped and clutched his arm. ‘No! I have to get out of here. I know what they’re doing - making me fit for nothing but life inside. I’ve seen it happen before - in the workhouse. You get to the stage where you can’t cope outside even if they let you free. There’s a woman on the ward been here for fifty years - fifty years - and she won’t even leave the building. Hardly knows there’s been a war on - can’t see why she’s had no banana and custard for five years. I’ll end up like her if I stop any longer.’

  Tom was astounded at the torrent of words, but worried at her agitation.

  ‘No you won’t - not after a mere month.’

  ‘I will.’ Catherine was adamant. ‘They can’t make me stay. I want to come home, Tom. Help me come home.’

  His eyes filled with tears at her sudden appeal. It was the first time she had used his name in over a month.

  ‘Course I will,’ he reassured.

  It was arranged with the doctors that Catherine would have a day out to Hereford that Saturday. If all went well they would consider a longer spell at home. She screwed up her courage to face the outside world, getting up early to dress and arrange her hair as meticulously as possible. Tom met the bus she came on but could tell straight away she was in distress.

  Catherine did not want to go to their lodgings, afraid of the faces and voices that might still lurk in its walls. Neither did she want to sit quietly in a church where her doubts and disbelief might swamp her. So they tried a cafe, but it was too crowded, and Catherine kept looking towards the door as if she would flee at any moment. Her cup of tea half drunk, she rushed into the street, Tom pursuing. She was trembling all over, her hands sweating in their gloves, her face clammy and grey. When Tom tried to hold her, she went rigid and couldn’t breathe.

  He took her back to the hospital in a taxi, explaining about her panic attack. Greatly dispirited, he left.

  The next day Catherine forced herself to walk the length of the driveway and peer beyond its gates. She breathed in the warm scented air, the smell of cut grass, listened to the chatter of wood pigeons. These were small pleasures she could learn to enjoy again. The world beyond the asylum walls need not be so terrifying. The fresh air made her feel heady and she reached and steadied herself against a large tree. An oak.

  In an instant she was back at The Hurst, pressing her back into the comforting strength of her favourite oak. How could she have forgotten that tree? It glowed like a talisman in her mind. Something good to cling on to, something to which to return.

  From that moment, Catherine was convinced that she must get back to The Hurst. Hereford held too much pain. Even if it meant being separated from Tom, she would go. Only there, in the shabby familiar surroundings of the creaking house and its beautiful garden would she have peace of mind. There she could recapture the feeling of being in love with Tom, of feeling passion for books and for life. The war was over; the soldiers who were billeted there would be moving out. Mrs Fairy was now in a nursing home, but even without the old cook’s help, she would reclaim The Hurst. While she nurtured it back into a home, it would nurse her back to life.

  On Tom’s next visit she told of her plan and brushed aside his concerns.

  ‘Someone should be there to help you,’ he said. ‘Can’t you wait till I get demobbed?’

  ‘No. I’m not staying here any longer - and I can’t bear the thought of being in Hereford either. The Hurst is our home, Tom. It’s the only place I can think of where I’ll have a chance of getting better - where we’ll have a chance of piecing our marriage back together.’

  Tom reddened at her blunt words. But she was right. Their marriage had been shattered by the upheavals of war, the loss of their babies and Catherine’s breakdown. He did not know if they could ever live peacefully together, or whether the wounds went too deep. Only time would tell.

  ‘I can try and get down at weekends, I suppose,’ he said doubtfully. ‘But I’d be happier if you weren’t alone. Perhaps your mother could come - just for a short while?’

  She gave him a furious look. ‘Kate? After all she’s done to me - to us! I can’t believe you’d even suggest it. That woman’s been the cause of all my grief. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that she’ll never live with me again.’

  A week later, Catherine signed herself out of St Mary’s and Tom travelled with her back to Hastings. A neighbour who held the keys had assured them that the house was empty and largely unscathed. They found that the tower had been damaged by an incendiary bomb and the conservatory had fallen in, but the rest was still standing. Inside, though, was a scene of decay and squalor. Wallpaper hung off the damp walls, carpets had been ripped up and wooden joists gaped through holes in the plaster.

  As they crept cautiously upstairs, Catherine was assailed by the overpowering smell of stale urine. She gagged and for a nightmarish moment thought she was back in the subterranean passageway outside the ECT theatre. It was proof she was mad and should never have been let out. She gripped the banisters and cried out for Tom.

  ‘That smell - can you smell it?’

  Tom soon discovered the source. The bedrooms had been left with chamber pots full to the brim. The soldiers had left in such a hurry they had not bothered to empty them.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Tom said in distaste. ‘You go and see if they’ve left us a kettle.’

  They spent the weekend attempting to make the kitchen and a bedroom habitable. Before Tom returned to Hereford, he told Catherine that his mother would be arriving to help out for a couple of weeks.

  Catherine’s protests were half-hearted. Now that she was back in the vast empty house, she was afraid of being left alone to her thoughts. The company of the practical and friendly Mrs Cookson would be ten times more welcome than her own mother’s.

  On their final night together, Catherine and Tom made love. It had not been planned and both were surprised at their wish to come together and be intimate. They lay holding each other in the quiet of their musty bedroom, listening to the evening call of birds through a broken window. For the first time in many weeks, Catherine felt a twinge of contentment. Perhaps they had a future after all.

  Mrs Cookson arrived and helped her daughter-in-law tackle the huge task of making The Hurst habitable again. They cleaned, scrubbed and painted. They mended furniture, washed and ironed curtains, took carpets out and beat them. It was exhausting work that left Catherine aching and hardly able to climb the stairs at night. She tried to hide her nosebleeds from her worried mother-in-law, laughing off her attempts to make her rest.

  ‘I’ve had them for years. Doctors tell me it’s my nervous nature brings them on,’ Catherine said wryly. ‘It might as well be to do with the weather forecast - cold windy day, nosebleeds light and variable.’

  What Catherine could not tell Tom’s mother was that work was her reason for living. Hard graft kept the demons in her head at bay and rendered her so tired that she fell asleep as soon as she lay down at night. Work - hard physical work - and sleep. This was all she wanted.

  When Mrs Cookson had to go home to her own family, Catherine felt bereft. She had enjoyed their easy companionship around the kitchen table and on rare ventures to the shops. Only the presence of the older woman had stopped her running in a panic from the sight of a queue or a busy store.

  But it was more than just the fear of being l
eft alone that preoccupied Catherine. It was the creeping knowledge that she was pregnant again. She could hardly believe it. One night of lovemaking with Tom had happened so quickly and unexpectedly that they had not even raised the question of prevention.

  It filled her with dread and excitement. She was nearly forty. Surely this was her last chance of becoming a mother. It was a final gift from an absent God whom she had rejected. But she dared not hope. She knew if she lost this fourth child, she would fall back into the pit of madness. Catherine doubted she could climb out a second time.

  She almost confided in Mrs Cookson, but didn’t. The loss of her babies was something they had never discussed, and Catherine was still awkward about that unhappy Christmas when she had fled from her mother-in-law’s house rather than hold baby Winston.

  Tom was due at the end of the following week. She would wait and tell him. A letter arrived from Kate asking if she could come and stay. Catherine threw it on the fire. The next one was more reproachful. She had not seen her for the whole of the war. They would be company for each other while Tom was away. Catherine tore it up, wondering crossly if it was Tom or his mother who had written to Kate. How else did she know of their circumstances?

  She was sweeping up the first pile of autumn leaves when she felt it starting. A twinge of pain and the gushing of blood. As Catherine hurried inside, she was struck by her own lack of surprise. She had been waiting for the dread moment, knew deep down she would miscarry. Women like her did not deserve to have babies.

  Catherine lined the bed with newspaper and crawled under the covers. She was not as far gone as the last time and by morning the bleeding had stopped. Numbly, she bundled up the paper and sheets and took them outside. Along with yesterday’s leaves she made a bonfire and lit the lot. She watched it smoulder then ignite, the flames licking higher, the smell pinching her nostrils.

  Back in the house, she pulled out drawings from the bedside cabinet, scraps of notebook with poems that she did not remember writing. She seized a bundle of letters from Tom and Kate, tore photographs out of an album, of Bridie and Maisie when they’d first moved to The Hurst. She took them and threw them all on the bonfire. A savage triumph lit inside to see her life go up in flames - her past and her future.

  It did not last. She wandered back into the empty house. She ought to bathe and change, ring the doctor or tell someone what had happened. But a heavy listlessness weighed her down. She could hardly be bothered to climb the stairs or write a note to Tom explaining why she was leaving him. Yet there was nothing else left to do.

  After sitting on the staircase for an hour or more, she forced herself to move. She found a half-drunk bottle of rum left by one of the soldiers and took it upstairs. Rummaging around in the bedroom she collected up her supply of tranquillisers and sleeping pills.

  Catherine went into the bathroom, locked the door, and then unlocked it. There was no point in making it difficult for the police or whoever found her to remove her body. If she’d had an ounce of energy left she would have run a hot bath and lain in it drinking the rum with her wrists cut. But that seemed too much effort. She would shovel down the drugs and be done with it.

  Pouring herself a glass of water, Catherine swallowed the first pill.

  Chapter 50

  ‘I love you Kitty Cookson.’ The words were so strong and clear, Catherine swung round, expecting to see Tom standing behind her. She could feel him in the bathroom with her.

  ‘Tom. . .?’ She gripped the basin. There was no one there. She stared at herself in the mirror. Who was that emaciated woman with the lacklustre hair that stared back? She looked fifty or more. Yet the eyes were those of a perplexed little girl. How could Tom possibly love such a pathetic creature?

  ‘I love you. We’ve still got each other, that’s what I want most of all:

  Catherine felt her legs go weak. Her dry eyes stung with tears. She looked down at the handful of tablets ready to take her to oblivion or the Devil. What was she doing? How could she let Tom walk in and find her rotting on the bathroom floor, a scrawled note on the dressing table explaining nothing?

  Tom of the warm brown eyes and the shy smile; her studious, conscientious, loyal friend. Her diffident lover. Maybe he would choose to leave her anyway. But she knew in that split second that she did not want to lose him. Abruptly, Catherine scooped up the pills and threw them into the toilet bowl. She yanked on the chain and watched them swirl away. With it came the first choking sob and tears.

  Howling, she stumbled out of the bathroom, down the stairs and out of the house. It had started to rain. She rushed into the garden, making for the sanctuary of the oak tree. Cold rain whipped at her face as she fell into the wet leaves around the tree trunk. She wept out her misery, amazed that she could still cry. Even as the pain consumed her, she knew it was proof that she was alive, still alive.

  Catherine sat shaking and frozen without the first idea how she was going to get through the rest of the day, let alone the next day and the day after that. However she managed she would have to do it herself, without the help of her husband or the numbing relief of drugs. She pressed into the tree, doubting if she had enough courage.

  ‘Work it out, lass.’

  The words went through her like an electric shock. Kate’s words. Her mother’s recipe for overcoming grief or hardship. Of course it was the answer. But Catherine had tried that, brought herself to a standstill and probably miscarried because of the gruelling housework she had made herself do. That’s what Kate meant by work.

  Yet Catherine had her own cure for a sore heart. Writing. If she could only bring herself to begin writing again . . .

  She scrambled onto numb feet and hobbled back indoors. That night she could not face it. She banked up the fire in the kitchen and lay down on the hearth rug with a blanket and slept fitfully.

  In the early morning, Catherine brewed a pot of tea and went in search of paper. Tearing out some blank pages from old cookbooks of Mrs Fairy’s she took them to the kitchen table. Hands trembling, she picked up a pencil used for shopping lists. She felt nauseous. Holding it reminded her of being pregnant with David. Catherine rushed to the sink and threw up.

  For the rest of the day she gave up and walked and walked around the garden, tiring herself out. For a second night she slept on the kitchen floor. In the morning, she tried again. Just write anything - no one’s going to read it. This time the advice seemed to be her own.

  She sat staring at her idle hands, listening to rain spatter down the chimney and hiss on to the fire. Just like in 10 William Black Street. If she closed her eyes she could hear the rustle of Grandda’s newspaper, the slam of the oven door, Kate humming as she pounded pastry with a rolling pin. She could smell the cinders, the rising dough.

  Catherine picked up the pencil and began to write. At the end of two hours she had filled six pages and was amazed to find it was already midday. She made more tea, ate two biscuits and went back to her writing. That night, she ventured up to her bedroom and read over her scrawled pages. It was a near perfect recreation of the kitchen in East Jarrow. She could see it, smell it, taste it.

  Over the next few days, Catherine thought about places and people in her childhood that she had tried to forget for years. Eccentric lodgers, bad-tempered shopkeepers, the kind pawnbroker who sensed her shame at having to bring in her family’s belongings. Picking over dross along the railway track, running through the scary dripping arches by the docks, gasping in wonder at a sea of red poppies in a field above Shields. Someone grasping her hand and pulling her off her feet as they flew along, chasing the moon. Kate’s hand.

  She pushed the uncomfortable thought from her mind. She had come too far, spent too much energy trying to rid herself of Kate’s influence to think kindly of her now. She was Catherine Cookson, wife of an Oxford graduate. There was no going back.

  Catherine put away her d
escriptions of Tyneside. They were too vivid and disturbing. But they had given her a taste for writing again and she set herself the gruelling task of writing ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day.

  Tom was demobbed early in 1946 and took up his post as maths teacher at the grammar school once more. They settled into a quiet routine: teaching, scouts and cricket coaching for him; writing, housework and gardening for her. Tom was full of admiration for the way Catherine battled her bouts of depression with a rigorous regime at her desk, often sitting up into the early hours, filling pages of script.

  She tried plays but they were wooden and lifeless. She tried poems but they were sentimental and gushing. Joining a writers’ circle, she tentatively tested out her short stories and came home bruised and oversensitive at their criticisms. Tom tried to help with her grammar, but they argued and fell out about it.

  ‘I can’t write like that,’ Catherine protested. ‘It knocks all the stuffing out of my characters.’

  ‘You can’t send them to magazines with that many spelling mistakes,’ Tom said impatiently. ‘And half the sentences aren’t proper sentences.’

  Catherine stopped showing him her work; she would do it her own way or not at all. Determined to prove to Tom she could succeed, she sent off a short story every week. After a year, they had all been returned. She carried on sending them out. Each time a large brown envelope was sent back, she would march into the garden and vigorously attack the weeds, battling her sense of failure.

  She and Tom existed under the same roof, yet were distant. It was like having a lodger in the house again, Catherine thought bleakly. Too scared of pregnancy, they had stopped making love. They shared the same bed, but often Catherine stayed up half the night writing or she would wake in the early hours to find Tom sitting upright on a chair, nursing a migraine.

  Outwardly, they put on a happy front. He was dedicated to his teaching and his pupils. Catherine forced herself to attend school functions to support him and invited boys back for tea after matches. She made a fuss of them and understood why Tom was so attached to the lively youngsters. Yet she could not help resenting the attention he lavished on them and the long hours he spent away from The Hurst. If only they had had their own family. . .