I did not look at people when I was out gathering coke, I would be walking behind the carts and when they suddenly came into view I would pretend not to see them. It was the old illusion that if I couldn’t see them they couldn’t see me.
Some of the coarser types expressed their thoughts verbally by saying, ‘It’s a bloody shame the things that bairn’s got to do.’
And it was a bloody shame that I had to go for beer every day and go to the pawn. I thought so too; but not that I had to go on the slacks, or gather coke, because these were of my own choosing. But I remember the day I decided I would no longer follow the coke carts; it was on the day that I also decided that I would drink no more beer.
I had followed the coke cart from the tram sheds to Tyne Dock and kept my head turned away from a number of people and must have come to a decision, because that night in the kitchen when me granda, pointing to the glowing coke, said, ‘Best sight in the world, isn’t it, lass? Here, have a drink of that,’ I shook my head, and rising from the old leather chair in the corner where I had been sitting reading by the light of the naked gas mantle, I looked from him to Kate and said, ‘I’m goin’ for no more coke an’ I want no more drinks of beer.’
What it was caused me to make this double decision I don’t know; perhaps the pitying glances of the neighbours. Perhaps this was really the beginning of telling myself that I was different, that I was cut out for something other than the life that I saw about me. Whatever caused me to come to this decision I had no sooner made up my mind than I told them, and doubtless flabbergasted them.
It must have been before this time too that I went picking cinders. But I remember that it was during the time that Kate was making cakes to sell.
I was all for our Kate making cakes to sell because it gave us a kind of prestige, it was like having a business. She remembered all she had learnt in the baker’s shop in Chester-le-Street, so she made one basic mixture out of which she could bake half a dozen different kinds of cake. There were two or three people selling cakes in the New Buildings at the time, and wanting to outdo them she resorted to a little trick of the trade that needed very careful handling. This was the addition of ammonia to a batch of mixture. It swelled the cakes to twice their normal size. I remember arguing with her and telling her there was a funny taste about the cakes and that people would detect the odd smell. But she wouldn’t believe me – she never ate any of her own cakes. The end of the ammonia trick came one day when she overstepped the dose and the batch nearly knocked her out when she opened the oven door. When she got over the shock we laughed as we hadn’t laughed together before; we laughed until the tears rained down our faces.
But it was at this period that I went on the tip. There was a coal strike on and you couldn’t get fuel for love or money. So, always resourceful, I said I would go onto the tip behind the tram sheds and pick some cinders.
Now nobody from the New Buildings had ever been known to go picking behind the tram sheds where only the very poor and the rabble went. But I would get up early in the morning and take a sack and a rake with me and scrape among the refuse for cinders, because I would have done anything to make Kate happy and keep her happy as long as she wasn’t on the bottle. And this was one of the times when she was going very steady. Having the daily beer of course – that didn’t count with me – and only a glass of hard at the weekends, which was really nothing to worry about.
She didn’t want me to go picking, it was very lowering, yet at the same time she was pleased with me for doing it because it enabled her to bake when the others couldn’t, and she was kind to me and I was happy.
Me granda would come and help me down with the sacks but he wouldn’t demean himself to pick on the tip. He had never sunk that low in his life and he wasn’t going to do that now. He didn’t express this in words but I knew how he felt about cinder picking.
It was Kate’s cooking that attracted so many relations to the house at the weekends I’m sure. We used to have more visitors than any other house in the street. All the Hogan children at different times – these were the family of me grandma’s elder sister Lizzie, there were thirteen of them – then there were the various offshoots of me granda’s side from Jarrow. Young people were always hungry and they were sure of a shive of stotty-cake – my name for oven-bottom bread. This was a large flat piece of dough baked on the iron shelf in the oven, and what could be better, especially on a winter’s day than a shive of oven-bottom cake split in two and laden with dripping. No-one ever went out of that kitchen empty-handed, which, as I look back, seems remarkable.
Later in my early teens, perhaps it was I that drew them, especially the lads. Hardly a weekend passed but Jackie Potts – the stepson of me granda’s nephew – and his pals would come in on a Saturday night. And me granda liked this; he enjoyed heartily the backchat and talk. He was at this time a different John McMullen, tolerant, mellow, and behind his gruff front very proud of me.
I was to have many lads in my teens, and I made a point of bringing them home, always making sure that our Kate was all right. Of course I hadn’t any power over people dropping in and Jackie saw her lively at times. Some years later when, resplendent in his Merchant Navy Officer’s uniform and in company with a friend so dressed, he pretended he did not see her in the tram, she was very cut up about it for she had been kind to him from when he was a boy. Although I too, when I heard this, was vexed for her, I understood Jackie’s side of it, for how many, many times had I wanted to disown her.
The house was always clean, and although not as well furnished as some in our community it was better than the homes from which my beaux came, for they were all of big families, and with one exception none of them looked down his nose at me granda or our Kate. The exception was the one I really fell for. As I had ideas about gentlemen, he also had ideas about ladies, and after having my company for two years he decided I hadn’t sufficient background or education to fit into his picture on the wall, so he threw me over for someone he thought more qualified for the glorified position of his wife.
PART TWO
THE SHORT TEENS
Nine
I was thirteen at the time I had the accident. I was playing with a girl who had a deformed arm which had more strength in it than any ordinary arm. She was another Katie. Over one section of the school yard there was either concrete or tarmacadam that had a rough edge, and Katie, catching up with me, gave me a dig and I fell on my left side on this edge, and that was the beginning of the trouble. This happened on a Friday afternoon at playtime; on the Saturday morning I said to Kate, ‘I’ve got a pain in me leg,’ to which she answered, ‘You’ve always got a pain somewhere.’
The tiredness that I was always complaining about, and the pains in my arms and legs, were put down to growing pains, for now I was sprouting up. For days I would feel no pain in my hip at all, at others I was limping badly with the pain. Now in relating what follows Kate might appear to have acted with utter callousness, but I’ve got to stress the fact here that she had had years of my acting and doing anything in order to get off school to keep clear of Miss Corfield, also getting up to various ruses to get out of carrying the grey hen. And so when I would say my leg was paining and would limp to illustrate it, she would say, ‘I know all about it, hoppy-on-the-Don.’ This was a name that had been given to some cripple who had spent a lot of his time sitting on the Don bridge where the murky river flowed round the foot of St Paul’s Church in Jarrow.
Sometimes when I would ask if I could go out to play she would look at me and say, ‘Isn’t your leg bad?’ And when I would answer, ‘No,’ she would come back with, ‘There, what did I tell you? You’ll have something one of these days that’ll stop you making game.’
My trips with the grey hen to the docks became excruciating excursions, and I remember one Saturday dinner time very clearly. I took the tram from the bottom of the street and got off at the dock gates but I couldn’t carry the grey hen up the bank to the outdoor beer shop in Hudson
Street, so I asked a paper boy if he would go and get me the beer and I gave him the jar and a pound note and then stood leaning against the iron railings sweating with fear in case he didn’t come back. A pound note was a lot of money. But he did come back and I gave him a penny.
On the Sunday it began to snow, and when Kate got me up for school on the Monday morning I started to cry. The kitchen was cold, I was cold all over. ‘I’m sick, our Kate,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a pain in me leg.’
‘You’re going to school, legs or no legs,’ she said.
It took me a long time to get to school and when I entered the warmth of the classroom, an hour late, I collapsed. Miss Harrington sent for Kate and I was taken to the doctor’s across the road from the school, and the doctor said I mustn’t use the leg, I must rest.
Mr Weir, the Scot from up the street, was passing at the time and he gave me a piggyback from the tram into the kitchen and laid me on the saddle, and this started my long acquaintance with the wooden couch. I felt better that afternoon after lying down, and towards teatime I sat up and had a game of cards with the lodger. I have forgotten his name but I remember he always let me win, and as we played a ha’penny a game my bank account was rising steadily. Kate used to chastise him about this but he would say ‘I’m not letting her, she’s a clever lass, she’s beatin’ me as she’ll beat everything that hits her.’
Then an odd thing happened. The man and the cards disappeared. The kitchen disappeared and I began to see funny things. Funny things like the ladies and the gentlemen in my picture on the wall, but now they were moving about and the horses were galloping and I saw a pony and trap coming right through the kitchen. I remembered this pony and trap – I had seen it before outside the house where I was born and our Kate was in it – her master and mistress had given her a ride home one Sunday – but there it was, this horse and trap in the kitchen. And there also in the kitchen was the man who stood at the top of the stairs and helped to throw me down; and there was the Devil, and Miss Corfield, and the Irishman who had been going to marry our Kate; these three were together and they were talking, talking, talking.
Their talking woke me up and I heard a voice saying, ‘What time is it?’ and another replying, ‘Just on two.’ And then the voice of me granda breaking as he said, ‘If she lasts over three she’ll pull through.’ And it came as a surprise to me that it was in the middle of the night and everybody was up and that my Aunt Mary and Uncle Alec were in the kitchen. I remember Kate bending over me, and the waft of whisky from her breath brought me into full consciousness. I can feel my lids lifting heavily as I looked at her, and then I turned my face away.
When I next awoke it was still dark and the pain in my leg was dreadful, so bad that I cried out with it. There was no light on in the kitchen and I was shivering. Then Kate came out of the bedroom, her eyes bleary with sleep, and ordered me to stop making that row.
Now it was this particular memory of her going for me in the early morning that stuck in my mind for years and caused a festering resentment. I had not taken into account that they all had likely been up until after three o’clock and my cries had dragged her from a much needed rest. Also Kate was not at her best in the mornings, especially after she had taken spirits. But such is the human mind that years later I couldn’t recollect one of the many kindnesses she had shown me, but only how she had used me, and in particular, the dark painful morning when she had gone for me.
Later on that day when I woke up to see a black moon hanging above my face I thought it was one of the funny things I had been seeing on the previous evening, but it spoke, a black hand came up and touched my cheek, and a nice voice said, ‘We’re going to put you right.’ And it was this black doctor that time – he put me onto boards and there I lay in the back bedroom for a long time. How long I can’t recollect, and with one clear exception I can only recall isolated instances of my sojourn in the bedroom, such as seeing a patch of sky between the rain barrel and the hen cree. The big rain barrel almost blocked out all the light from the lower half of the bedroom window.
I have the feeling of a Saturday afternoon when I heard the fruit man calling in the back lane, and then Kate bringing me a large bunch of white grapes, and my thinking, oh, they’re fresh from the tree because the sawdust’s still on them. And another Saturday night when there were visitors in the kitchen and I heard Kate saying quietly, ‘The sinews were almost gone, she could have lost it. A boy in the docks had the same thing and they took his leg off in the Royal at Newcastle.’ And the day when the gasman came and emptied the meter, and Kate came into the bedroom, her joined palms full of coppers, ‘Look,’ she said, ‘discount. I hadn’t a penny. I didn’t know where to turn. God’s good, by, He is that! If the fishman comes would you like a kipper?’
The clear exception concerns Miss Corfield. All during my stay in the bedroom I prayed daily that she would die. I prayed very earnestly for this after the fashion of, ‘Make her die, sweet Mother Mary. Or if you can’t see your way clear to do that, then keep me leg bad so’s I won’t have to go back to school. Name of the Father an’ of the Son an’ of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’ I used the phraseology of the kitchen when praying, and once again I was shown the efficacy of prayer, for Kate came into the bedroom one day and said, ‘Miss Corfield’s dead.’
I was sick, no pretence this time, and now I prayed frantically to get well so that I could go to confession.
Would this be the time when the mission was on and I went to confession and the missioner said, ‘It’s a wonder you’re not in Hell’s flames burning’, and sent me staggering out of the box in terror? It could have been. I became a very good Catholic after that mission. But I had nightmares again about Hell.
Miss Corfield died of cancer but I didn’t find this out for some years.
Sometimes I imagine me grandma was alive at the time I was lying in the bedroom for I seem to recollect her helping to lift me. But she couldn’t have been alive. It must have been my need of her and her presence still strong in the house that made me imagine this.
Then came the day I stood on my two feet alone; I can see myself limping out of the bedroom and leaning for support on the white scrubbed kitchen table and looking through the window down the length of the yard. The yard door was open and I could see into the back lane, and there passing was Florrie Harding and Janie Robson and as I watched them I said to myself, ‘I’ll never play with them again.’ I did not know childhood had left me, but I remember saying to myself ‘What are you going to do?’ and that this question was accompanied by an odd feeling in my chest. It was a mixture of many feelings, the feeling that I had when I went to the pawn, and when I carried the grey hen; the feeling I had when I humped the coke sack on my back; the feeling I had when I passed some of the other girls on the road with their nice clothes on while I was wearing an old costume coat of Kate’s that reached to my knees and bulged out like a balloon from my hips – the feeling I had of being different. But on this day, to the mixture of emotions was added a very definite feeling of worry and anxiety about my future, and I answered the question, saying, ‘Well, I can only do two things, I can write and I can do housework.’ But even at that age I knew I couldn’t earn my living by writing. There was no lack of ideas or even complete stories, the impediment was the mere matter of grammar and spelling. I should do something about it.
Perhaps it was with the idea of doing something about it that I picked up a knife from the table and began to sharpen a pencil, only to hear Kate yell at me, ‘Do you know what day it is? Sharpening a pencil on a Friday!’
I lived with superstitions from my earliest recollection so they became natural to me for never a day passed without hearing Kate saying, ‘Uncross those knives, there’s enough trouble in the house.’ If later in the day there would be a row she would say, ‘I knew it was coming, those knives.’ And should she, perhaps the very next day, see the knives crossed again when I was washing up she would cry, ‘What have I told you? You know what happened yester
day.’
As for cutting your nails on a Friday she would have sooner thought of jumping off the dock wall into the river. I remember being so bemused by the beauty of my nails that unthinking I took the scissors to them one Friday; I had just cut into the thumbnail when the scissors went flying across the kitchen. Was I mad cutting my nails on a Friday! What was I asking for? And when I came to think about this I knew I must be stark staring mad to tempt fate with scissors on a Friday.
The word pig was another superstition. When Kate referred to a pig she said grunter, or made a dramatic gesture of turning both her thumbs downwards. This was very often followed with the explanation that in Maryport the men wouldn’t put out to sea if someone used the word pig in their presence.
As for walking under a ladder this was really asking for it, wasn’t it?
Yes, yes it was. Yes, I saw that terrible things could happen by walking under ladders. Cutting your nails on a Friday, crossing knives, saying pig, not to mention when a picture dropped from the wall and you waited day in, day out for someone to die. It might be six months later when some aged person in the street came to their natural end, but hadn’t there been a warning of it. ‘You remember when that picture dropped?’ The evidence of a picture dropping could be the two dark frayed ends of string, but this would be entirely ignored for a picture falling meant certain death. I have known Kate coddle me granda with hot whisky and extra care after a picture fell. In her place I think I would have accepted fate thankfully but there was a deep forgiving goodness in Kate, she could forgive and forget.
Our Kate Page 15
