Our Kate

by Catherine Cookson

  The amazed silence was broken by an officer called Morgans. Morgans was a character. I had never liked to hear women swear, and some women have only to say bloody to set my teeth on edge, but Morgans’ swearing was an art, you couldn’t take offence at Morgans’ swearing. Morgans on this occasion looked at me, her dark eyes shining, and I think there was both amazement and admiration in her laugh. Anyway she got me over the aftermath of this awful denouncement by saying, ‘Come off it, bloody Saint Catherine, and get a move on with that bread.’

  I remained ‘bloody Saint Catherine’ to Morgans until the day I left the Institution, and she was one of the few who didn’t send me to Coventry for my sin. But time and time again I would feel like death when, coming back from my night out, I would go to the mess room, which was also the sitting room, to have a cup of tea and anything that was going – I was always hungry – and would open the door onto laughter and chatter which would fade away on my entering, as would also the people in the room.

  There was an officer working there at that time whose home was in Tyne Dock and she knew all about me. My parentage I knew was soon public. She was one of the less refined members of the staff, one of those who put my teeth on edge with her swearing, one of those whom I disliked, and not without reason, because I heard her remark one day, ‘Talk about an upstart bastard. And her being in service an’ all. Can you imagine where she gets it from?’

  Among a number of the officers there was a striving after refeenment rather than refinement, and I soon discovered that our Kate wasn’t the only one who pronounced her words wrong and got her sentences mixed up. There were a number of Mrs Malaprops on that staff.

  I had been working in the laundry – which job I liked very much at first, even if I disliked the Head Laundress equally so – when I had a return of that mixed emotion which always prompted the question ‘What are you going to do now?’ I remember I was startled by its reappearance and I said to myself, ‘This is a good job. I’ve got over two pounds a month and all my uniform found and plenty of off-duty time. What more do I want?’

  Well, what did I want? I asked myself. I pointed out once again that I hadn’t been trained for anything except housework . . . What about writing? I hadn’t been trained for that either, face up to it, my spelling and grammar were atrocious. Yet I could write, I knew I could write if only there was someone somewhere who could help me, give me lessons, who could learn me – no, no, teach me. I was learning by the mistakes of others; one of the officers had said ‘Learn me’ and another had most tactfully, in front of a full table, corrected her with, ‘Only you can learn, others teach.’ I wanted to spit in her eye.

  Why not aim at an accomplishment, something in music? Why not learn the fiddle?

  I went round the second-hand shops until I found a fiddle for ten shillings and I took lessons at a shilling a time. I have to laugh now when I think about the first night in my room with that fiddle, and the officers coming to view it and have a laugh at my expense, and the chaos in the recreation room where I practised.

  The recreation room was above the sewing room and was for the use of the officers, but it was used only for the supper that accompanied the Christmas dances. I came to look upon that great long room as my sole property.

  There were eighteen of the staff all told at that time, including the mental-block girls, and most of the eighteen threatened what they would do to me if I didn’t stop practising that fiddle. There wasn’t only my screeching to contend with, there was the assistant-matron’s dog, which, as soon as it saw me coming down the corridor with the case, would dart to the recreation room, sit under the window and howl to high heaven.

  So keen was I to learn that I took the fiddle home with me on my evenings out and the girls used to push up the dining-room window and call after me. But nothing deterred me.

  When Kate opened the front door to me she would smile ruefully and say, ‘Must you bring it with you every night, lass?’

  But me granda was for the fiddle. ‘You practise, lass,’ he encouraged me. ‘There’s nowt Aa like better than a bit of music.’

  Of course he wasn’t a great authority on music, having only the box gramophone and our three records to judge by, one of which was, ‘You made me love you’.

  After spending twelve shillings on lessons and practising for three solid months and still not being able to give a recital I was forced to realise that there was something wrong with the fiddle. So I gave it up and, as my urge, as I came to call the compelling mixture of emotions that would beset me, was going mad again I took up French. Before I could speak English I took up French! But here again I failed because there was something wrong with my accent, the teacher couldn’t get it right. I did all I could but it was no use. I went up, she said, where I should go down.

  I was very depressed about this failure for I had an overpowering desire for education, for knowledge, and to be thought clever. But people can dislike you for being clever, especially eighteen refeened officers. So I laughed at all my attempts at improvement and made others laugh with me, and at me. I acquired quite an art in this direction. It became the usual question as soon as I entered the mess room – in my second year after I had been released from Coventry – someone would say ‘What’s happened the night, Mac?’ And if anything hadn’t happened that could be turned into something funny and against myself, I would invent an episode to please them. And so when I took up the fiddle I laughed at myself, so with the French, so with the Indian clubs. I practised Indian clubs to make me strong, and I worked so hard at them that at last I was able to swing three in each hand simultaneously and do a sort of dance while performing. One day in the midst of my practice, whirling my clubs, doing a slow waltz and singing to myself, I heard stifled laughter. All the first dinner set, of which I was one, were hiding on the stairs and looking through the banisters at floor level. Supposedly unaware I danced towards them, swinging the clubs, but when I pretended to drop the lot on them there was pandemonium, which all ended in another big laugh.

  Nearly always on late-leave night – a twelve o’clock pass once a month – I would return to my room to find chaos awaiting me. An apple-pie bed, the whole place stripped; and one time I found the dressmaker’s dummy dressed up in my uniform, with the fiddle tied to the sleeves, Indian clubs for legs, a French exercise book on a stand before a face – painted on my pillow with my pen-paints – poetry I had been writing pinned over the grotesque chest, and across my window a placard bearing the letters ‘Queen of the Arts’.

  I took it as usual in good part and slept that night on the floor of my neighbour’s bedroom. The next day I gave them the answer to their joke. On the mirror which acted as a noticeboard in the mess room I placed a large sheet of paper which bore the words the queen thanks her subjects and at the bottom in a flourishing hand I signed my name in full. catherine mcmullen. Strange, but I used to like writing that name.

  One sidelight on this incident was that the assistant Matron asked me to leave the room as it was until the Matron saw it – not to get anyone into trouble, apparently the Matron liked a joke. It was news to me.

  It would be about this time, too, that I went into the carnival. I didn’t want anyone to know I was going in because I knew that no-one would dream that I would do such a thing. Especially the gentleman I was going with and who had ideas about decorum, and the inhabitants of the ‘New Buildings’ who thought I was swanky. But at this time there was an urge in me to act the goat – doubtless Kate’s humour pushing to the fore.

  I got dressed in the house of a friend in Shields and my get-up, a sort of Nellie Wallace creation, made me unrecognisable. I called myself ‘Sailors beware!’ During the three-mile route a car stopped near me and a gentleman asked my name. Now I had already decided that if I got anywhere in the prize line I’d give a false name. But I didn’t know the men in the car were judges so I said Katie McMullen, and I couldn’t believe it when later over the loudspeaker I heard ‘First prize for causing most amusement on
the route, Katie McMullen!’

  The following week was very enlightening. Instead of people turning their noses up I was hailed almost as a celebrity. The Assistant Matron had me dress up and go around the wards doing my stuff. People stopped me after church and said, ‘Why don’t you try for the stage?’ and Kate, whom my antics amazed as much as anyone, said, ‘The whole buildings are agog, they just couldn’t believe that it was you.’

  One woman said to me, ‘Lass, I’ve known you since you were a bairn in arms an’ you’ve always had a sad look in the back of your eyes, even when you were tiny you had it, an’ to think that you did that on Saturday. I saw you but I still can’t take it in it was you.’

  Regarding the sad look in my eyes, she was right. All my early photos have it. The first one taken at three years old looks as if I had already known sorrow.

  I again turned to writing. I wrote a play about the hospital versus the house side of the Institution. The theme was the snobbish friction which existed between the two. The play was funny and everybody was impressed, well, not quite everybody. I had enemies as I was to find out.

  I tried to get the younger members of the staff to act the play, but we laughed and larked so much that it came to nothing, yet I felt I had written something worthwhile at last. So I sent it to a well-known correspondence school who were giving free criticism of manuscripts with a view to judging whether you were eligible for coaching. I waited on a high peak of excitement for weeks and then back came the play, without a covering letter, but written in red ink across the blank back page were the words ‘Strongly advise author not to take up writing as a career.’

  It was such a blow I stopped writing for a fortnight.

  Although we had lots of fun at times there was another side to my years in the Institution, for I was aware of the suspicion that surrounded me because of my birth, and this was not that imagination which is often attributed to illegitimates and their sensitivity to this handicap.

  My work as a laundry checker meant checking in all the dirty washing from the main hospital and the male and female mental blocks, and entering each article into a ledger, and when the washing was clean, booking it and sending it out again. Some of the dirty linen was in a vile state as the Hospital catered for men off the ships; it also catered for all kinds of diseases. This thought never troubled me. I rarely handled the dirty linen as I had two inmate helpers to do the sorting, but the stench from the clothes at times made me feel sick. There were periods of time when I felt very much off-colour, sometimes quite ill when I didn’t want to do anything – not even to learn. It was about this time that my nose started to bleed heavily. During one such period I broke out in spots. They covered my body from my waist downwards. They were large spots and were very sore and when I told Kate she said, ‘It’s with all those breakfasts you eat. What do you expect with all that fried stuff?’ And of course she was right. I had a great appetite and very often when other members of the staff couldn’t face their breakfast at half past seven in the morning and left it until the ten o’clock break, when the sight of congealed fat tempted them even less, I would gladly dispose of one or more plates of cold bacon and egg. Many a morning I ate three big breakfasts, and it’s no wonder I had very little appetite left for the dinners. But I would have a good tea, packing away plenty of bread, so my diet at that time consisted mostly of fats and carbohydrates.

  Our particular section of the Institution had been raising funds, through dances, to help buy a violet-ray apparatus for the hospital. In return for our help the doctor allowed all the staff to have a free course of treatment. I was sitting in the half-circle of officers one morning, attired only in my knickers and brassiere, when one of them – and she was one of some importance – pointed to my waist and said, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A spot,’ I said; ‘I’m covered with them. I must stop eating frys.’ This was about eleven o’clock in the morning.

  I returned to the laundry at half past eleven. At a quarter to twelve I was ordered to go up to the hospital, and when I arrived I was put in an isolation ward with a special nurse in attendance. What was it all about? She couldn’t tell me, so I lay there waiting and wondering, and worrying. It was my spots I supposed, but why this rush? Why this ward?

  Eventually there came into the room a sort of deputation, headed by the matron. She stared at me fixedly and coldly, as only she knew how, while Doctor Shanley started to ask me questions. He was a nice doctor and I liked him, and I answered him without hesitation, telling him all he wanted to know. When did I first see the spots, etc, etc, and all the while the matron was staring at me, as was the other doctor, a lady, and the sister and the nurse. Then the doctor examined me. I say he examined me; it seemed to me he started to examine me and then change his mind, so quickly was the examination over. He took off his gloves and patted my cheek and said with a laugh, ‘Come on, we’re going to count these’ and he counted the spots on my stomach and my buttocks and loins, trying to make me laugh as he did so, but I wasn’t feeling like laughing. I looked at the matron and the sister and the other doctor and the nurse and anger rose in me, but not against them so much as against the officer who had reported the spots. And yet at that time I didn’t really know why I was angry.

  The doctor said, ‘Are you constipated?’

  Oh yes, I was constipated, I told him, I always had been. I was born with the condition. Kate told me that Doctor McHaffie had had to come to treat me for constipation when I was a month old. At various times during my childhood I was made victim of the crude home-made and scream-inducing treatment of having coarse washing soap inserted into the rectum, after which I was sat over a chamber of boiling water.

  The doctor patted my cheek again before he left, as if I were a child, and as he went through the door I overheard him mutter, ‘You’re mistaken. Never been touched . . . ’ And I thought he sounded pleased.

  The nurse who was detailed to look after me made a great fuss of me, and my room became the meeting point for lots of the nurses.

  You can imagine my pride when I found I could talk to the first-year nurses in their own language because I had been reading up The Naval Book. This was a book for seagoing male nurses. Still with the idea of becoming a nurse I had begun some months previously to study anatomy and physiology. I could draw the pelvis and make it look like a nice picture with light and shade. I could talk about the aorta and I knew all the bones of the body. They said, ‘Fancy, and you in the laundry and knowing all this. Why, you know more than we do about the theory.’ I was very happy in that side ward, I didn’t want to leave it. I felt more at home among these girls than I did among the house staff. During the time I was in the ward no-one was allowed to visit me from the house.

  I had written to our Kate on the Friday night and told her I was in hospital but said I didn’t know what was wrong with me except I had spots. On the Tuesday evening I was amazed to see her come into the little ward, and I was also delighted to see her, and because she looked nice I felt a spurt of pride in her and wished that that lot over in the house could see her like this.

  ‘How did you get in?’ I asked.

  ‘The Matron sent the maid from the house with me.’

  ‘The Matron? You haven’t been to the Matron!’

  ‘I have,’ she said with quiet dignity. ‘I wanted to know what was wrong with you; you said you weren’t allowed visitors.’

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked.

  At this Kate bent over me and, smiling gently, said, ‘She said you’re a good girl. You’ve got a very good daughter, Mrs McDermott,’ she said. ‘She’s a very good girl.’

  I could see the Matron’s face as she had looked when she entered the ward a few days ago. She hadn’t thought I was a good girl then. She must have remembered that only a few weeks previously I had been up before her.

  ‘What is this I hear, Miss McMullen, that you were out until two o’clock on Sunday morning? Is this true?’

  After closing my gaping mouth I
replied, ‘Yes, Matron. I was at a party.’

  ‘What kind of a party?’

  I told her what kind of a party. Jackie Potts had taken me to a party at his relatives’ house, relatives on his mother’s side, people who lived quite close to the Institution, highly respectable people. When I told her their name and the situation of the house, and that I had known the young man since I was a girl she modified her tone and dismissed me with, ‘Very well, Miss McMullen, but you should not stay out so late.’

  I should not stay out so late.

  Christmas parties in the North went on all night. Two o’clock was early for breaking up, and until I left the North I never went to a party at which there was anything intoxicating to drink, except in my own home. I remember bicycling up to Birtley with Lily Maguire for a Catholic dance that started at midnight on Easter Sunday and went on till six o’clock the next morning. All-night parties and dances were nothing out of the common. On looking back I think perhaps the Catholics were more tolerant in this matter, as they also were towards drinking and gambling, and this attitude is not understandable to non-Catholics who consider it doesn’t make sense when you take into account the dogma and bigotry. Anyway I wondered, but only for a moment, how the Matron had come to know about me being at the party. And then I thought – I had happened to mention to a certain officer what a good time I’d had at this particular party, forgetting that this lady was the Matron’s third ear. She was also a Catholic.