Our Kate

by Catherine Cookson

  It was on 1 June, 1940 that Tom and I were married. They were evacuating Dunkirk. The country was in a state of chaos. My blind people were going to be re-evacuated. Everybody around me seemed in a dither all except me. At two o’clock on this Saturday I was going towards something that from being a mirage had turned into solid reality. The master of the Institution, Mr Silverlock, was to give me away. And as I walked down the aisle of St Mary Star-of-the-Sea on his arm I silently rejected my childish image of Doctor McHaffie as me da, and substituted this fine man in his place; and strangely, from that day the master, as I always called him, referred to himself as my adopted father.

  The marriage service was short, even ugly. The priest seemed to throw it at us. Tom had not become a Catholic, although he had signed a paper to say the children of the marriage would be brought up as Catholics. This particular priest had visited my house for two or three years, as had the nuns from the Convent. I was at that period clutching at all outward signs to hang on to my religion, trying to shut my mind against all criticism. I had, since my second year in Hastings, twice given up my religion, but now I was back in it praying that it would hold me, praying that it would not deprive me of its particular form of security, and peace. The priest used to visit the house weekly, stay to tea, play the piano, sing and later cause me to chastise myself and ask what did I want, why couldn’t I see my religion through the eyes of this priest who was jolly and broad-minded?

  The priest had every hope that Tom would come into the Church. For my part I wasn’t pressing Tom openly, but I was praying that he would, for once in he would be a stave to which I could tie myself.

  It was on the Monday morning previous to the Saturday on which we were married, that I received a letter which caused me to make the sudden decision. It came to me with lightning clarity that if Tom and I did not marry, and soon, still other elements would now drive a wedge between us. So I remember running to the gate and calling after him down the road, ‘Tom! Tom, just a minute!’

  When he came back I said to him, ‘We’ll be married on Saturday.’ Just like that. He stared at me for a moment, clutched my hand, then turned and ran down the road. He always ran when he was happy, or excited. So I had gone to the priest and said, ‘Father, we want to be married on Saturday.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘Saturday? Oh, no, my dear, he’ll have to come into the Church.’

  ‘We want to be married on Saturday, Father.’

  ‘Well . . . well, you can’t be married in church without a dispensation from the Bishop and that will take some time.’

  ‘I’m going to be married on Saturday, Father.’

  ‘What if you can’t?’

  ‘I mean to, Father.’

  ‘Oh, now, now. Now!’

  ‘We’ll go to a Registry Office, Father.’

  If you want to see spots you’ll see spots.

  Yet I find it odd when looking back that, being the type of person the oculist suggested, my life should have been so shaped by my emotions, for they have been as strings for certain people to play on, and once they discovered this weakness in me they twanged them all the harder. Yet every now and again I can see myself making a stand, as against the priest; and I won’t play down the courage that it needed for a Catholic to stand up to a priest, especially twenty-nine years ago.

  So we were married on that Saturday, and by the priest, in the church.

  We told no-one except the Master and Matron until the last minute. Yet there were quite a number of people in the Church, and it was said afterwards that never had so much laughter been heard in a vestry as on that day.

  We came back to the house, to a wedding cake and refreshments. And there were a few telegrams awaiting us; one from Kate, who was holding her own kind of wedding reception.

  ‘Well,’ as she said to Mary, who passed it on later, ‘whoever heard of a dry wedding.’

  Going up to London the train stopped at Tonbridge. The station was full of Frenchmen, dirty and tired, the remnants of Dunkirk, and I sat in the carriage and cried.

  We spent the first night of our married life in the Charing Cross Hotel, and the following day went to Grays, to Tom’s people, who welcomed me most warmly. The same evening we returned home.

  The house, and all in it seemed changed. As I stepped through the door I thought, Katie McMullen is dead. Miss McMullen is dead. Long live Catherine Cookson. Mrs Catherine Cookson.

  Within a month The Hurst was empty, at least of people, and with the Grammar School I went to St Albans and sat on my cases in a sorting room waiting to be allotted lodgings.

  A few weeks later we were very lucky to get a tiny little flat in the main street in St Albans, and there Tom and I spent the happiest year it was possible for two people to experience, and this in spite of me being ill all the time, and bleeding from the nose every day, which increased with my pregnancy.

  I was five months’ pregnant when I received a letter from a friend to say that Kate was ill, and if I wanted to see her alive I should go North. I was always impulsive, and although I was in bed at the time I said to Tom we must make the journey, for if she died I would have her on my conscience all my life.

  Why I should feel this way I just didn’t know, I owed her nothing in the way of duty, or anything else, yet there was this bond between us pulling me towards her. And so on the Friday night we went up to London, on our way North, and ran into a big raid. I will never forget my first sight of an underground station packed with horizontal humanity. The experience was devastating in itself, and later we sat in a train that crawled through inky blackness all night. The warnings were still on when, at nine o’clock the following morning, we arrived in Brinkburn Street, South Shields, at the very outdoor beer shop where I had come so often for the beer, and above which Kate was now living. She opened the door to me looking better than I’d seen her for a long time. She couldn’t understand why I had come. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘I’ve never been bad, I’ve only had a cold.’

  But I was glad I had come anyway. Everything was so uncertain; we might never see each other again; there was a war on, and what was more she was pathetically delighted to see us, for now she accepted Tom. And as she said on the quiet, she had always liked him but she hadn’t liked him for me, but there it was. Many years later she confessed to loving him, so much so that before she died she thought there was no-one to equal him.

  She had, at this time, found work with a Doctor and Mrs Carstairs, but this only after trailing the streets of Shields for weeks in search of it. Time and again she had been turned down because, being so fat, no-one could imagine her skipping around and doing a full day’s work. As she herself often said, she could do a ten-hour stretch and come up for more. And she did, often with the flesh of her ankles almost touching the floor.

  For ten years she worked at the doctor’s, right up until I brought her back home. Mrs Carstairs was good to her, and in return she repaid her in the only way she knew, with hard work that knew no limited hours. The Carstairs’ household became her main interest, and twice a week I heard of their joys, and their sorrows. Until Kate died Mrs Carstairs wrote to her and never forgot her birthday. This brought Kate a great deal of happiness.

  Doctor and Mrs Carstairs had known of Kate’s weakness, but like most other people they were fond of her in spite of it, and, as Mrs Carstairs said, ‘That was Kate’s private life. She never let it intrude on her work.’

  And there was another reason I was glad I had braved the raids and come North. I could now show them, indeed I could, that I was no longer Katie McMullen. I had a name. At last I had a name of my own. Moreover, I hadn’t married a nobody; I had married a Grammar School master, a man who had been to Oxford.

  I would have married Tom if he had been another Rooney, a dustman, from around Eldon Street. But he wasn’t a dustman, he was a Grammar School master and I had married him. Yet the miracle was that the Grammar School master had married me. And yet I told myself, this is what I had been leading up to fo
r years. This is why I had been educating myself. It had been tough going but I had made it.

  During that visit as I was going through the arches towards East Jarrow, I met a woman. And she stopped me and said, ‘Why, Katie, it’s you! How are you gettin’ on?’

  So I told her how I was getting on: I was married, I was married to a Grammar School master.

  ‘Aye, lass, it’s just like yesterday that you used to go up and down this very road with a sack on your back catching the droppin’s from the coke carts, remember? Aye, an’ the trails you had up and down this very road with that grey hen. An’ to Bob’s . . . mind Bob’s? Aye, lass, you had a life of it. An’ now you’re married . . . an’ to a Grammar School master? It’s hardly believable. Aye, you’ve done well for yourself; you’ve fallen on your feet, lass.’

  Yes, I had fallen on my feet.

  But it was brought home to me that day that you cannot get away from your early environment, you cannot get away from yourself, from the members of your family, the family of your townsfolk, the people you grew up with. They know all about you, and they will never see you but as they remember you when you lived among them.

  The result of my trip to the North was that on the seventh of December I lost my baby. After nine days and nights of labour an exhausted nurse, with the help of Tom, delivered his six-month-old son, an exact, and minute, replica of himself, and I felt I was about to die.

  Later, I was devastated afresh when I learned that the baby could not have a grave of its own but had to be buried in a general grave. Later still, when I went to the cemetery the attendant told me he had buried it with an old woman from the workhouse who had no-one belonging to her, which gave me strange comfort.

  In 1942 I lost my second baby in Sleaford. When in 1943 – we were now established in Hereford, Tom being at Madley RAF Station – I lost my third baby, and was warned strongly that there were to be no more, I was faced with the fact that it was a sin to prevent life. There still remained in my mind the voice of the priest in the pulpit at Tyne Dock saying, ‘It is less of a sin to take a newborn child and dash its brains out against a wall than to prevent it coming into life.’ I took my problem to the priest and the answer he gave me sent me out of the confessional box mystified. If there was sinning to be done, he said, then let it be done by my husband. I was to take no part in it.

  No part in it?

  The transubstantiation was worrying me too. I was willing to accept it as a symbol, but I had been told flatly by the priest that this was no symbol, the bread and wine were actually the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. The thought was repulsive to me; I couldn’t go to Communion. The bread, as I’ve said, was always repugnant to me, but this conception of flesh and blood was rejected by both my stomach and my mind. This led a step further. At the exposition of the Host I no longer believed that Christ was alive on the Altar, and although I said, ‘As the hart pants after the fountain of water so does my soul pant after thee,’ in which I recognised beauty even when a small child, it was no use, I no longer believed what I was saying.

  There was at that time in Hereford a priest who was a convert. He was kind and understanding. He was so because, being a convert, he saw my troubles primarily through the eyes of a Protestant; so sensible was he that Tom began to take instruction under him. This in a way terrified me, for I could now see Tom inside the Church, and me out. But I need not have worried on this score. Tom, I found, was merely trying to do this to help me solve my problems. And one of my problems was, that every Catholic was supposed to do everything within his power to bring his non-Catholic partner into the Church. This, he thought, might be the source of my trouble.

  At this time I was becoming annoyed, and angry, and voiced my anger against some of the stupidity, and bigotry, of my religion. One thing in particular that angered me was a notice within the Church door dealing with mixed marriages. It seemed to my mind to place the Protestant partner in the marriage union on an animal level. The non-Catholic party was, in the eyes of the Church, damned, and the only hope for him was to come into this all-knowing, meticulous and God-presided fold.

  But I didn’t want to leave the Catholic Church. I loved Our Lady. I prayed to her constantly. I went to the convent and talked to the nuns. I wanted above all things, even more so than having a child, to remain a Catholic. I could have, like thousands of other Catholics, just lapsed, perhaps gone to my duties once a year, or when the priest raked me out. But I wasn’t built that way, that was a form of cheating, of fear, and I, who was afraid of so many things, feared fear, and fought it.

  Twelve

  After the loss of my first baby in St Albans I discovered, while forced to lie in bed, that I could draw. It was a great discovery. By the time I reached Hereford, via Leicester and Sleaford, I knew that I had unearthed a hidden talent. I could draw architecture. I took one of my drawings to a printer to see if it could be turned into Christmas cards. Indeed it could, he said, I had the art of texture.

  What was texture with regard to art? I didn’t know.

  I was to learn that texture was the knack of making stone look like stone, or velvet appear like velvet with the simple aid of a pencil. I discovered academy chalk and carbon crayon. The printer said to me, ‘You should go to the Art School. If you’ve done this without a lesson you have a gift that you should use.’

  And so said the master of the Art School. He could not believe that I had achieved these drawings without a lesson. ‘You must come when you can and take lessons here,’ he said; ‘you are capable of taking a third year exam and there is no reason why you should not eventually get to the Slade.’

  I didn’t know what the Slade was.

  So much faith had Mr Milligan in my work that he had hung, in the yearly exhibition, two of my cathedral studies and, to my amazement and delight, they got a mention in the Press.

  I was an artist. Moreover, I was selling some of my drawings at five pounds a time. These were copies of photographs which the firm would send me, some as small as two inches by one and half inches, and these had to be enlarged to eleven inches by nine. I learned a new trade the hard way. Five pounds appeared like a fortune for a drawing until I realised I was back on the basis of my pen-painting days. It would take me a fortnight to do a drawing, and I would sit from the time Tom left for camp in the morning almost until he returned in the evening. Among other things now, my eyes began to suffer greatly again and I had to attend the hospital.

  Then there was music. Hadn’t I passed with honours in that first exam? Now was the time to take it up again. When I hadn’t any orders in for drawing I was practising two, three or more hours a day. My teacher said, ‘You know, you could be quite good. You must practise and take exams.’

  I wanted to take exams for everything. I wanted to have something to show, something to prove that I could do things. I longed for exams.

  During all this I was bleeding each day. But what was more, every moment of every day, and every second of every moment I was filled with anxiety and worry over Tom. He was, it could be said, in a comparatively cushy job instructing at Madley. A cushy job that he hated, and loathed, and which he tried to get out of time and again, but one at which I prayed that he would be kept until the end of the war.

  I was obsessed at this time, too, by a feeling of guilt that I wasn’t doing my duty. I offered myself for part-time work at the munition factory – although I was exempt through ill-health.

  After five weeks packing cordite, I got cordite poisoning, and that was that.

  Right from the beginning of the war I had a weird feeling that I wouldn’t see the end of it, and in a way I didn’t.

  I had been ill for a long, long time and should have had medical attention. Continued loss of blood from my nose had made me anaemic. I was as thin as two laths. And I found now that I was becoming overwhelmed by the shame of my birth. The strange thing was that no-one was aware of this. Not even Tom. I was a lively spark. I always made people laugh, I always talked and chatted. I alwa
ys felt it was my duty to make a party go, there must never be a dull moment. People liked to be with me; I liked to be with people. And then I got phlebitis.

  My condition was diagnosed in a surgery by an elderly doctor. I was told to go straight to bed. I was attended at the house the following day by a young, harassed, foreign doctor who had shown marked impatience with me before. On the third day he ordered me out of bed; on the sixth day I felt desperately ill and he came and ordered me back to bed again. I was in the house alone all day except for the father of my landlady, who was a very old man, and a nurse who came in to wash me. But most of the next six weeks was spent lying rigidly still, because of my leg, and looking out at the towering stone wall of Bulmer’s Cider Factory that rose straight up from the bottom of the little garden, and thinking – when I wasn’t practising my drawing for the exam – of all the things that had happened to me, but mainly about my birth, and Kate; and my thoughts weren’t loving.

  Then one morning, after Tom had gone to the camp, I was overcome by a weird and terrifying feeling. My heart raced, my limbs trembled, I felt sick and I was sure I was going to die. It was my first experience of nervous hysteria, but I was not told what it was.

  I was now full of terrifying fears which I couldn’t sort out or place in any category, and I found, when the time came to get up, that I couldn’t use my legs.

  A specialist was brought and advised that I should have a week or so in hospital, just for a change of scene. I had never minded going to hospital, I always got on very well in hospital. But on this occasion, unfortunately, I was put in a small ward where there was a patient who ruled the roost. I was in no state to combat an ignorant, stupid woman, but I knew after a week that if I didn’t get out of that place, and away from her, I would go mad, really mad. Her technique was to inform all and sundry, in a loud whisper, ‘That one across there has nerves. There’s not a thing wrong with her, she just thinks there is. She’s one of that sort, you know. It would do her good if she had something the matter with her. That would show her. There’s me been in here . . . ’