Our Kate

by Catherine Cookson

  I look back now on the years between forty and fifty as on a painful nightmare. Not only had I my mental state to contend with but the inevitable attack on all sections of my weakened system by an early menopause. Add to this neuritis of the arms and legs, a skin allergy and the capacity for picking up anything that was going, even mange from my bull-terrier, to say nothing of my nose, which, if possible, was bleeding more at this time, and had also taken onto itself a painful antrum.

  My doctor used to infuriate me, for, no matter what I went to him with, he would say airily, ‘Oh, Mrs Cookson! You’ve got to expect this, it’s your temperament, you know. You’ve got to pay for being a writer.’

  In 1948, 49 and 50 I had three operations on my temperament. I may say here that these were the first operations for which, before I went down to the theatre I was given an injection to quieten the system. Four out of the previous six times I had been in an operating theatre I had lain on the table while they cleared up the gore from the last patient. It’s odd how people always thought I was tough.

  Following this, my temperament gave me, with the help of some tree shears, mastitis of the breasts. Then my temperament, with the help of my pen, gave me writer’s cramp, and neuritis which caused a frozen shoulder. Some temperament.

  Fifteen

  I don’t know when I first started my flying dreams. Perhaps it was at the beginning of puberty. Somewhere in Freud it explains these dreams as being connected with the awakening of sex. Be that as it may, I looked forward to my flying dreams. I would go down to the bottom of the street, stand with my back against the telegraph pole, shout ‘Go!’ and I would go. First of all, I would scoot up the long pole until I reached the wires. Then I would pause a moment, look along the thin sparkling strands and fly to the next pole, where I would stand on the top for a second before sliding down to the ground again. Why did my subconscious choose telegraph poles? I didn’t like telegraph poles. There was a family called McLaughlin who lived up Bogey Hill. The brother and sister were much bigger than me and always went for me, and I was scared to death of them. They were strong Catholics, so why did they pick on me? I wore my green on St Patrick’s Day, yet it was usually on this day, or around this time, when young pious and ardent members of differing denominations were making innocent looking paper balls that held flint stones in their middle, ready to do battle for their respective beliefs, that this couple would waylay me; they would hold me against the telegraph pole and knock my head repeatedly against it by the simple procedure of shaking me violently by the shoulders. So I didn’t like telegraph poles. Yet the dream went on for years.

  I never remember having any dreams that I enjoyed except this one. Sometimes, even now, I find myself flying. I am walking along a street and I suddenly say to myself ‘Go on, fly,’ and I will rise from the ground, and no-one around me thinks it is in any way extraordinary.

  I have at times found myself in the sea in my dreams, swimming, but this was never a pleasant dream because I couldn’t swim. Having nearly drowned on my first attempt in the Shields Baths when I was nineteen, I had an inordinate fear of the water, which, try as I might, I couldn’t overcome. My experience on the slacks didn’t help me at all.

  My holidays each year became another form of nightmare, through having to spend them on a boat, for Tom is boat mad. Each morning I was surprised we hadn’t sunk, and each evening I was amazed I hadn’t fallen overboard. After seven years of such holidays I just had to make the big effort. I was fifty-two and it seemed a little late, but thanks to Mr Ryker, the instructor in the Hastings Baths, I accomplished the impossible. I think I look upon it as my greatest achievement. I have never had my swimming dream since I learnt to swim.

  Then there were, and still are, the dreams of being naked. Dreams have always played a great part in my life, and although I have now thrown overboard most of the superstitions which plagued me, and would very much like to reject the applied significance of all my dreams, I find, from experience over the years, that to do so would be rejecting a form of truth. The dreams and their significance I don’t pretend to understand; I only know that certain dreams signify certain things for me, and even at one particular period when I said firmly, ‘I’m taking no more notice of dreams,’ they still went on, and the happenings that would follow them proved conclusively that, ignore them how I might, they would remain the negative to the print.

  The naked dream, like the dream of the black-robed priest, who popped up in all odd places, but mostly on the altar with his back towards me, started with the loss of my first baby, and dealt exclusively with my physical health. Sometimes I dreamt I was naked to the waist, at others, there might just be one arm bare, or my feet bare.

  There has been only one time when I dreamt I was completely naked. Two days later I developed a cold; it turned severe, but I refused to pamper it. I had learned not to run to the doctor with any slight illness. In fact, not to go to the doctor unless I was absolutely forced; also, not to put myself to bed, which often in the past I had done. So when my dream only resulted in a cold I said to myself, ‘So much for being stark naked . . . a lot of bare flesh for a running nose and a headache.’

  The following week I still had a cold and it forced me to bed, but I still went on working, croaking into my tape recorder. I knew that I had to be right for the following week, and the week after. I had been asked to speak at a Conservative luncheon. I was also due to go North. The South Shields Lecture and Literary Society had done me the kindness to make me their President. I must get rid of this cold.

  When I eventually sent for the doctor I had double pneumonia. But this wasn’t the worst. Being rhesus negative, and also allergic to all kinds of drugs, my reaction to the drug that checked the pneumonia was worse than the disease itself; so much so that I thought, this is it.

  Now out of this arose the question: ‘Do you want to see a priest?’

  Pushed at the back of a drawer was a crucifix, the holy-water font, and the statue of Our Lady, and St Joseph, that used to form my altar. I had bought these in the porch of St Peter and St Paul’s in my early teens, putting a few coppers away each week on one or other of them. I had set up my altar on the little iron mantelpiece in the corner of the bedroom, and night and morning I had said my prayers beneath it – provided there were no lodgers in the room. Even when I went to Harton Institution I set up my altar, but this didn’t stop them thinking the worst of me, or reporting me for having indecent pictures in my room, which on inspection the Matron found to be: Minnie-Ha-Ha, hanging at one side of the altar, and a reproduction of Paolo and Francesca at the other. Since coming South, however, I had never set up my altar, yet I hadn’t the heart to throw the relics of my religion away. Now my inner eye was on them. This is what people meant when they said that Catholics always recant on their deathbed. Well, did I want a priest? Did I want the last rites?

  What for? God, if there was a God, knew exactly how I felt. He knew that I didn’t want to deny Him. He knew that I had struggled against denial for years. If there was a God, then He knew every facet of my thinking. Would He think any more of me if I was to placate Him now by submitting to certain rites in which I no longer believed? What, after all, was a priest but a man? I knew all about ordination, which is sealed by the laying on of hands by a bishop, who after all is another man, subject to a pope, who is another man, successor, we must believe, of Peter; but with a difference. Peter was not magnificently housed in a city set apart, nor was his belly well-filled four times a day. I don’t know the intake of popes in this matter, but I do know that of priests, at least some priests. But this carnal matter, although not beside the point is going off at a tangent and that’s what always happens when you touch on this subject. Anyway, could a priest’s mumbled words have any effect on the mind of God? Could they alter God’s attitude towards me in the eternal second between life and death? No, if I believed that, I was in for more mental torment.

  I didn’t want a priest. I lay and waited. Death didn’t come. />
  Perhaps the Catholic view of my reprieve would be that I was being given another chance. This view had been presented to me before. It was while I was in St Helen’s Hospital in 1952. I had lost a lot of blood during some weeks, and was feeling very low after the operation. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was dozing – I opened my eyes to see the bright shining faces of two nuns bending over me. My heart again leapt up to my mouth. I had told Tom to say I was of no denomination, but apparently he had been worried at the time and stated my denomination to be Catholic. The nuns were sweet but I had to tell them the truth. ‘I am no longer a Catholic, sisters,’ I said.

  Talk about the persistent attack of angels.

  ‘You have had an operation. You have got better only by God’s grace. He has given you this chance in order that you may see your error. He’ll not do it again. You can test Him too far.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to spend your eternal life in Hell, my dear, would you?’

  On and on it went.

  When Tom came in, as he said later, I had gone back almost to the breakdown. ‘Get me out of this.’ I cried at him. ‘I don’t care how you do it, but get me out. They’ll come back.’

  An hour later I was carried to a taxi, and carried out of it, and then I was in my own bed. Physically I was in a very low state, mentally I had really gone back years.

  On the Monday I sent for my doctor. He did not come but sent me a pamphlet on rehabilitation – the main theme was to keep oneself busy. I looked from the letter through the window and into the sky, and asked why had it to happen to me. I wanted help. Why was I always refused outside help? Perhaps it was after all God’s way of showing me I was wrong, perhaps those nuns were right.

  I was retching again.

  But the other side of the coin, as regards dreams, is the one I have about lavatories. Perhaps because in my childhood I found peace when I escaped to the lavatory, and had my earliest dreams there, now in the time of my success the lavatory should stand as a symbol to me. Whatever the real explanation of this I do not know, for as I’ve said I cannot stand the smell of lavatories, but I do know that the lavatory dream arrived just about ten years ago when I first began to earn real money by writing. The lavatory dreams always portend what the fortune-teller would term, good fortune. And according to the number of lavatories and their condition, so the amount of money that comes to me.

  One night, about two years ago, I dreamt of a long line of lavatories which, one after the other, I refused to enter because of the state they were in, and when I came to the last one and my necessity was great I still would not deign to enter it, and then, as happens in dreams, the whole place turned into one huge lavatory and there was I in the middle of it with no clear path out.

  I awoke only to find it was a dream within a dream. Still asleep and dreaming, I said to myself, ‘What a frightful dream!’ I was now looking in a mirror, my lip was curled back from my teeth, my nose was at an upward angle, and I asked of my reflection, ‘Why have I to dream about lavatories?’

  When I did eventually wake I remembered my dream within a dream, and said to myself, all things being equal that could mean something. Two days later I received an offer to do work that brought me in the fattest cheque I had ever received.

  It is interesting to recall that the lavatory dream started when the climbing dream stopped. From when I began to write seriously in 1945, until about 1955, I frequently had a dream of climbing mountains, of a rock face that presented me with a jutting overlap. I was always clawing my way up, hand over hand, trying to get footholds here and there; I was always exhausted when I came to this overlap. It would take a mighty effort to climb outwards and onto its top. Always, with one exception, I reached my objective and lay there spent. No wonder I woke up tired in the morning, so tired that I could hardly crawl out of bed.

  The one time that I did not succeed in climbing the mountain was when I found myself in a dark valley with the rock faces going straight upwards, so steeply that they almost obliterated the light. There was no way out, the only thing was to go back the way I had come. I stood still looking upwards to the unreachable summits, and in this position I woke up, and I said to myself, ‘What now? I’ve got to face something, or go back. What is it?’ The answer was Kate. I had to conquer my feeling towards her or retreat into myself by way of the dark road I had come.

  For six years Kate had been visiting me, and each year her visits grew longer, until they lasted for three months. Always during her stay I got her her daily beer, and never once did she ask for or mention, whisky. This spoke plainly of her power of control, which she could use if she liked. I know now that there were times when she was staying with me when she must have gone through hell, so great was her craving.

  Following each visit, I always got a letter saying, ‘Oh, lass, only four walls to look at and no garden; and no you, or Tom.’ She had by this time become very attached to Tom.

  Twice during her long stays she was ill and in bed for six weeks at a time, and strangely I enjoyed nursing her. When her dominant character was low and I knew there was no possibility of her slipping out, she became our Kate to me, the nice our Kate.

  But as the years went on, and although there were three hundred miles between us now, the burden of her still weighed on me, for I was living in dread of the day when, not being able to look after herself, I would, to use her own phraseology, be saddled with her.

  When the final day of testing came in 1953 and I went North, I found her in a deplorable state. She had swelled to enormous proportions. She had heart trouble, dropsy and cancer of the stomach, the latter she was unaware of, and she had been drinking heavily, paying someone to bring it in for her. Dr Carstairs gave her a short time to live. Like me granda, she had a fear of hospital, so there was nothing for it but to bring her back with me.

  What strengthened and helped me during this time was Tom’s moral support. Although he knew to what depths of mental distress she had brought me, and the daily irritations in store for himself – one of which was her cooking, for she took it as an insult if her great stacked plates of gravy covered food weren’t eaten – he said, ‘You must bring her home.’ And I knew I must, and for good, for my conscience was loud in me, telling me that whatever I went through with her now would be nothing to what I would suffer if I didn’t make this final effort.

  After a journey by train sleeper, and ambulance, I brought her home for the last time. She was ill, very ill, and when at last I had her in bed in her old room and I looked at her, I thought, thank God it won’t be for long, then was immediately horrified that I could think this way. I stared pityingly down at the great balloon of water that her body had become, at the faded blue of her eyes, and the colour of her nose, bulbous now. There was no beauty left, not even the beauty of age. And then she took my hand. With the tears running down her face she held it to cheek as she said, ‘Aw, lass, thank God I’m home. I’m home, I’m home. Aw, me lass. Aw, me lass, God’s good. He’s brought me home to die. Every night when I’ve said me prayers I’ve asked him to bring me home.’ Strange, but she did say her prayers every night, and stranger still that she should consider her home was wherever I was.

  I had wanted her dead for years. Only by her dying could I be released from the burden. I was nearing fifty. I had stood enough, I wasn’t physically, or mentally strong enough to stand any more, yet it was in that moment, when I told myself these things, that I knew she must not die, that I couldn’t let her die, that she had to live and we had to come to know each other. I, too, had to have my chance. I had to sublimate this feeling of hate with another feeling, with the feeling that had always been there, this passionate, and compassionate love for her, this had to rise to the top. I, too, needed saving. I, too, had to live with myself. I said to her, ‘You are not going to die . . . Mam, you are going to live to be happy.’ I had called her mam for the first time.

  And she did live, and she was happy. For three years we lived together, and for most of the time there
was happiness. There were the ordinary irritations of life, more so when she was getting about as she did sometimes in the morning – she had to be in bed most days by two o’clock – because she always wanted to do the cooking, and the name of Gayelord Hauser affected her like a red rag to a bull, for our eating habits for some years had been guided by his cookery books.

  There was one thing in her that never weakened until the moment she died, and that was her dominant character. Yet during these last years she fitted in with our life and tried in every way to please us, I say us, because she wanted Tom to think well of her.

  Only twice did she express any desire to go out, and on the first occasion she stopped abruptly outside a bar door and said as abruptly, ‘I won’t be a few minutes, I just want a half, just a half.’ Sickness overwhelmed me again, and bitterness. I knew she would down a couple of doubles and have a flat flask in her bag and all within a few minutes. But following this I realised the agony the craving caused her, and decided that I must get her some spirits, at least once or twice a month. And so, on the quiet, I would bring her in a quarter bottle of whisky, saying, ‘Hide that,’ for Tom wasn’t supposed to know anything about it. And very often he didn’t for he was strongly against her having it; beer, yes, and brandy, which the doctor had ordered, but not whisky. She hated brandy. Oh, the look on her face when I would give her the bottle. ‘Aw, thanks lass, thanks lass.’ She would be happy, and laughing, and gay for days.

  But the most important thing during this last period was that we came to know one another. We talked openly about the past for the first time in our lives. And once she said to me, ‘I’ve never understood you, lass. It’s come to me that I’ve never understood you. Years ago I used to think you had the making of an upstart, and funny, I wanted you to be an upstart, because it proved to me you were different. But you were different from the day you were born. You were like him, you didn’t belong to the North or anything in it.’ Here she was wrong. ‘But you were no upstart, you were too straight and honest for that, and you never rejected me.’ (If she could only have seen into my mind and heart.) ‘I once heard tell that Taggart Smith said to you in the New Buildings when you were leaving home to go into place that time, that you should make a clean break from us an’ that you would never make anything of yourself if you kept in with us. It was me she meant. I’ve never born malice to anybody in me life but I found it hard to forgive her for that. But you did make something of yourself. There’s nobody in the place risen like you have, an’ you didn’t disown us to do it.’