How often did I want to, Kate. How often.
Kate was overjoyed at this time with my writing success, and when the news came that J Arthur Rank wanted to turn my latest book, A Grand Man, into a film, she held me in her arms and cried, ‘I’m happy for you. Aw, lass, I’m happy for you.’
It was odd, but her demonstrations of affection always embarrassed me now. I wasn’t used to them. They had come too late, as it were. But I, too, was happy and excited over the news. A Grand Man was my fifth book and it had been written merely as a try-out. After finishing my fourth book I was wondering what theme I should use for the next one, when I thought of my short stories about the child from the Tyne which had started with ‘She Had No Da’ and I decided to have a shot at putting them in novel form, pathos and humour mixed. And so A Grand Man came into being.
In 1954 I was sent by the film company to Belfast, there to set the location and do the first script for the film ‘Jacqueline’, the title given to A Grand Man. I should have enjoyed this but I was ill at the time. When I returned I went straight into hospital, and I was physically ill for the next two years, which was a pity, for this was the period when exciting things were happening. There was the première of the film in London. A great night for me, and Tom. Then greater excitement still when we learned that the Queen had the film shown at one of her private parties.
Then came the offer to film Rooney, and the request again to do the first script. It was difficult going, but I have to feel very ill before I stop writing; when I have no urge to write I know things are in a bad way with me.
It was during this time that I was asked to go North to open a sale of work for the Polio Fund, and I stayed with a Doctor and Mrs Anderson, whom I had met once before and who, from this visit, were to become my very dear friends; but the outstanding incident of this trip for me happened as I stood on the platform looking down on the crowded hall. There was a man and woman standing staring up at me. The man had a child in his arms, and the woman kept smiling broadly as if she knew me, as I thought doubtless she did, for many in that hall remembered me that day. After I had said my piece this couple made their way towards me.
‘Hello,’ said the woman.
‘Hello,’ I said.
She looked blankly at me for a moment before asking, ‘Don’t you remember me?’
I racked my brains quickly. I have a good memory for things that happened years ago but I can forget a name that I heard only yesterday. But this woman was from the past; I had a vague feeling that I should have remembered her. I hesitated too long, and then the man put in stiffly, ‘But you must remember her. Why, you must. You picked taties together in the cornfield.’
There I was, dressed up to the eyes, Catherine Cookson, the writer, seven books to my name, two of which had been filmed. Booked to give talks here and there, asked to open garden parties, fêtes, and make after-dinner speeches, and the reporter from the Shields Gazette had just paid me the compliment of saying I looked more like a model than a writer, and here I was being reminded that I had picked taties with this woman.
I had forgotten I had picked taties in the cornfield, but now I was remembering. It was after I’d had the hip injury, and had left school. Funds were very low. Bella Weir, from up the street, was picking taties in the cornfield; but then Bella was a big strong hefty lass. And there were others from Bogey Hill who were picking taties and did so every year, but I had never picked taties before. Wanting to earn some money to help things along, I said to Kate, ‘I’ll go and pick for a day or so.’
It came back to me that Kate had protested strongly, but I went, though only for two days, because I became dizzy and had that funny tired feeling. And now, vaguely, I was recalling this woman, and understanding why I hadn’t been able to remember her; she wasn’t from the New Buildings where I could recall every face, and every name, she was from the Bogey Hill end. Half a mile is a long distance when you are a child; I couldn’t remember playing with this girl although she now reminded me that I had. The atmosphere was very strained; I could see what the man was thinking. Bloody upstart! They get on and forget what they were. Brought up along of old John McMullen, and Kate, her that would drink it through a dirty rag. God, don’t they make you sick.
If ever before there had been a doubt in my mind about the hold that my early environment had on me this incident shattered it.
I was no longer coming North to show them what Katie McMullen had become, there was no need now. I was established as Catherine Cookson, the writer, yet to my ain folk I would ever remain Katie McMullen of the New Buildings. But wasn’t it as Katie McMullen of the New Buildings that I saw myself from inside? The truth was, I was still her; I had always been her and would ever remain her, and that with her, and through her I still lived in the past because that is where I belonged. I had spent a lifetime trying to get away from my past, not realising the impossibility of getting away from oneself, for I was the North, through my early environment I was the epitome of the North. Its people were my people.
I was Katie McMullen. Resolutely, unashamedly. Now I recognised my inheritance, and it centred round the name I had no claim to, for that name was not even my mother’s, but that of a drunken, bigoted, ignorant old Irishman. God bless him, for who would not bless a man for loving a child as he did me.
Sixteen
Kate had been with us for nearly three years now, during which time we had moved from The Hurst, to a charming house in a wood situated about a mile away.
The move was in a way painful to me and I didn’t really get over it for a year or more, for The Hurst had been the realisation of a dream. I had bought The Hurst when it was old, and had nursed it. Then Tom came and he nursed it, but he, not tied by my sentimentality, saw the futility of working like galley slaves to keep a fifteen-roomed house, and large garden, for two, at most three people.
Kate loved the new house. She had a room on the ground floor with two large windows at which the roses tapped in the summer, and when she looked out, she looked at walls built of larches, and rowans. But above all, the kitchen with its Aga cooker was a never-ending joy to her, and it was a job to get her to bed after lunch each day. Even when she could hardly stand she would get up in the mornings and come into the kitchen.
‘Now don’t you do those dishes, lass; I told you I’d be up. Go on an’ get on with your writing.’
But there were times when she couldn’t struggle up and she would be in bed for weeks, but not without protest.
More and more now she hated me out of her sight. Sometimes at night when, nerves very taut, I would go into the drawing room to look at the television and would fall asleep from sheer fatigue, she would say later when I went in, ‘It’s been a long night, lass,’ or ‘You been out to the pictures?’ She would make a joke of it, but I always took it as a reprimand.
For a full year I never left her except for two hours every Friday when I went into town to the bank, and to the library for her books, and try as I might to hide it the strain was beginning to tell, and also on Tom. So it was arranged that a friend of mine, Mrs Chapman and her husband and son, should come and stay and see to the house and her, while we had a week’s holiday on the Fenland Rivers. She didn’t like this. She hated anyone else running the house. Moreover, I noticed at this time, that she seemed very irritable, and she was also afraid of me being in a boat in case anything happened.
We left on the Saturday morning at nine o’clock by taxi to the station, and as my friend wanted to do some shopping she came down in the taxi with us.
I learnt later it was at five past nine that Kate telephoned the shop from where I got her weekly supply of beer, and ordered a bottle of whisky, asking them to deliver it straight away. And with this last gesture she certainly precipitated her end.
I phoned her every day from some part of the River Cam, and she always said, ‘Aw, lass, I miss you.’ One day she was excited because my Cousin Sarah, and Jack, her husband, had broken their holiday journey South to see her. She
was very fond of Sarah, and Sarah, like all her nieces and nephews, thought a great deal of her. Besides, Sarah had never criticised her, she would only say ‘Eeh! Poor Aunt Kate.’
It was her birthday on September the fifteenth, and this was the day we were to return home, but not until the evening, so I had made arrangements for a basket of fruit, of which she was very fond, and other presents to be delivered early in the day. Her reaction to the fact that I had thought ahead, and hadn’t forgotten her birthday, was pathetic.
She was in bed when we arrived home, and I will never forget the look on her face when she saw me, and when she got her arms about me she would not let me go.
‘Thank God! Thank God you’re home safe. I’ve prayed night, noon and morning. Never leave me again, lass. Promise you’ll never leave me again.’
‘I’ll never leave you again.’
‘Promise.’
‘I promise. Why, I’ll tell you what we’ve done. We’ve booked a boat from Banhams for next year. Flat-bottomed and straight all through. No steps. We booked it so that you’ll be able to come with us.’ – And we had – ‘And it’s got big windows, and you can sit with your feet up and look out. How’s that? A life on the ocean wave!’
‘Aw, lass. Aw, lass.’ She was crying. ‘I had the feeling I would never see you again. Don’t ever leave me, will you? Will you?’
‘There now, no more, no more. I’ve told you. I’ll never leave you again, not even for a day.’
On the Sunday she got up but she looked ill, and was very irritable. On the Monday, and Tuesday, she was the same, and on the Wednesday morning she rose at nine, saying, ‘I’m going to do that ironing.’
‘Oh, leave it,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of time for that.’
‘What do you want me to do, sit and pick me nails? All you want to do is keep me in bed. I’m sick of bed.’
At twelve o’clock she was just finishing the ironing, standing – she would never sit down. Only lazy bitches sat down – when suddenly she exclaimed, ‘I feel so sick, I’m going to be sick.’
When she vomited blood I sent for the doctor. Our own doctor was away at the time and another local doctor came, a Doctor Cutler. He was big, and bearded, and as soon as she saw him she took to him. She was in bed by now and she joked and chaffed him as he sat by her and held her hand. I left them together.
Later, when he came out of the room, he said, ‘She’s a grand old girl, as plucky as they come.’
‘How long has she?’ I asked.
‘A few days, a week at the most. As you know her heart’s bad, and her kidneys must be in a shocking state, but it’s the cancer of the stomach that’s going to see her off. She must have had a constitution like a horse. Did she eat well?’
‘Like a horse,’ I said.
‘Give her ice, and a drop of brandy,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in the morning.’
I didn’t know how I was going to meet her eyes with this news in my face, and my whole being wanting to burst asunder with pity, and love, and remorse. But I needn’t have worried; she had the situation in hand, for she greeted me with, ‘Now don’t try and do me out of it, he says I can have what I like. Have you a drop?’ She was smiling.
‘Only brandy,’ I said.
‘Well, I’m in no position to argue, am I?’ She was actually laughing now. It was too much. The tears burst from me like a rainstorm and brought her up in the bed, crying, ‘Oh me bairn, don’t, don’t. I’m not worth your tears. I know I’m not. Aw, lass. Don’t, don’t.’
Tom and I sat up that night with her and she was sick many times, but when the doctor arrived early on the Thursday she greeted him with a smile, saying, ‘Aw, lad, I’m glad to see you.’
He was a long time with her, and when he came into the kitchen he seemed moved. ‘She’s a brave woman is your mother,’ he said. ‘A brave woman.’
I don’t know what had passed between them but I think she must have told him she knew she was dying, and rapidly.
On the Friday night she held my hands, and it was at this point she said that she had been a wicked woman. She was in great pain now and obviously sinking. Just before she lost consciousness she said, ‘Will that lad be coming the night?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he’ll come.’
She woke up later to see him bending over her, and she smiled and made an effort to wisecrack about his beard, but it wouldn’t come.
On the Saturday morning she regained consciousness for a short while and looked at me lovingly, but she could no longer smile, then she drifted away again to wake no more.
She died at one o’clock on the Sunday. And ‘that lad’ who had only made her acquaintance four days before, and whose weekend off it was, came at twelve o’clock, because, he said, he kept thinking of her – besides good priests, and good dustmen, there are good doctors.
When she was nearing her end he led me from the room, saying, ‘Come on, you’ve had enough.’ Tom and my mother-in-law were with her, but I knew she was already gone. She had been gone since yesterday morning.
Sitting on the terrace, the doctor said, ‘Now you are going to feel awful, full of remorse because of the things you haven’t done.’ I stared at him. How did he know? How did he know that already I was torn inside because I hadn’t openly shown affection to her, returned her embraces, stayed with her in the evenings instead of falling asleep in front of the television?
I did not know that the doctor was speaking generally and that this reaction was what most people feel on the death of their parents.
In my case I should have felt little self-condemnation, yet I was weighed down by it. The days following her funeral, my mind became a battleground for conflicting emotions. I was free, free. I was fifty years old and for forty-five of those years I had been carrying the burden of her. Oh, the countless times I wished that she was dead; and now she was dead and I was free of worry, the fear, the anxiety, but I was lost. I missed her. I wanted our Kate back. Drunk or sober, I wanted her back.
This feeling did not lift to show what was behind it until the first time Tom and I went out together to an evening entertainment, for then, in spite of my sorrow – which was very real – I felt like a young girl being let out of school. Or a more fitting description would be, a middle-aged woman being let out of prison.
It wasn’t until some time later that it was proved to me that Kate had been an alcoholic. If I had thought of this it was to dismiss it, for I said to myself that she could go for weeks without whisky. I thought an alcoholic drank all the time. This limited knowledge of the subject was because I wouldn’t go into it. But even if I had known years ago what her trouble was it would have been more than my life was worth to suggest treatment. I once, during her stay in The Hurst, got her to a doctor after she’d had what appeared like a slight stroke, and lost the use of her arm. She would not let me go in with her, and when she came out she said, ‘I haven’t got to eat so much meat.’ And that was that.
Anyway, everything from now on must be plain sailing. I was really free. There was nothing more to worry about. This being so I would get really better now.
But the past hadn’t finished with me. It was to haul me back right to the beginning.
When I returned home to Hastings after the war, I had on my left cheekbone a small red mark, not a spot, and this developed a halo round it, the whole taking up about an eighth of an inch of the skin. It didn’t disappear but was practically unnoticeable under make-up. Within the next two or three years there followed six of these marks on the left side of my face, one on the lip, and I was surprised to find that my tongue also was covered with them. I had frequently bled from the tongue, which was worse than bleeding from the nose, but had never associated the bleeding with these marks. The marks on the tongue didn’t have haloes round them like those on my cheek. When yet another one showed itself on my neck I went to my doctor. He did not say it was my temperament this time, but heartened me by remarking that they were a sign of age creeping on, a sort of disintegr
ation, and I was to expect this kind of thing. I was then in my early forties.
Then about twelve years ago, shortly after my mother died, when I could no longer completely cover the marks up with make-up, I went to a doctor again, a different doctor this time. And she thought I should see a specialist.
I saw the specialist in a general hospital. He took one look at the blemishes, then sent for a number of students. ‘Do any of you know what these are?’ He pointed to the marks on my face and neck, but none of them seemed to know.
‘This patient is suffering from telangiectasis, a hereditary form of a rare vascular disease.’
I was back on the table having an electric shock. I could smell urine. My heart had leapt up into my throat and was checking my breath. I heard his voice as from a distance saying, ‘This patient has bled from her nose since she was eighteen, she’s had it cauterised numbers of times but cauterisation is no use here . . . Do you bleed from the stomach?’
Our Kate Page 27
