Hamilton
Page 1
HAMILTON
Catherine Cookson
Table of Contents
The Catherine Cookson Story
Hamilton
PART ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
PART TWO
One
Two
Three
Four
PART THREE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
The Catherine Cookson Story
In brief:
Her books have sold over 130 million copies in 26 languages throughout the world and still counting…
Catherine Cookson was born Katherine Ann McMullen on June 27th, 1906 in the bleak industrial heartland of Tyne Dock, South Shields (then part of County Durham) and later moved to East Jarrow, which is now in Tyne and Wear.
She was the illegitimate daughter of Kate Fawcett, an alcoholic, whom she thought was her sister. She was raised by her grandparents, Rose and John McMullen. The poverty, exploitation, and bigotry she experienced in her early years aroused deep emotions that stayed with her throughout her life and which became part of her stories. Catherine left school at 13, and after a period of domestic service, she took a job in a laundry at Harton Workhouse in South Shields. In 1929, she moved south to run the laundry at Hastings Workhouse, working all hours and saving every penny to buy a large Victorian house. She took in gentleman and lady lodgers to supplement her income and took up fencing as one of her hobbies. One of her lodgers was Tom Cookson, a teacher at Hastings Grammar School, and in June 1940, they married. They were devoted to each other throughout their lives together. But the early years of her marriage were beset by the tragic miscarriage of four pregnancies and her subsequent mental breakdown. This took her over a decade to recover from, which she did, often by standing in front of a mirror and giving herself a damn good swearing at!
Catherine took up writing as a form of therapy to deal with her depression and joined the Hastings Writers’ Group. Her first novel, Kate Hannigan, was published in 1950. In 1976, she returned to Northumberland with Tom and went on to write 104 books in all. She became one of the most successful novelists of all time and was one of the first authors to have three or four titles in the Bestseller Lists at the same time.
She read widely: from Chaucer to the literature of the 1920s; to Plato’s Apologia on the trial and death of Socrates (she said that here was someone who stuck to his principles even unto death); to history of the nineteenth century and the Romantic poets; to Lord Chesterfield’s Letters To His Son and the books and booklets that abounded in her part of the country dealing with coal, iron, lead, glass, farming and the railways. She disliked it when her books were labeled as ‘romantic.’ To her, they were ‘readable social history of the North East interwoven into the lives of the people.’ For the millions of her readers, she brought ‘an understanding of themselves’ or perhaps of their dear ones. Her stories do not bring in a realism in which the worst is taken for granted, but a realism in which love, caring, and compassion appear, and most certainly, hope. ‘This type of realism does exist,’ Tom Cookson said of her writing. There is nothing sentimental about her writing; she is unrelenting in the strong images she invokes and the characters she portrays. They were born of her formative years and her personal struggles. Many of her novels have been transferred to stage, film, and radio with her television adaptations on ITV, lasting over a decade and achieving ratings of over 10 million viewers.
Besides writing, she was an innovative painter, and she believed that her father’s genes fostered the strength to work hard, but also, in rare moments of freedom, to strive to better herself. Catherine was famed for her care of money but had given much to charities, hospitals, and medical research in areas close to her heart and to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, who set up a lectureship in hematology. The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust continues to donate generously to charitable causes. The University later conferred her the Honorary Degree of Master of Arts. She received the Freedom of the Borough of South Tyneside, today known as Catherine Cookson Country. The Variety Club of Great Britain named her Writer of the Year, and she was voted Personality of the North East. Other honours followed: an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1986, and she was created Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She was appointed an Honorary Fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford in 1997.
Throughout her life, but especially in the later years, she was plagued by a rare vascular disease, telangiectasia, which caused bleeding from the nose, fingers, and stomach, and resulted in anemia. As her health declined, she and her husband moved for a final time to Jesmond in Newcastle upon Tyne to be nearer medical facilities. For the last few years of her life, she was bedridden and Tom hardly ever left her bedside, looking after her needs, cooking for her, and taking her on her emergency trips, often in the middle of the night into Newcastle. Their lives were still made up of the seven-day week and twelve or more hours each day, going over the fan mail, attending to charities, and going over the latest dictated book, with Tom meticulously making corrections line by line, for Catherine’s eyesight had long faded in her 80s.
This most remarkable woman passed away on June 11th, 1998 at the age of 91. Tom, six years her junior, had earlier suffered a heart attack but survived long enough to be with her at her end. He passed away on 28th June, just 17 days after his beloved Catherine.
Catherine Cookson’s Books
NOVELS
Colour Blind
Maggie Rowan
Rooney
The Menagerie
Fanny McBride
Fenwick Houses
The Garment
The Blind Miller
The Wingless Bird
Hannah Massey
The Long Corridor
The Unbaited Trap
Slinky Jane
Katie Mulholland
The Round Tower
The Nice Bloke
The Glass Virgin
The Invitation
The Dwelling Place
Feathers in the Fire
Pure as the Lily
The Invisible Cord
The Gambling Man
The Tide of Life
The Girl
The Cinder Path
The Man Who Cried
The Whip
The Black Velvet Gown
A Dinner of Herbs
The Moth
The Parson’s Daughter
The Harrogate Secret
The Cultured Handmaiden
The Black Candle
The Gillyvors
My Beloved Son
The Rag Nymph
The House of Women
The Maltese Angel
The Golden Straw
The Year of the Virgins
The Tinker’s Girl
Justice is a Woman
A Ruthless Need
The Bonny Dawn
The Branded Man
The Lady on my Left
The Obsession
The Upstart
The Blind Years
Riley
The Solace of Sin
The Desert Crop
The Thursday Friend
A House Divided
Rosie of the River
The Silent Lady
FEATURING KATE HANNIGAN
Kate Hannigan (her first published novel)
Kate Hannigan’s Girl (her hundredth published novel)
THE MARY ANN NOVELS
A Grand Man
The Lord and Mary Ann
The Dev
il and Mary Ann
Love and Mary Ann
Life and Mary Ann
Marriage and Mary Ann
Mary Ann’s Angels
Mary Ann and Bill
FEATURING BILL BAILEY
Bill Bailey
Bill Bailey’s Lot
Bill Bailey’s Daughter
The Bondage of Love
THE TILLY TROTTER TRILOGY
Tilly Trotter
Tilly Trotter Wed
Tilly Trotter Widowed
THE MALLEN TRILOGY
The Mallen Streak
The Mallen Girl
The Mallen Litter
FEATURING HAMILTON
Hamilton
Goodbye Hamilton
Harold
AS CATHERINE MARCHANT
Heritage of Folly
The Fen Tiger
House of Men
The Iron Façade
Miss Martha Mary Crawford
The Slow Awakening
CHILDREN’S
Matty Doolin
Joe and the Gladiator
The Nipper
Rory’s Fortune
Our John Willie
Mrs. Flannagan’s Trumpet
Go Tell It To Mrs Golightly
Lanky Jones
Bill and The Mary Ann Shaughnessy
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Our Kate
Let Me Make Myself Plain
Plainer Still
Hamilton
Maisie doesn’t understand why her mother can’t love her, but she knows that her life is hard and deeply unhappy. When her stepfather George, the only person she trusts, leaves, Maisie has no protector until she begins to escape.
She could never be quite sure when she first met up with Hamilton; most likely it was when she started talking to herself. But she didn’t call him that then; that came much later when she was fourteen and Doctor Kane had to pay her a professional visit. “Let’s use our horse sense,” he said, and at that precise moment what did Maisie see but a great horse galloping right over him and all the time looking at her, it’s eyes full of knowledge and its lips drawn back as if in laughter. When Maisie saw the name Hamilton on the horse box, she adopted it for her new and secret companion. But if she could not talk to anyone about Hamilton, she could at least write about him.
And write she did, with results that would eventually broaden her horizons far beyond the confines of her native Tyneside. But Hamilton continued to live on in her mind and became the one to save her.
Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1983
The right of Catherine Cookson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is sold subject to the condition it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form.
ISBN 978-1-78036-104-8
Sketch by Harriet Anstruther
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described, all situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
Published by Peach Publishing
PART ONE
THE CHRYSALIS
One
I’ve done it! I have really done it. After thirteen years I’ve done it. How long have I wanted to do it? Oh, for the whole of the thirteen years. Yes, all of that time. Now I don’t care what happens to me. I don’t. I don’t.
I’m sitting here in this dreadful place wondering why it should have happened at all, and to me. I’m what you call inoffensive. Well, that’s how most people see me. Some even think I’m odd; and, of course, that’s without them knowing anything about Hamilton.
When did I first meet up with Hamilton? Oh, it must have been when I started talking to myself when I was seven years old. I didn’t call him that then, though.
I remember very little before I was seven. Some people can go back to when they were two or three and recall instances as plainly as if they had happened yesterday. But there are only two I can recall before that time. One was my first day at school when the children stood me against the wall and measured my arms, making me hold them out straight in front of me when they would try to pull my left hand to meet my right, and when they couldn’t, Katie Moore, who lived three doors down, explained to them that God had made my arms like that to get even with my mother who thought herself better than anybody in the terrace and she had no right after what had happened.
Long after I was seven I tried to get Katie to tell me what had happened to make my mother like she was, but she didn’t seem to know.
The other event I can recall before that early age is of my mother knocking a book out of my hand, then sitting staring at me, and me sitting staring at her too frightened to speak, until she yelled, ‘Why? Why?’ at the same time swiping with her hand a cup and saucer and jug off the kitchen table. And then she cried.
But from when I was seven I could give you almost a day to day report of things that happened. My first vivid memory is of George. Oh, I liked George. Oh, I did, because George was common. Funny, how soon I discovered that all the nice things were common, such as eating ice cream out in the street; or, when it was raining, running along a gutter and kicking the water up in sprays; or jumping in the garden and screaming as you jumped because of a wonderful feeling inside you which regrettably lasted only a second; or wiping your bacon dip up with your bread. But the most common thing was to say what you were thinking, especially if they were funny things. This wasn’t only common, it was low; and George was both common and low in this respect, and his mother was even worse, and nicer.
Why did my mother marry George who was four years younger than her? I’ve never been able to fathom that one out. I understood that my own father popped off when I was two. I didn’t know then whether it was popped off dead, or just popped off, because the only time I mentioned him I got my ears boxed.
Thinking he might have popped off dead I started to pray for him. That was when I became a sort of Catholic. You see George was a Catholic, a wooden one as he said. I couldn’t understand that at first. But it wasn’t the reason he couldn’t marry my mother in the Catholic church but had to go to the Town Hall to have it done. He took me to church one Sunday. It was the very first time I had been in a church and my mother let me go for they had only been married a fortnight and she was still in a good temper. In spite of not understanding a word that was said, I liked that church very much. What with all the bobbing up and down, it was as good as the pictures.
George didn’t go to church every Sunday, just now and again. Some Sundays he took me to see his mother, and she said to call her gran. But the first time I referred to her as gran at home my mother took me into the bedroom and, grabbing me by the shoulders, shook me as she said, ‘You’re not to call that woman gran. She’s an awful woman, common.’
One thing I learned early, my mother was everything but common: she didn’t talk common, she didn’t act common, she didn’t look common. She was about five foot four in height and had a lovely figure and was pretty. She had large grey eyes, dark hair with a deep wave in it, and a small mouth, and she always spoke nice, correctly. She was an only child and she had been born in this house, 7 Wellenmore Terrace, Fellburn. Her father had been a draughtsman, drawing ships’ insides, so I understood from the few times she spoke about him. Her mother had been a music teacher. She didn’t talk very much about her either. They had both died before I was born.
So why, her not being common at all, had she to marry a man like George, because you couldn’t get anybody more common than George: he smoked and he drank, and he used language; he laughed a lot and very loudly; and then he wasn’t a nice eater, he guzzled.
But George was nice. He altered my life…for a time. I always used to associate him with colours. When he came into the house it turned bright yellow; when he left, it dropped back into its e
xtremely clean and extremely tidy, extremely well-furnished grey.
George travelled, that was, when he did the job he liked best which was driving a lorry. But he often lost his job because he didn’t get the lorry to where it was going. When he got drunk on the way he just slept in it, and on one occasion when he was making for a port with some big crates, it was twenty-four hours after the boat had sailed when they found the lorry in a lay-by. He was still asleep in it.
Sometimes he worked digging ditches; other times he’d help knock buildings down. He didn’t seem to mind any job that he did except the one that took him down manholes, because then he smelt.
They began fighting towards the end of the first year because my mother knew by then she had let herself down in marrying George. But I was glad she had because I’d never had a companion like him. Whenever he met me outside he would always take hold of my short arm. And sometimes on a Sunday—this would be a Sunday when he hadn’t a bad head first thing in the morning—he would take me to church with him and we would come home along a tree-lined path through the park which led to the field bordering our terrace. There he would say, ‘All right?’ and I would look up at him and laugh and say, ‘Right ahead!’ And then we would both hitch along, like Katie and I did. He was very big and bulky, and watching his feet leave the ground and flop down again seemed to me to be very funny, and always before the end of the path I would lean against him and laugh until my body shook. And then there was that memorable Sunday when he suddenly lifted me up until my face was level with his and he said, ‘Maisie Rochester, it’s a bloody shame. All round, it’s a bloody shame.’
I couldn’t make out why the laughter should suddenly cease and he was quiet on the way home. I only knew that in that moment I loved George Michael Carter and I loved his mother, and to me they were the most wonderful people in the world…my world.
I was thirteen years old when George left us, and there was no question about how he popped off because he came and told me that he was going. My mother had gone to a meeting of the Literary Circle. Apparently she had been a member for years before she married George, and then she stopped going, until six months ago when she started again.