JUSTICE IS A WOMAN
Catherine Cookson
Contents
The Catherine Cookson Story
Justice is a Woman
PART ONE One
Two
Three
Four
PART TWO One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
PART THREE One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
PART FOUR One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
PART FIVE One
Two
Three
Four
Five
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 pu
blished novel)
Kate Hannigan’s Girl (her hundredth published novel)
THE MARY ANN NOVELS
A Grand Man
The Lord and Mary Ann
The Devil 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
Justice is a Woman
The day Joe Remington brought his new bride to Fell Rise, he had already sensed she might not settle easily into his home just outside the Tyneside town of Fellburn. She made plain her disapproval of Joe’s familiarity with the servants, and questioned the donation of food to striking miners’ families. These persistent and frequent objections soon rubbed Joe and the local people up the wrong way, a problem he could easily have done without, for this was 1926, the year of the General Strike, the effects of which would nowhere be felt more acutely than in this heartland of the North-East.
Then when Elaine became pregnant, she saw it as a disaster and only the willingness of her unmarried sister Betty to come and see her through her confinement made it bearable. But in the long run, would Betty’s presence only serve to widen the rift between husband and wife, or would she help to bring about a reconciliation?
Catherine Cookson’s powerful novel spans the years of change and hardship leading into the Second World War and explores the many facets of a marriage based on initial passion rather than love.
Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1994
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 978-1-78036-015-7
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
One
‘As I see it, sir, you’re a traitor to your class.’
‘What is my class?’
The elderly gentleman, sitting very straight in the corner of the first-class carriage, pursed his lips and knobbled his chin before replying, ‘By your manner, dress and voice, I would have said you were upper middle class, but as our conversation has proceeded so has your status decreased in my eyes.’
‘And now you’re forced to eject me from the middle class altogether, is that it?’
‘You have said it, sir.’
The younger man sitting on the opposite side of the carriage bit hard on his lip, bowed his head for a moment, then glanced at his companion, who was sitting almost as stiffly as the gentleman opposite, and with much the same expression on her face. When she muttered under her breath, ‘Joe,’ he put his hand on her knee and shook it; then turning to his travelling companion again, he said, ‘What your generation doesn’t seem to understand, sir, is that times are changing: the war stuck spurs into the working man; he no longer considers himself so much merchandise, a means of barter, he’s emerging; for the first time in generations he’s seeing himself as an individual, and if he’s not led properly he’ll take over the reins and lead himself.’
‘No working man can ever be a leader, a real leader; he’s a bungler; the most he can rise to is soap-box oratory; he can excite a mob but he cannot quell a riot. The working man will always have to be led, whether in army or civilian life. It is in the order of things; it is as God and nature intended.’
As he exclaimed, ‘Oh God Almighty!’ Joe Remington sprang to his feet, an action which brought the elderly gentleman into an even straighter sitting position and caused Joe’s wife, Elaine, to close her eyes tightly for a moment before she felt her arm grasped and herself being yanked up from the seat.
‘Thank God! we’re running in. Let’s get out of here.’
‘Joe! please.’
Joe released his hold on his wife’s arm and allowed her to pass before him out of the first-class compartment into the corridor; then, almost as an afterthought, he stepped back and swung some hand luggage down from the rack before returning his travelling companion’s glare of dislike and following his wife out and along the corridor to the carriage door.
When the train drew to a stop in Newcastle Central Station Elaine Remington disdained to accept her husband’s assistance as she stepped on to the platform, so he turned from her and walked towards the guard’s van.
He held the tickets, and so his wife had to wait for him at the barrier; and when eventually they were through and were standing under the covered way outside the station, their three large suitcases at their feet, Joe broke the silence, saying, ‘I’m amazed that you are taking his side.’
‘There are times and places for arguments, and a railway carriage, to my mind, is not one of them, and on such a subject as class.’
‘It wasn’t about class until he brought it up.’
‘What would be your attitude if you were to meet him again?’
‘There’s little hope of that.’
‘He said he was on his way to stay with Lord Menton.’
‘Yes, yes, I know he did.’
‘But…but you said Lord Menton’s place was quite near; in fact, he’s your neighbour.’
‘Yes, I said that, but I didn’t mean to imply that we are on visiting terms. Menton and my father!’ He gave a mirthless laugh.
‘I can understand about your father, but do you mean that you yourself are not on visiting terms with the Mentons?’
‘That’s just what I do mean, Elly. And look, my dear’—he turned to her fully now, his voice and manner softening—‘don’t let’s have a row. If we’re going to have our first bust-up let it be over something important and not over an old diehard like him. Come on.’ He put his arm through hers. ‘Come on, smile. If you don’t I’ll kiss you in public long and hard and that’ll cause a sensation, ’cos it isn’t done, you know, kissing in public in the North.’
When she smiled faintly at him, he said, ‘Ah, that’s better, the sun’s breaking through.’ Then looking about him, he exclaimed, ‘Where’s David got to? I wired him; he should be here.’
‘Do you always call the servants by their Christian names?’
‘Christian names? David?’ Joe had stepped from the kerb to the road and was gazing into the distance as he replied, ‘We grew up together. Somehow, I don’t look upon David as a servant.’
‘Nor his wife?’
He turned his head in her direction and said quietly, ‘No, nor Hazel.’
‘But you call the butler Duffy.’
‘That’s only because he’s always been known as Duffy from a boy, so I understand…And you know something, Elly?’—he stepped back on to the kerb and to her side again—‘we don’t look upon Duffy as a butler; we are not in the class that has butlers. You knew that.’
‘But he does buttle; he waits on table, and he acts as footman, et cetera.’
‘Elly’—Joe’s voice was very soft now—‘we’ll have to start sending you to night school. You’re going to live on the outskirts of Fellburn, remember? You’ve seen the place, you’ve stayed at the house, you’ve met the people. True, it was a flying visit, but do you recall that I pointed out to you then that Fellburn—Newcastle and the whole Tyne area is so different from London in its outlook, even more so than Peking is to Paris; in fact, the Chinese and the French, I think, could have more in common than the Londoners—your Londoners, and Geordies…Remember the conversation we had after you had met Father?’
‘Yes, yes, I remember it, Joe, very well.’ Her voice was stiff.
‘And what did you say then?’
She looked about her, at the mass of black-capped, dark-clothed workmen who seemed to have appeared from nowhere and were now pressing past them on their way into the station, and she muttered under her breath, ‘This is neither the time nor the place.’
He was once again standing close to her, his arm linked within hers, and he bent down to her now and said, ‘That’s a favourite phrase of yours, isn’t it? Well, not to be deflected by it I’ll tell you what you said; it’ll pass the time till David gets here. You said, “Darling, darling Joe, I don’t care what your father is, or will be, I don’t mind if I have to live with him for the rest of my life as long as you have to live with him too.” And if I remember rightly, Elly, you ended up by telling me that you adored me and that you would die if you didn’t marry me.’
‘Joe?’
‘What is it, darling?’
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