Goodbye Hamilton

by Catherine Cookson

  GOODBYE HAMILTON

  Catherine Cookson

  Table of Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  Goodbye Hamilton

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  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 Devil a
nd 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

  Goodbye Hamilton

  It seemed the clouds that had darkened so much of Maisie’s early life had finally cleared away. Freed at last from a disastrous marriage, she had also become a bestselling author with her very first book—all about Hamilton, the remarkable horse her imagination conjured for solace through the long years of an unhappy marriage. Hamilton proved to be a real guide, philosopher and friend over many years. Now she was to be married again, and Hamilton marked the occasion by taking a wife himself—a mare called Begonia. Living in London with her new husband, Nardy, her life seemed perfect.

  But Maisie was destined never to have long-lasting happiness as the bitter hatred of someone in her past would lead to further heartache…

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1984

  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 978-1-78036-105-5

  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

  One

  The sun was shining; it was a beautiful day; and I was going to be married for the second time. But with what a difference! The first time had been a more than quiet affair in the registry office, to a man who, I can truthfully say, tortured me for thirteen years, and who finally tried to prove me insane because I talked to an imaginary horse.

  Well, yes, I did talk to an imaginary horse; I talked to him because I was lonely and lost. But I’m not lonely or lost any more. And strangely I haven’t seen Hamilton, as I called him, since that day on the ship when Nardy declared his love for me. At times, I’ve felt he was still there lurking in the background, but he has never put in a real appearance.

  It was eight o’clock on the morning of this very special day and I was sitting in the little study room of my house in Fellburn where I wrote Hamilton. I say, of my house, but it was to be mine no longer, not as a home, for I was to let my stepfather George Carter and his second wife and her children live here; I was to take up residence, as Nardy put it, in London.

  Nardy’s is a beautiful house; he was brought up in it, and he loved it in, strangely, the same way that I loved this house. Yet I had no reason to love this house, for I had suffered in it practically since the day I was born. Being of extreme plainness, and having a deformed arm, I was a trial to my mother, then easy prey for the man and his sister who coveted the house and what it held and who could only get it by his taking me on through marriage.

  Yet it was the continuous hell experienced in my childhood, my youth, and my womanhood which created that one compensation, Hamilton.

  That is not quite true, however, for in George my stepfather, that big ungainly loud-voiced individual, I had a champion; and in his mother also. Oh yes, indeed in Gran, for it was her rough humour that had saved me from utter despair more than once. And then I must not forget my flesh and blood companion, Bill, my bull terrier. How I loved that ugly animal.

  And there was one more very important man who came into my life at that time, the doctor, Doctor Mike Kane, brusque, bearded, and grumpy. At first, I disliked him wholeheartedly, then grew to respect and love him. And it was really he who brought Hamilton into being. After my mother had almost disfigured me with her fists, then told him I’d received my injuries through falling downstairs, he had looked at me and said, ‘Come! Come! Tell me what happened; I’d always thought you had a lot of horse sense.’ And that term, horse sense, he frequently applied to me. And so, you could say, it was he who created Hamilton, that beautiful stallion with the white flowing mane and tail, and the wise eyes, and his love of the ridiculous, which, after all, amounted really to the essence of my own spirit and the hunger of my soul for love and companionship …

  But all my friends would be round me today, not only the old ones but the new ones too. My, my! The number of people whom Nardy had brought from London had filled the main hotel in the town. Oh, and I must not forget all my neighbours in the Terrace. These people who had ignored me for years and thought I was the luckiest girl alive when Howard Stickle, the assistant manager of a tailor’s shop, had deigned to look at me in the first place, then marry me. I knew that their opinion was that I should go down on my knees and thank God for such a break. And the odd thing about it was, they kept to that same opinion for years, right up to the day he was exposed in court as a sadist, a man who would stop at nothing to gain his ends, which were to bring into this house the woman he had been living with on the side for years, and the children he had given her. He had even gone as far as to consider murder: the stair rods hadn’t become loose on their own.

  But why did I stand such treatment? The simple answer is, this house. It was all I had in those days, that and my dog.

  Still, that was all in the past, for on this day I was to be married to my Nardy. Nardy is an abbreviation of Leonard. It sounds silly, but I loved it, and him. Oh, yes, how I loved him.

  At the thought, I put my good arm tightly around my waist and hugged myself; then sat back in the chair and closed my eyes. Was I really going to walk up the aisle of a church on the arm of George, and be married to my loved one by a minister? Yes, yes, I was.

  The Reverend Hobson was a very understanding man. The two previous ministers whom we had approached hadn’t been so. I was a divorced woman, and being the innocent party cut no ice. Strangely, I didn’t feel a woman at all. I felt a girl, and I was a girl, because I was in love for the first time in my life; I was really happy for the first time in my life.

  Of course, Father Mackin had been round. He had looked at me ruefully, raised his eyebrows and said, ‘You are aware that me hands are tied?’ and I had said, ‘Yes, Father, and I’m sorry.’ And he’d answered, ‘You’re not a bit sorry,’ but he had smiled as he said it, and he wished me happiness…I like him. I like Father Mackin …

  ‘Are you comin’ for your breakfast, lass? They’ve nearly all finished. You don’t want to collapse in the aisle, do you? If you do they’ll have to stick you on that horse an’ get you up there, eh?’ Gran’s laughter filled the room and the hallway where she stood with the door in her hand, her wrinkled ageless face abeam. She steppe
d further into the room as I rose from the desk, and her head on one side, she said, ‘We never hear of him these days, do we, your Hamilton?’

  ‘No.’ I went up to her and took her hand and as we walked from the room, I said, ‘No, we don’t, do we? But he’s still there ready to gallop all over you, and don’t you forget it.’ I pulled her arm tighter into my side and we looked at each other, and our exchanged glances held feelings we couldn’t put into words.

  George was crossing the hall, his big face red and shining. He thumbed over his shoulder while saying, ‘That lot in there pig, guts, hog, and artful, that’s what they are. I’ve never seen so much grub shovelled away. You thought I could eat when I was a lad, but two of that four are females.’ And to this Gran answered as she now walked past him, ‘Well, you took them on.’

  I looked at George and shook my head, indicating that he should make no retort. Gran always got a dig in when she could about her only son’s saddling himself with a woman who already had four bairns. Yet she was fond of Mary, at least they didn’t quarrel. At the same time, though, she didn’t look upon Mary’s children as real grandchildren because they had not come through her son.

  ‘She never lets up, does she?’ George was bending down to me now, whispering, ‘One of these days I’ll come back at her, I will. Where’s Mary?’

  ‘She’s upstairs making the beds. And you must never do that, come back at her.’

  ‘No; I know. Anyway, lass’—his face went into a big beam—‘it’s come, your weddin’ day.’ He caught hold of both my hands now and drew me towards him. And I looked up at this man, the only person who had brought any brightness into my childhood days. I had loved him dearly. I still did.

  ‘And gettin’ a grand fellow, the best in the world. The only thing is’—his voice changed and he straightened up—‘what the hell am I goin’ to look like in that grey rig-out eh? Me in tails! Oh my God!’ He again thumbed towards the kitchen. ‘She nearly wet herself yesterday when I tried the gear on. But what’ll happen when I’m goin’ up that aisle with you? I tell you, she’ll let you down: if she doesn’t bellow she’ll snigger.’