MARY ANN AND BILL
Catherine Cookson
Contents
The Catherine Cookson Story
Mary Ann and Bill
Chapter One: Words
Chapter Two: The Day Out
Chapter Three: Like Mother Like Daughter
Chapter Four: Sunday Afternoon
Chapter Five: Getting Acquainted
Chapter Six: What’s Good for the Goose
Chapter Seven: Material and Imagination
Chapter Eight: Ben
Chapter Nine: Rose Mary’s Sickness
Chapter Ten: Fame and Fortune
Chapter Eleven: The Will
Chapter Twelve: Samson Again
Chapter Thirteen: Mr Blenkinsop’s Strategy
Chapter Fourteen: The Ethics of Stealing
Chapter Fifteen: Patterns of Life
Chapter Sixteen: Fanny
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 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
Mary Ann and Bill
Mary Ann never wanted to take on Bill in the first place. She had all too shrewd an idea of what it might involve, but both her husband, Corny, and the twins David and Mary Rose, were so keen to have the little bull-terrier puppy that in the end she was pretty well forced to give way to them.
In the early stages of their relationship, Mary Ann’s feelings towards this new addition to the household were of pure hatred. And who could blame her? To have your entire sitting room chewed up is hardly endearing for a start. But Bill was not alone in disturbing his mistress’s piece of mind. A leggy blond had appeared on Corny’s horizon, and Mary Ann found to her dismay that even her beloved husband was like other men in being susceptible to temptation.
With money disappearing from the till at Corny’s garage, and the twins in hot water at school, there is both drama and comedy in good measure before the story of the endearing and always indomitable daughter of Tyneside works itself out.
‘The character drawing is excellent. Mary Ann herself is a real joy and one senses the truth of the background.”—The Times Literary Supplement
Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1967
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 978-1-78036-082-9
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
Dedication
To Foster and Rose Mary.
A generation does not divide us.
Chapter One: Words
Mary Ann sat in the living room above the garage and looked at her children, and she wondered, and not for the first time, why it was possible that you could be driven almost demented by those you loved most; if it wasn’t Corny, it was one of the twins driving her to the point where she wanted to break things.
When the great stroke of luck had befallen them a few months earlier she had thought that all was set fair now for peace, plenty and pleasure. She couldn’t have been more mistaken.
Peace, with that noise going on across the road! What had once been fields, overlaid by a wide canopy of sky that she could look into from the bedroom window, was now a contorted mass of scaffolding and buildings in the process of erection. Even to the side of the house, on the spare bit of land, there was hammering and battering and clanking going on all hours of the day; and whereas, at one time, they were lucky to get half-a-dozen customers for petrol during the day, now the custom was so thick they never seemed to close.
They had supported this white elephant of a garage, off the beaten track from the main road, for seven years in the hope that the road would be extended to take them in. It had never materialised. Instead, Mr Blenkinsop, the American, had. And Mr Blenkinsop had transformed Green Lane and Boyle’s garage into a place where the last thing one expected now was peace.
As for plenty, Corny had always said that when his ship came in he’d build her a fine house on this very spot, or anywhere else she liked; they’d get a spanking new car; they’d take a holiday, not a fortnight, but a month, and abroad, and it would be first-class for them from beginning to end; no mediocre boarding houses for Mrs Mary Ann Boyle. These were the things he had promised her just before he went to sleep at nights, and she forgot about them the next day, knowing they were but dreams. Yet when the miracle happened and he could have built them a house, bought a smashing car, especially as he was in the business, and taken them for a holiday, what had happened? He couldn’t leave the garage; he had to be here at Mr Blenkinsop’s beck and call. As for the house, that would have to wait; let Mr Blenkinsop get the factory up first and let him get the garage premises extended on the spare land, and then he would think about a house. As for the holiday, well, she could take a week off if she liked, but he couldn’t come along…So much for plenty.
And pleasure? Oh, pleasure! She had never had less pleasure in her life than during these last few months. Corny was so tired when he came upstairs he couldn’t even look at the television. As for going out, say to Newcastle, to the pictures, even that was a thing of the past since the miracle had happened.
All she seemed to do now was to cook more because there was always somebody popping in for lunch: Mr Blenkinsop and his cousin Dan from Doncaster, who was now in charge of the works, and other big pots who were interested in the new factory. She had liked doing it at first because she liked being told she was a smashing cook, but she found you could weary of praise when a mountain of dishes kept you going well into the afternoon; and a box of chocolates and a bunch of flowers failed to soothe you since they couldn’t wipe up.
And besides the peace, plenty and pleasure, there were the twins. She had always considered she could manage the twins. Even during all those long years when David hadn’t been able to speak and his dumbness made him obstinate she had been able to cope with him, but since he had begun to talk six months ago she had found him almost unmanageable. He would lapse into long aggravating silences, during which no-one could get a word out of him; but when he did talk the substance of his conversation was such as to make you wonder how on earth he had come by his knowledge, and sometimes create in you a desire to brain him for his precociousness, and at other times to laugh until you cried at his patter.
But this evening she felt no way inclined to laugh at her small son. Anyway, he was in one of his obstinate moods and she could also say that so was she herself. She was fed up to the teeth with this day and all its happenings; from early morning she had been on the go. She had made arrangements to go and get her hair done when Corny had phoned up to say that Mr Dan Blenkinsop had just come in from Doncaster; how about a cuppa? And she had made a cuppa, and over it Mr Blenkinsop had been so talkative and charming that the time had gone by and now it was too late for her to keep her appointment in Felling, and her hair looked like nothing
on earth, and Corny had accepted the invitation of Mr Blenkinsop for them all to go to Doncaster tomorrow…Well, she wasn’t going. She would just tell Corny and he could phone and call it off; she wasn’t going looking a mess like this. In any case it was he who accepted the invitation and not her. He had jumped at it like a schoolboy, saying, ‘Oh, that’ll be grand, a day out. And the twins will be over the moon to see the boys.’
She had memories of the last time the twins and Mr Daniel Blenkinsop’s four sons had met. Neither the house nor the garage had returned to order for a week afterwards.
But in the meantime she would use the promised trip—about which their father had already informed them—as a means of making the children come clean regarding why David had been kept in at school.
‘You tell me what he’s been up to, Rose Mary, or there’ll be no trip to Doncaster tomorrow for anybody.’
Rose Mary lowered her eyes from her mother’s face and slid them towards her brother, but David had his gaze fixed intently on the mantelpiece and, because it meant he had to look over the top of his mother’s head, his chin was up and out, and Rose Mary knew from experience it was a bad sign. Their David never talked when he pushed his chin out, no matter what he was looking at. There was a vague yearning in the back of her mind for the time past when their David couldn’t talk at all. Everything had been lovely then. She had looked after him and talked for him, and he yelled if he couldn’t be with her, but now the tables were turned so completely that he yelled if she insisted on being with him. The only thing their David wanted to do now was to muck about with cars, and get all greased up. He didn’t play any more. She didn’t see why she kept sticking up for him, she didn’t. But when she saw her mother’s hand jerk forward suddenly and grip David by the shoulders and heard her voice angry sounding as she cried, ‘Don’t put on that defiant air with me! I warn you, you’ll go straight to bed. That’s after you get a jolly good smacked backside,’ she shouted as loudly, ‘Aw, Mam, don’t. Don’t bray him. He’ll tell you.’
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