But her sense of obligation was not her only reason for wanting to nurse her mother. As Kate’s life ebbed away, so did the secrets of her past. If Catherine stayed close, the dying woman might let slip something about her father. Catherine still yearned to find out anything about this shadowy figure - fill in the pieces of herself that had been missing all her life. She wanted to hear the truth from Kate, not just second-hand gossip from Aunt Mary or Great-Aunt Lizzie.
One late September day, when the garden was gleaming bronze in the sunlight, Catherine found her mother in bed, crying over her book Colour Blind.
‘How did you know?’ Kate whispered. ‘About our Jack.’
‘Know what?’ Catherine looked at her puzzled.
‘He was just like this man in the book - the way he tret me. But you were too young to know.’
Catherine stared in shock. The character in her novel forced himself on his sister. Surely her Uncle Jack had not been like that? She remembered him as shy and timid with girls. But Kate’s face told a different story. The old memory resurfaced: waking in bed beside Kate, a figure looming over them with a waft of whisky, a struggle, whispered wrangling, Kate breaking free and fleeing to the safety of the privy. Uncle Jack. She must have known it all along, for there it was in her book.
‘Why did you not say anything to Grandma or Grandda?’
Kate’s laugh was bitter. ‘Who would’ve believed me? He was Rose’s blue-eyed boy. I was the one would’ve been blamed - Kate the slut - for leadin’ him astray.’
Catherine sat on the bed, her heart heavy. ‘Tell me about those days,’ she asked gently, ‘and the time before I was born.’
Kate brusquely brushed away tears. ‘You don’t want to hear about all that.’
‘I do,’ Catherine insisted. ‘Whatever you say won’t go beyond these four walls, I promise. Not even to Tom. But I need to know, Kate. I’d rather know my father was a bad’un than know nothing.’
For long minutes they sat in silence and Catherine feared her mother would remain stubbornly mute. Then suddenly she began to speak, her voice reflective.
‘I first met him at Ravensworth - saw him with Lady Emma - then out riding. He stopped to pick up the raspberries I’d dropped - made me eat one.’ Her faded eyes shone, her tone almost girlish. ‘So handsome in his riding clothes - hair all chestnut waves like a lion’s mane and eyes that looked right inside me. Your eyes.’ Kate looked fondly.
Catherine sat holding her breath while her mother spoke of the growing romance with Alexander, a coal agent’s adopted son who came often to the estate and courted her.
‘Am I like him in any other way?’ she dared ask. ‘Great-Aunt Lizzie said he was an artist.’
Kate looked startled, then nodded. ‘He was, though he liked to draw people, not buildings. That’s what interested him - ordinary lads and lasses. Went all over the estate drawing them at work.’ She paused, her hands moving in agitation over the covers. ‘And some’at else. He used to have nosebleeds like yours - bad ones. But I could never tell Dr Dyer for the shame of it. Didn’t like to think he had owt to do with you -wouldn’t think about him - not after he’d turned his back on us and left me to face the music on me own.’
‘So you never saw him again? Perhaps if he’d seen you face to face - seen you carrying me - he might have done something for us.’ Catherine was desperate to believe the best of her absent father.
Kate gave her a look of such pity that her stomach turned over.
‘He did come back to see me,’ she said sadly. ‘Thought he’d come to fetch us from Leam Lane, but he threw money at me and your grandma and waltzed off. Never saw him again. Was like living in a tomb in that terrible house - those weeks before you were born.’ Her face was harrowed. ‘Always hoped he’d change his mind, even afterwards. That’s why I put his name on your birth certificate and lied about being Mrs Davies. Could’ve gone to gaol, but it was all I could give you - a decent name.’
Catherine swallowed. ‘So when you told me he was dead - when I was a bairn - you didn’t know about him dying in Sweden?’
‘No, that was to stop your questions. You always had a head too full of fancy notions and a gob full of questions. But I didn’t know till years later when Davie said he’d seen his gravestone.’ Her voice was flat. ‘It was only then I gave up on Alexander and married Davie.’
‘But he might just have said that to get you to marry him,’ Catherine said indignantly. ‘Have you ever thought of that?’
Kate closed her eyes tight shut as if the pain was too great. ‘Aye,’ she whispered. ‘That’s what we were arguing about the night Davie went missin’. It was a terrible row. We’d both had one too many. I said I didn’t believe Alexander was really dead - that he’d only said it to make me forget him. I said some terrible things - that I never should’ve married him - that Alexander was the only man I’d ever loved.’
Kate was almost whispering now and Catherine had to lean closer.
‘And - and then he told me. Not only had Alexander died all those years ago, but the gravestone was put there by his loving wife, Polly.’ A sob caught in her throat. ‘I knew then it was true. Your father had been engaged to some posh woman - one of the gentry - when he was still seeing me. I was daft enough to hope he might choose me over her -I was that in love with him and thought he was too. Well, Polly was the lass’s name. I could have waited all me life, but Alexander would never have come back even if he’d lived.’ Kate shuddered. ‘I told Davie to get out and never come back - even though I knew he was tellin’ the truth. But it hurt too much, hinny. Then poor Davie—’
Catherine reached across quickly and squeezed her mother’s hand. She was filled with a sense of loss, not just for herself but for the young Kate who had been treated so callously.
That afternoon, as the sun dipped behind the trees, Kate talked of the birth and how she had been banished by her parents to work in Chester-le-Street while they brought Catherine up as their own.
‘Was to save face, I had to give you up,’ Kate said bitterly. ‘My punishment was to work to keep you and not be allowed to be a mam. Was just a servant, nowt else, after you were born. Old John said I was lucky he hadn’t kicked me on to the street like the whore I was.’ Tears brimmed in her sunken eyes. ‘Wouldn’t even let me pick you up for a cuddle when I came home.’
Tears filled Catherine’s throat. She thought of how she still yearned to hold her baby David after all this time. How cruel was Kate’s punishment - a mother’s love stifled at birth.
On impulse, Catherine reached across the bed and gathered Kate into her arms. Wordlessly they held on to each other, while her mother cried into her hair.
Eventually, Kate sobbed, ‘I’ve been a terrible mother - a wicked woman to you, Kitty!’
Catherine thought of all the pain and hurt of their fraught relationship. At times she had hated her mother more than anything else in the world, but she knew there was nothing to be gained from speaking her anger. Kate must be allowed to die in peace. Catherine summoned up words of forgiveness.
‘No you haven’t,’ she gulped. ‘The only person you’ve really hurt all these years is you. It’s not your fault what happened, so stop blaming yourself.’
Kate lay back quietly weeping. ‘Don’t leave me, Kitty.’
Catherine stayed with her mother till she fell asleep. That night she went to bed drained and slept straight away. For the next couple of days, Kate slipped in and out of consciousness, always seeming to settle when Catherine came near. On the third morning, Catherine noticed a difference in Kate’s breathing. It was shallow and fast, like marbles in her throat.
Her mother lay with her eyes closed, but when Catherine tried to leave the room, her hand moved in agitation and she tried to say something. Bending close, Catherine reassured her, ‘I’m here, don’t fret.’
For a moment Kat
e’s eyes flickered open and gave a flash of recognition. Her hand groped out to hers. Catherine took it and held it. Kate’s fingers grasped hers weakly.
‘Forgive me, lass,’ Kate rasped, her breathing ragged.
Catherine leant over and tenderly kissed her forehead.
‘God bless you, Kitty,’ she murmured and closed her eyes again.
Catherine sat holding her mother’s hand as the clock ticked on towards midday. It was Bill pushing open the door, padding into the room and whimpering at the bed that alerted her to the sudden stillness. Kate was gone.
For a moment Catherine was filled with a sudden sense of peace, of relief. Kate lay there looking so calm and untroubled, a much younger woman. Catherine felt a pang of loss. She wished she could have known that Kate - the one with whom Alexander had fallen in love. Rising, Catherine leant over her mother and kissed her cooling cheek.
‘It’s over,’ she whispered. ‘All your struggling’s over, Mam.’
Tears flooded her eyes as she said the word - the name she had never been able to utter when Kate was alive, Mam. She went to the French windows and threw them open, letting the autumn breeze sweep into the room. With Bill at her heels, Catherine escaped into the garden to weep.
Chapter 52
The time following Kate’s death was like a strange limbo for Catherine. She alternately rejoiced in her freedom from her overbearing mother and mourned her passing. Right at the very end, she had come closer to her mother than at any time in her life, only to lose her just as she was getting to understand her.
Kate’s going seemed to sever her ties with Tyneside, cutting Catherine off from the source of her inspiration. She began to realise just how important Kate had been to her writing; she had been the life-blood to her stories, their stormy relationship the spur to her creativity.
It was Tom who suggested she write about Kate directly.
‘Get her out of your system, Kitty,’ he encouraged. ‘Write about her if you can’t write about anything else.’
Catherine tried. Over the next few years she attempted to make sense of her childhood and her seesawing emotions over Kate. At times it was too brutal, too unforgiving, and Catherine abandoned the project. It was too personal, stirring up raw feelings she had tried for years to bury. But having given up on the idea, she found a renewed creativity in her fiction.
By the end of the decade, she was making a name for herself as a popular writer, a number of her novels being adapted into films. Some people found it strange that she could write so vividly about the North Country when she had lived away for more than half her life.
She ventured back on occasional research trips, and even rarer visits to her few remaining relatives. Tom encouraged these and liked to go with her. But after a day or two she was always homesick for their house in Hastings and could not wait to get back.
‘Maybe we’ll end up living in the north,’ Tom once suggested, ‘when I retire.’
Catherine had laughed at such an idea. ‘Like elephants going home to die, you mean?’ she snorted. ‘You can go, Tom, I’m staying here.’
Then, one day, quite out of the blue, a visitor appeared on their doorstep.
Catherine stared at the middle-aged woman in the neat coat and hat, clutching a handbag.
‘Hello, Kitty,’ she said nervously. ‘Or should I say, Mrs Catherine Cookson?’
Something about her jokey singsong voice made Catherine’s heart twist.
‘Lily Hearn?’ she gasped. ‘It’s never you!’
The woman grinned and nodded. ‘I’m on a coach tour. Knew you lived round here. Wasn’t ganin’ to come, but one of the lasses said to get mesel’ along and give you a fright.’
Catherine laughed and rushed forward, hugging her long-lost friend in delight.
‘Eeh, Lily, I’m so glad you did. Come in, come in and meet Tom. We’re having tea in the garden.’
‘Listen to you,’ Lily teased, ‘tea in the garden. You always did have fancy ideas, Kitty. And, by heck, you’ve made them come true. Just look at this place.’
She gazed around in awe as Catherine showed her through the house to the sheltered garden. Proudly Catherine introduced Tom to Lily.
‘Lily was my best friend from Jarrow.’
‘Till we fell out,’ Lily said bluntly.
Catherine blushed to remember their painful parting. ‘I was daft to let that happen. Always too quick to take offence in those days. I thought you’d told that terrible old Atter about me having no da.’
Lily was indignant. ‘No, I never! Is that why you never kept in touch? I thought you’d just got too grand for the likes of me. I would never have dropped you in it, Kitty.’
‘I know you wouldn’t,’ Catherine assured her quickly. ‘Atter must’ve worked it out herself- she was that nosy. By the time I stopped being angry, it seemed too late to make amends. I’m sorry.’ She slipped her arm through Lily’s as if they were girls again. ‘It’s so good to see you.’
They spent the afternoon catching up on what each had done. Lily had married a local man, had two children and still lived in Shields. They talked non-stop, regaling Tom with stories from their past. Tom watched in astonishment; he had not seen Catherine look so young or light-hearted in years. The two friends giggled and teased each other mercilessly. Why had she never mentioned this Lily Hearn before?
Catherine urged her to stay for dinner, but Lily refused.
‘My Matt’ll think I’ve run off.’
‘Your husband’s here too?’ Catherine exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t you bring him?’
Lily’s look was sardonic. ‘Said he wouldn’t know what to say to a lady that writes books. I told him you were just a lass from Jarrow, but he wouldn’t have it.’
Catherine flushed. Once she would have given anything to hear people from Jarrow call her a lady, but now it just made her feel empty.
‘I’m pleased for you,’ Lily said generously. ‘You deserve it, Kitty.’
Catherine felt overcome. ‘Come and visit again,’ she pleaded. ‘Next time come for a holiday and bring Matt and the family.’
Lily shrugged. ‘Maybes we’ll see you up our way some time?’ When Catherine did not answer, she added, ‘You better come quick or you won’t recognise the place. They’re pulling down the New Buildings.’
Catherine was unexpectedly upset by the news. After Lily had gone, she could not settle. Tom spoke her thoughts out loud.
‘You should go, Kitty, before it’s too late. You should return to Jarrow.’
***
On a blustery spring day, Catherine stood with Tom and Lily on the half-demolished site in East Jarrow. William Black Street was already a pile of rubble, only the end gable still standing where Catherine had once played shops. She could almost hear the chants of the children at play, the beat of a skipping rope, a mother’s voice calling for a child to come home.
The Jarrow she knew was almost unrecognisable, the shipyards gone and new blocks of flats pushing towards the sky instead of cranes and gantries. Yet the past was still there all around her - the blackened outline of St Paul’s and its ruined monastery, the oily Slake, the pit wheels of South Shields and the restless River Tyne.
Catherine held Tom’s hand.
‘Do you still want to live in a place like this?’ she challenged.
Tom smiled at her fondly. ‘Only if you’re there with me.’
Catherine’s eyes smarted as she gazed at the bulldozed bricks of her former home. She heard Kate’s promise ringing in her ears: You ‘ll see your day with them - get your own back. By God, you will!
Suddenly Catherine realised it no longer mattered. She did not need to prove herself to her old community, did not want to get her own back at them for the slights and cruelties of her childhood. More than anything else, she yearned to be a
ccepted back. The restless, impetuous Kitty McMullen who had run away all those years ago wanted to come home.
Perhaps one day soon, she and Tom would come back for good. Catherine was surprised by the warm feeling the idea gave her.
She turned to Lily and smiled. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’
‘Aye,’ Lily grinned, ‘and some of Mam’s scones - the ones you like. She’s been waiting for you to call for over thirty years.’
Catherine laughed, linking her arms through Lily’s and Tom’s. How she loved them both. Together they set off down the bank from the New Buildings into Shields one last time.
***
If you have enjoyed The Jarrow Trilogy, you might like to try The Durham Trilogy. It begins with The Hungry Hills.
With the Great War still raw in the memory and life in the 1920s mining village of Whitton Grange hard and dangerous, Louie Kirkup dreams of a better future. But with a sick mother and a large family of pitman brothers and father, the daily burdens fall heavily on her young shoulders. She fears becoming a spinster drudge until she sets eyes on 'Red' Sam Ritson – hard, muscled and a natural leader – climb into the boxing ring at the Durham Miners' Gala and determines to marry him. But Sam, wedded to his battle for his fellow miners against the ruthless mine owner Seward-Scott, is no ideal husband. As tensions increase and the General Strike looms, Louie's brother Eb begins an affair with Eleanor, the mine owner's wife. With the miners locked out of work, Louie fears for the fate of her village and her unborn child. As the strain takes its tragic toll, loving and loyal Louie must stay strong for them all.
Written with compassion, humour and a vivid immediacy, The Hungry Hills is an unforgettable saga of two very different families living through the dramas of 1920s Britain.
The Hungry Hills was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and is the first in the Durham Mining Trilogy.
THE JARROW TRILOGY: all 3 enthralling sagas in 1 volume; The Jarrow Lass, A Child of Jarrow & Return to Jarrow Page 129