Our Kate

by Catherine Cookson

  ‘Aye, she might, but she’s never heard it in this house.’

  No, I had never heard the word bastard spoken in the house, not even when me granda and me Uncle Jack had been roaring drunk. I had heard many different kinds of swear words but none you could label under the heading of bad or vile language.

  I never learned what a bastard was that night nor did it in any way link up in my mind with having no da, but it seemed to me that from that night a sort of unspoken understanding grew up between Kate and the fathar. They still had rows but strangely they would more often than not defend each other against a third person.

  Shortly after we came to the New Buildings my Aunt Mary and Uncle Alec married and went to live in number thirty, the end house at the top of the street, and they had it furnished properly straight away, with a bedroom suite which had a dressing table with swing mirrors. These mirrors were always a delight to me, and if I could get a chance to stand in front of them I was in my element. The front room was set out with a modern suite, and even in the kitchen there was a lovely sideboard which today would still be classed as valuable. Mary had bought it second-hand, and inset in the front of it was a painting of Christ releasing chained men from prison. Mary was very proud of her house and she kept it beautifully clean; but there was no harmony in her home for she had a shocking temper; and she made enemies all round her. She was possessed of a gnawing desire to be better than her neighbours, even the best of them. I don’t think she ever knew a day’s real happiness in her life.

  As the years went on I used to babysit for my Aunt Mary, minding Jack and Alec. I used to like this job because I could open all the drawers and cupboards and see what she’d got.

  Mary could be generous in her way. Often I got a big slab of new bread when she was baking, or a cake. I liked to go up there when she was baking. Her cakes were different from those our Kate made. When Kate baked it was to fill the men’s bellies; when Mary baked it was to set out a nice tea. At least that is how I looked at it.

  Kate was very fond of Mary’s two boys, and there grew up a love between young Alec and her. It started in a monetary way. He had a paper round in the evenings and when she was very hard up for a copper she would say: ‘How’s it the night, Alec?’

  ‘I’ve got sixpence,’ he might say.

  So he’d lend her sixpence on the unwritten understanding that he would get eightpence in return. He very often got more when she was in funds.

  Up to the time she left the North, Alec called on her every week and she looked forward to his visits because she thought of him almost as a son.

  I look back to periods of calmness, like short rests between battles, and these rests held flashes of happiness; quiet evenings in the kitchen when I would sit curled up on the corner of the big steel fender before the roaring fire reading a comic, or my ‘conscience-pricking book’ as I came to look upon the annual that the caretaker’s daughter of Simonside School, by the name of Taylor, had lent me. It was the first real book I’d ever been able to peruse, and I couldn’t bear the thought of giving it back to her. And when Kate took me away from the school it was an easy thing to pretend to myself that I had forgotten all about the book. But for years after I couldn’t pass that girl and look at her because I remembered that book.

  Very often when I sat reading the saliva would be running free in my mouth because finny haddy might be cooking in the oven, or there might be panhacklety sizzling in the big black frying pan on the hob. The wind would be whirling down the chimney, and the gas mantle making little plop-plopping noises. Me granda would be sitting at the centre table as usual, cheating himself at patience, and, of course, to his hand would be a pint mug of beer, into which he would thrust Dennis every now and again, after having heated it in the heart of the fire.

  I cannot see me grandma on these nights, only our Kate and me Uncle Jack. Sometimes Jack would be sitting opposite me reading the paper while Kate stood at the other table near the window ironing or baking.

  And later, during the war and after, I have a picture of Kate sitting at the corner of the table reading the newspaper aloud, me granda nodding occasionally or stopping her to question some point. Every night during the war she read the paper to him; always first going to Philip Gibbs’ despatch from France. This was all brought back clearly when I heard recently that Sir Philip Gibbs had died. How his every word had been awaited in that kitchen in 10 William Black Street, for Jack was in France most of the war. Sometimes the kitchen would ring with laughter when Kate read aloud such books as Handy Andy, or Wee McGregor, or Tales of an Irish County Court.

  And there were nights when I’d be bathed before the fire. A mixed joy this because I couldn’t stand anybody looking at me. So a towel had to be rigged up to protect my modesty, and when later, clothed in my nightie, I would stand between me granda’s knees having sips of beer from his pint pot, I would experience a happiness bred by a fleeting sense of security.

  But the feeling of security would be wiped away when, perhaps the very next day, I would be sent to borrow. I hated to ask anyone for the loan of money. And most of all I would hate going up to my Aunt Mary’s. I would knock on her shiny front door because very often she kept the back door locked, and after one look at her face I would lower my lids and deliver my begging message.

  There were periods when the two sisters did not speak for months on end and I would gain a blessed respite.

  It was during one of these periods that Theresa, Mary’s only daughter, was born and in consequence, I did not see her until she was nearly six months old.

  Often my Aunt Sarah would pay a visit from Birtley. My Aunt Sarah was like neither Kate nor Mary in looks or temperament. She was big-boned and downright in manner. The sisters had little in common, except perhaps that all three could get through a colossal amount of work, and they all had a dominating streak in them.

  Sarah liked her beer and her whisky and she would have what she could afford. But she had one advantage over Kate, she was able to carry it. She could take three or four glasses of whisky and you wouldn’t notice it, yet should Kate take two she was well away.

  Lately, at a small dinner party I sat looking at a woman who was drinking her second large brandy with her coffee. She’d had two sherries before dinner and her glass filled four times with wine during dinner and was now becoming very merry and the night was young. Why wasn’t I nauseated with her? Why? Because she wasn’t our Kate.

  I did not like my Aunt Sarah, at least not in my youth. I was afraid of her. But in spite of this she always held a certain attraction for me, and I never knew what it was until many years later; it was her voice. It could be raucous and loud as she yelled at the children, but it was a different voice, there was something about it.

  Mary did not drink – at least, when anyone was looking, as Kate said, but I really don’t think she had any desire for it. And Kate’s drinking afforded her a superiority she would not impair by self-indulgence; never once did she discuss Kate without showing her disdain. Whether this was aggravated by the knowledge that my Uncle Alec liked Kate, and never tried to hide the fact, I have been made to wonder. I loved my Uncle Alec. To me he was a clever man because he did competitions and later crosswords when they were in their infancy. I liked him until the day he died – strangely enough in Kate’s arms – because, in spite of Mary and her tongue, he always defended our Kate.

  I did not immediately go to the Catholic School, but for some days went to the Meeses School just up the road near Bogey Hill – this was the name given to a group of houses which, with the exception of a few, were very slummy. Most of the children from the New Buildings who weren’t Catholics went to this school. I can only remember my sojourn there as a very depressing experience. But it was while there that I realised I had loved being at Simonside School, and that I would never again dance round the maypole.

  My next memory of being at school was going to the Catholic School in the heart of Jarrow. It was about two miles from East Jarrow. I took
my dinner with me and the days were long. It was about this period of my life when I first remember feeling tired. If I told Kate I was feeling tired she would say, ‘Serves you right. You got a ha’penny each way for the tram and you likely walked and spent it. So serves you right if you’re tired.’

  This was often true. I would get the money for the tram but walk at least one way so that I could buy bullets, as we called sweets. But I did not always buy bullets, often I would save my ha’pennies.

  I did not like the Jarrow School, and I did not learn there as I did at Simonside. All the lessons to my mind seemed to be about God. We started the day with one and we ended the morning session with a lesson on the same subject. And this was repeated in the afternoon. Then there was confession.

  I must have taken instruction although I cannot remember doing so, but I do remember the night I made my first confession. It was on a Friday evening. We were marched straight from school to the church. As I knelt in the pew with the other penitents I went over in my mind what I had to do. I had to tell the priest how wicked I was, and when my turn came I did just that. But instead of going into the penitent side of the box I pushed the curtain aside and groped at the priest’s knees. A strong hand on my collar hauled me away from my personal contact with God, Heaven and the Angels and thrust me into a black box in which I could see nothing but a glimmer of light high above my head. And in it an outline of a profile which had no resemblance to a priest or his Master but gave me every evidence of their opponent.

  From the time of my first confession I had nightmares. The first one I remember clearly. I dropped down through layers of blackness and as I dropped, struggling and groping at this tangible lack of light, I knew I was going straight into Hell, and just as I was arriving at my destination I screamed, scream on top of scream, to wake up tangled in the bedclothes. Kate was standing above me saying, ‘Wake up and stop that noise. No more late suppers for you. That’s the taties.’

  These dreams kept to the same pattern for a long time, for a matter of years I would say, until one night I woke up to find myself at the front door with the draught from the big keyhole blowing onto my face. At the time I was sleeping in the front room in the desk bed – a bed that folded up into a cupboard. It had a wooden base on which was a biscuit-thin flock mattress which I preferred to the feather bed. The draught on my face woke me up and I was terrified at finding myself at the front door. Afterwards I always told myself before going to sleep I mustn’t get up in the night, and I didn’t.

  There was another dream that used to accompany the nightmare and went on for a long time after the nightmare stopped. It would take place almost as soon as I fell asleep. I could feel it happening as my lids drooped. I would walk up a long staircase towards where a man and a woman were waiting for me at the top. The woman I recognised as our Kate, the man I did not know. I could not see his face; the only impression I got was he was of a great height. Kate would take me under the arms and the man would grasp my feet and after swinging me back and forwards a number of times they would hurl me down the stairs. I always woke up before I reached the bottom. I did not yell with this dream, just gasped and grabbed at the air to save myself. I remember me grandma saying, ‘As long as you wake up afore you hit the bottom, hinny, you’ll be all right. If you ever hit the bottom you’ll be dead.’ I never told her it was our Kate and a strange man who threw me down the stairs. I just said I had a dream of falling downstairs.

  I used to walk up to the tram sheds near Bogey Hill to take the tram to school. There was a lane by the side of the tram shed leading to Cleveland Place which consisted of a couple of rows of houses near a railway line, and a signal box. The signalman had a garden near the railway line and in the spring Kate used to send me up to his cottage for two penn’orth of shallots for pickling. This morning something happened to the signals and the early train to Newcastle crashed. When I reached the tram sheds they were bringing the dead and dying down on stretchers. They lined them up on the main road waiting for ambulances, and as I stood, not horrified, or appalled, but just interested, for I couldn’t take it in that the people were dead, a priest waiting by one of the stretchers patted my head and asked my name, and when I told him and also that I was going to Jarrow School he told me to call in at the vestry that night and he would give me something in commemoration of the event. Later that day I did as he bade me and he presented me with a rosary. I still ask myself why he gave a child something to commemorate such a scene: the only answer I can think of is that he intended I should pray for the souls of the dead.

  Why I was moved to Tyne Dock School I don’t know. Perhaps the trek to Jarrow was too much for me. I used to cry because I didn’t want to go to school, and when Kate enforced this there would be a row between her and me Uncle Jack, for nearly always, with the craftiness of the young, I made my protest in front of our Jack, or me granda.

  I would feign sickness and would actually retch and vomit to order; at least make such a realistic attempt at the latter that it was taken for the real thing. The result of these little rehearsals would be Jack’s voice raised to Kate, saying: ‘You’re not going to send that bairn to school in that condition!’ and she, knowing her daughter, would say, ‘She’s going, sick or no sick.’ When she said this in a certain way and I knew she wasn’t to be softened, I would depart to the lavatory and lock myself in, and no coaxing would get me out until I knew it was too late to go to school.

  But my feeling of tiredness was not put on. I must have been anaemic from the day I was born. I was very small for my age, and, although I was quite used to being told that I was a bonny lass, I had weak eyes, which in my early teens were so covered with sties that I lost all my eyelashes. Moreover, the nose that my mother told me had been so beautiful when I was a baby, had been split at one side when I fell on a broken-neck beer bottle.

  One thing of beauty I really did possess and that was my hair. It was a bright reddy chestnut and naturally wavy. Every night me grandma or Kate put it in rags – a painful business. I lay on these rag corkscrews for many years. And it was this hair that caused a tug-of-war between Miss Corfield, the headmistress of St Peter and St Paul’s, and Kate. And I was the rope so to speak.

  I feared Miss Corfield, as every pupil in Tyne Dock School did, and from the first sight of me she must have taken a strong dislike to me for she never left me alone. I can see her standing in front of the ranks in the school yard and pointing at me, saying, ‘Put your hair into plaits.’ I moved out of the ranks and tried to comb the curls out with my fingers and do as she said – a difficult job for I had never plaited my hair before. This was the beginning of the tug-of-war. For weeks and weeks Kate and me grandma together would send me out arrayed in my curls, and Miss Corfield would see that I came back with plaits. Miss Corfield I suppose was right in this one instance; you were less likely to get dickies in your hair if it was tied back. But me grandma saw that I didn’t get dickies in my hair because every dinner time when I returned home, I had to sit on her lap or stand protestingly between her knees while she ‘looked’ my head, and then went over it with a small tooth comb.

  Nevertheless, at last Miss Corfield got her way and I went to school in plaits; but it was too late, I had become a target.

  Church again took up a great part of the school life. On a Thursday night the children went to confession, and on Friday morning you got up, very often on a bleak snowy morning, and without bite or sup you went to Communion. You took your breakfast with you, usually bread and marge, in your school bag.

  Right from the very first Communion I carried with me a feeling of sin, for the simple reason that I didn’t like Communion; I thought nothing about the spiritual side of it at that age except that I was taking God into me – and I didn’t like the way He came. The feeling of that round cake sticking to my palate, turning to a gluey tasteless substance filled me with nothing but nausea and guilt. I hated the taste of that bread and was almost vomiting by the time I swallowed it. I was always laden with a
fearful dread when I went up to the altar rails, because then, at least for the time when the host would be in my mouth, I would be disliking God, and this was a sin, a terrible sin.

  But nevertheless I rarely missed Communion, because you could go to Communion in your school clothes. But Mass on a Sunday was a different thing. Not all the children went to Mass in Sunday clothes, by no means, but Kate wouldn’t let me go if I hadn’t something different to put on. Perhaps I possessed a decent coat at the time and it would be reposing in the pawn, and if funds were short it would be the last thing thought necessary to be taken out at the end of the week; more often I ‘missed Mass on Sundays’ because of the condition of my shoes.

  Following all Sundays came Mondays. Mondays were awful days. They were as bad in a way as Friday night when the men got paid. On a Monday Miss Corfield came round the class to find out, not who had been to Mass and praise them, but the few who hadn’t to flay them. So fearful was I of being cornered by her that I would ask one of the Richardsons what the sermon at the Children’s Mass had been about. She usually made me stand on my seat and she took a delight in taunting me. She called me . . . ‘Grandma’; and it caused the whole school to titter and laugh.

  Undoubtedly I was old-fashioned; in some ways I was much older than my years, but in others I was so young, so gullible, it would appear I had just been born.

  ‘Well, Grandma, and were you at Mass yesterday?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Corfield . . . no, Miss Corfield.’

  ‘Come on make up your mind, Grandma, and tell us who took the Mass.’

  ‘Father Bradley, Miss Corfield.’

  ‘Father Bradley, was it? And what did he talk about?’

  ‘About going to Hell and a man called Las-a-vis.’