Our Kate

by Catherine Cookson

‘Las-a-vis?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Corfield.’ My legs would at this point have a great desire to cross themselves because my bladder was answering my nerves. I would move from one foot to the other and rub my knees together. As she said again ‘Las-a-vis? Does anybody know who this Las-a-vis is?’ she would look round at the swarm of faces, which by now would be rising and falling before my eyes. Then her jocularity would disappear, and she would say, ‘You have made another mistake, Grandma. Father Bradley did not speak of Lazarus. You weren’t at Mass, were you?’

  ‘N . . . No, Miss Corfield.’

  ‘Why do you lie? Were you at Confession on Thursday?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Corfield.’

  ‘And Communion?’

  ‘Y-e-s, Miss Corfield.’

  ‘But not at Mass yesterday?’

  ‘No, Miss Corfield.’

  ‘Hold your hand out.’

  She had a cane four feet long with an end that was split, not intentionally but from usage. Even the first switch of the cane splaying its agony across my hand was enough to knock me backward. Usually I got three, sometimes more.

  Then there was the business of being late. It was quite a walk from East Jarrow to Tyne Dock School. And I was almost as bad at getting up in the morning as me Uncle Jack. Often I was running the last few yards past the church, taking the short cut up the wall where the children’s feet had carved out steps over the years, and into the playground, just too late. The bell had gone, and the last of the crocodiles had disappeared into their classrooms. And there we would be, the latecomers. I had just . . . just missed getting in by a matter of seconds. I would tell them so, and keep saying it to anyone who would listen. Then in the middle of its protest my voice would be silenced by the overpowering feeling of dread descending on me. Sometimes we had to stand fifteen minutes waiting for her coming. And those fifteen minutes were like years full of agony. Down the waiting line the boys would be spitting on their hands and rubbing them on their breeches, which was supposed to toughen the skin. I, like most of the other girls, would be standing by now with my legs crossed doing a kind of minor St Vitus’ Dance. Very often the dance became reality, for when your hands were frozen and that cane swished through the air and split them in two you left the ground and jangled out animal sounds.

  I became so terrified of this woman that I began a snivelling, placating campaign. I would go to Mrs Dixon’s at Simonside, mostly on a Monday morning, and there with a penny I had kept hidden for the purpose I would get a penn’orth of flowers, and a big bunch at that. These were for Miss Corfield. Very often because I would stand talking to Mrs Dixon I would be late and Miss Corfield would take the flowers from my hand, lay them aside, then say, ‘Hold your hand out.’

  I remember hugging a great old book to school. It was about two feet high and four inches thick and bound in warm leather. Kate had seen this book lying on a side table in a butcher’s shop in Leygate. The butcher was going to tear it up for wrapping. It was full of old illustrations of London and she asked him for it and brought it home. A great value was put on this book in the kitchen, the pictures were so old, so I asked if I could take it to school to show Miss Corfield.

  I remember going to her with it, but what happened I don’t know. I next see myself waiting at dinner time outside the gate and walking with her towards her house above the station, trying to open this huge tome as I went along to show her the pictures. All to no avail.

  I came home from school one day and said, ‘Miss Corfield says we’ve all got to take three yards of flannelette to make a nightie.’ Kate made no reply. They were all out of work at the time. A month later: ‘Our Kate, Miss Corfield says if I don’t bring the flannelette I’ll get wrong. I’ve kept on tellin’ you for weeks I’ve got to take the flannelette.’

  It was on a Friday night when I started again and I kept on all day on the Saturday for I was petrified of going to school on the Monday morning without the material.

  Around teatime she suddenly burst out, ‘All right, I’ll get you the blasted flannelette. Come on.’

  She took me into Jarrow. We walked all the way in the dark. I don’t remember to which shop we went, but I do remember that my eyes nearly sprang from their sockets when I saw her pick up part of a bale of flannelette that was standing on display in the shop doorway and walk away with it. I scrambled after her into the back lane where she pushed it under her coat, and then we both ran. I remember coming round by the lonely Quay corner and her having to stop because I was sick. I retched and retched, and when she got indoors she retched too.

  I took a piece of the flannelette to school on the Monday. It was cut out into a nightdress, and when I left three years later it was still there, unfinished.

  There were three Corfield sisters in the school. The one next in age to the headmistress took Standard Six and I was afraid of ever reaching her class because she had the name of being a devil too. But the younger Miss Corfield into whose class I went when I moved from Jarrow School became almost a friend. When I entered her class for the first time she recognised me. Apparently she had taught in Jarrow School while I was there. I remembered her just vaguely but was so pleased and grateful for her recognition. Tuition under the youngest Miss Corfield had moments of happiness, such as on a Friday when we had poetry and plays.

  I used to say that I learned nothing at Tyne Dock School but religion, but this was not true. I learnt poetry. When I hear certain pieces of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Shakespeare now I say to myself ‘I know that part,’ and also remember where I first heard it, in Tyne Dock School. But for the rest, I learned very little and my days were filled with fear. Yet I was fortunate in my particular teachers. Miss Barrington, in Standard Four, I remember with love; she was a very big woman and she liked me. It was Miss Barrington who would give a penny for the first one who could recite a piece of poetry she had written on the board. I nearly always got the penny.

  ‘Had I served my God with half the zeal I served my King, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies’. . . and on and on. The day I first said Wolsey’s ‘Farewell to Cromwell’ Miss Barrington said, ‘Can you remember who wrote that?’

  ‘A fellow called Shakespeare.’

  I can only name two of the girls I used to play with – Maggie Kelly and Mary Knowles. The playground was divided by a railing, cutting off the priests’ yard and presbytery and I seem to remember seeing a parrot in a cage in the yard. It belonged to the priest, and I also have an idea that this parrot could swear. Undoubtedly if the boys had had anything to do with it it would have achieved this.

  When not petrified by Miss Corfield or weighed under the guilt of not liking God, who after all was only a piece of bread, or sick with apprehension about our Kate, I managed to give time to falling for a lad. There were, I remember, Willie Birket and Tot Lawson, but I made headway with neither. Tot had dreamy eyes but they didn’t look at me and in an endeavour to turn them in my direction I gave bullets to his sister Ruby to pass on to him. They had no effect on his eyes. But when I was nineteen he sought me out and he became my lad, for a while.

  In my schooldays I cannot remember any lad ever giving me a bullet, I was the one who proffered taffy or bruised fruit. On one classic occasion I spent my little hoard on a deceiving male. His name was Eddie Youlden. He sat behind me in Standard Four, and I thought he had made a song up about me that he kept singing down my neck. It went:

  K-K-K-Katie,

  Beautiful K-Katie,

  You’re the only g-g-girl

  that I adore.

  When the m-moon shines on the cowshed,

  I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.

  I’d passed him bags of bullets before I realised I was being deceived. Never trust a ginger-headed man.

  There were two priests at Tyne Dock, Father Bradley and Father O’Keefe. I loved Father O’Keefe. He was a gentle, kind man. But I was as much afraid of Father Bradley as I was of Miss Corfield. He was a stern man, and his sermons were dull an
d punctuated by long drawn out ‘and ers’. Me granda spoke scathingly of this priest. ‘What was he anyway? His old fathar was nowt but a workman.’ The scorn of the poor for the poor.

  It was often to be heard when me granda got talking about someone who had got on and moved to higher planes. Perhaps he had heard that someone he knew was living in Westoe – the select end of Shields. Or they had gone to Jesmond, in Newcastle – the pinnacle of ambition where it was said there were ‘dress suits and nee hot dinners’. But one day me granda came in from work and sat down to his meal, without uttering a word to anyone. This was his usual procedure, except of course when he was drunk, but there was something about him on this particular day. After he had finished his meal he pushed his chair back, sharpened the end of a dead match with his knife and while cleaning his teeth remarked,

  ‘Know who Aa saw the day?’

  Me grandma returned his uplifted glance but did not answer.

  ‘Arne Fuller.’

  ‘Arne Fuller?’ Me grandma’s eyes were screwed up with enquiry.

  Me granda lost his composure and his pale blue eyes did a revolving stunt while he sucked his lips in between his teeth.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody gormless, woman: Arne Fuller . . . the papers an’ the huxter shop.’

  ‘O . . . h.’ Me grandma nodded her head at him. ‘Fuller’s the newsagent?’

  ‘Aye. Fuller’s the newsagent.’ His tone stung her to reply quickly.

  ‘Well, what about Arne Fuller? He’s been left the docks for years.’

  ‘Aye. Aa know that, woman. We aall know that. Everybody knows he’s got a chain of shops as long as the slacks.’

  He stopped and continued to probe his teeth until me grandma in exasperation said, ‘Well, what about him?’

  ‘He asked me in for a drink.’

  ‘Arne-Fuller-asked-you-in-for-a-drink?’ Me grandma’s eyes were screwed up again, and me granda’s head was cocked up towards her.

  ‘That’s what Aa said, he asked me in for a drink. Aa was comin’ out of the North-Eastern’ – this was one of the many public houses that lined the street opposite the dock gates – ‘An’ Aa dunched into him. “John McMullen!” he said. “It’s years since Aa clapped eyes on ya.” And then we got crackin’ and he said to me, “Come in and have a wet, John.”’

  ‘An’ what did you say?’

  ‘Aa said—’ Me granda’s voice was now slow and held a note that I couldn’t understand. ‘Aa said Aa’d had me nuff for the time being an’ Aa was on me way home.’

  It was many years later before I was able to translate this scene and to appreciate the effort it had taken for me granda to refuse that drink from Arne Fuller. Because Arne Fuller had got on he was a bloody upstart and me granda was not going to be seen drinking with a bloody upstart, yet from that day he ceased to apply this name to Mr Fuller. Arne Fuller had remembered him, had even spoken to him. Later conversations would begin with ‘It was on that day that Arne Fuller asked me to go in for a drink, remember?’

  My playmates in the New Buildings varied; sometimes it was one of the Weirs, sometimes it was Florrie Harding or Janie Robson or Olive Swinburn or Joan Woodcock, or her sister Lottie. I didn’t care for Lottie Woodcock very much for she was too like my Cousin Mary, my Aunt Sarah’s eldest daughter, pale, thin and claiming people’s attention. Everybody was very careful of Lottie Woodcock as they were of my Cousin Mary. They both died in their early teens of consumption. I often wished that I could be bad so that people could make a lot of me.

  I was very jealous of my Cousin Mary. She was a year younger than me and used to come down for the holidays, when she would cry most of the time, saying, ‘I want to go ho-er,’ meaning home. I was jealous of her because my people were nice to her. I hated the attention she got in the kitchen. I also hated her because of her nice clothes. Yet we used to lie in the desk bed in the mornings playing happily.

  There was one morning when Mary couldn’t find one of her petticoats: the house was searched and nobody could find the petticoat. I too searched for the petticoat. ‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘it couldn’t have walked and nobody’s eaten it.’ So Mary was taken back to Birtley that day with one petticoat missing. I think she was wearing four at the time, besides vest, stays and knickers, a dress, a pinny, and a coat. When later that night I undressed for bed I couldn’t hide the petticoat, and Kate said, ‘My God! What are we going to do with you? You’ll end up in a home, see if you don’t.’ Being sent to a home was a constant threat, but on this occasion she was laughing as she said it.

  I was about eighteen when my cousin Mary died and after this I lost sight of my seven Birtley cousins for over twenty years. The four boys all worked in the pits. I never cared much for pitmen. Me granda, when slating them among others, said all pitmen heaved more coal at the corner end, or at their games of quoits, and pitch and toss, than they ever did down the mine. Added to this impression was my own experience of miners, but this I derived more from the way they treated their wives and families, the females thereof, than from the men themselves.

  It wasn’t until about 1952 that my opinion of miners turned a complete somersault. I was meeting my cousins for the first time after the long separation, and I angered them with my remarks about the high price of coal in the South. The result of our verbal battle was that they challenged me to go down the mine. The thought petrified me, but what could I do with those four indignant men facing me? I went down with Peter – he was a deputy at the Betty Pit in Birtley – and was down about three hours. I almost embraced the daylight when I stepped back out of the cage, and from that moment wanted, sincerely and genuinely wanted to pin medals on every pitman. The outcome of my nerve-racking experience was my fourth novel, Maggie Rowan.

  I can’t ever remember going to bed before nine o’clock, and as I grew older there were certain duties to be done in the evening. One was to help me granda try the hens. He would take the big cree and I would take the small ones. The trying of the hens, to find out how many eggs were forthcoming on the morrow, was accomplished by inserting the index finger into the back passage of the hen. You could then tell whether the hen would lay in the morning or not until the afternoon. Me granda could tell the exact hour.

  Trying the hens was repulsive, but not as repulsive as having to hold them while he slit their gullets. There came the night when I rebelled against this barbaric chore. I must have been about eleven, and I was standing holding a duck, a favourite duck, tight under my arm. Its head was swinging protestingly from side to side. The dish that stood on the broken chair in the scullery was waiting for the blood. I opened the poor beast’s bill and then it was done. Me granda threw the duck on the floor where it regained a second’s resurrection of life and stood on its legs before finally toppling over. It was too much; I ran into the kitchen, and standing with my back to the table I shouted at him, ‘I’m not doing it! I’m not doing it any more! Do you hear me?’ I was crying loudly, and our Kate was saying, ‘Now, now. There’s nothing to make a fuss about. All right, all right.’

  I’m sure me granda had got me to hold the fowls for execution because he liked having me near him; he liked the idea of us working together. Our Kate could have caught a hen, killed it, dressed it and had it in the oven before the bird’s flesh was cold. She had a stomach for those things.

  The kitchen was the hub of my life; it was the centre of the universe from which all pain and pleasure sprang. In it would be enacted battles both physical and mental. One particular battle happened at least once a week between Kate and myself. It would begin with her saying ‘I don’t want you to go to school this mornin’.’ This should have filled me with joy but it didn’t. For it meant only one thing, she wanted me to go to the pawn. I would stand nearly always at the kitchen door leading into the scullery, from which you went by another door into the backyard. I would take up this position as if ready for flight. She would not look at me as she told me why she would have to send me to the pawn but would go about her business of clear
ing a table, or preparing food, or lifting up the mats, or throwing a great bucket of slack to the back of the fireplace in preparation for the tea leaves that would be put on it to clag it together. And she would be saying, ‘It’s the rent, I’ve just got to have it. This is the second week and they could put us in Court.’ Being taken to Court had the same horror for her as the workhouse had for me granda. She would not have been ‘put in Court’ for two weeks’ rent, but there were outstanding arrears of something between four and five pounds, and as the rent was only about four and six a week they represented many unpaid weeks. Her debts hung over her head like an avalanche about to plunge down and bury her. Yet the irony was that if they had all kept off the drink for a few weeks the debts would have been cleared and she would have been without that particular worry. But people with Kate’s weakness don’t reason. They can only satisfy the craving in their stomachs, and answer censure with, ‘Well, what else have I got?’

  From my position by the door I would say, ‘I’m not going, our Kate.’

  She would remain silent, moving swiftly from one place in the room to another. My eyes would follow her and when she didn’t answer I would go on, ‘I hate going. It’s awful. Everybody looks at me. I’m not going, do you hear?’

  Sometimes she would suddenly stop in her darting and sit down and rest her head in her hands. This would be too much for me. I would bow my own head and step into the room and wait. But at other times she would turn on me, crying, ‘You’ll do what you’re damn well told. Now get your hat and jacket on and get away.’ Sometimes I would stand and watch her as she parcelled up the things. Very often they were just bits of underwear still damp from the wash. Sometimes it might be a suit, me Uncle Jack’s suit, never me granda’s. I never knew him to have a suit or anything worth pawning, until I was fourteen or so. Sometimes she would go to the drawer and take out her blouse, her only decent blouse, and there I would stand watching her parcelling the things up while she said, ‘Ask him to stretch a point and make it five shillings,’ knowing as she said this that I’d be lucky if I returned with three.