Our Kate

by Catherine Cookson

  When Kate left that night I was furious. I knew nothing about syphilis or gonorrhoea, but I knew that if you went with men you could pick up a disease. Hadn’t the girls in the laundry who had been discharged from the hospital but kept in the workhouse because they had no proper homes to go to, hadn’t these girls picked up something through going with men? And they all had a peculiar smell about them. A dirty scenty smell.

  So that was why I had been hustled into the hospital. After Kate had gone my rage nearly lifted me out of the bed and over to the Matron’s house, but Kate’s words came back to me, the words she had said on the day of the party as she stood on the mat looking down at me with pity: ‘You’ll see your day, hinny, don’t you worry. You’ll see your day with them all.’

  Like the majority of Catholics I was at that time bigoted about my religion, which played a very important part in my life. It sustained me and comforted me, I neither questioned nor probed but accepted it, and therefore was happy in it. And this state of happiness I felt was due to the Virgin and the Holy Family. Never did I pass the church on my way home from Harton but I paid them a visit, and on the journey back I would call in again. Often the church was in black darkness except for the red eye of the sanctuary lamp, but I would grope my way down to the far altar where stood Our Lady, and there, kneeling in the darkness, repeat my desires and beg her to grant my wishes. The ever-present wish that Kate would give up the drink; the ever-present wish that I would find me da, and the ever-present wish to be a good girl, to keep myself pure, a very difficult process, for although, as I understood it, it was not wrong to love, the very fact of loving brought thoughts into the mind that the conscience told you should not be there, and when, fascinated by them, you did not immediately dispel them, this conscience drove you to confession, to grow hot with blushes as you divulged your sins of bad thoughts. I once discussed this business of bad thoughts and the confessing of them with a Catholic girl, one with whom I had been to school. I remember what she said, ‘Don’t be daft, Katie.’ Then she stood back from me, her eyes narrowed and her mouth open in laughter, as she exclaimed, ‘By! You are daft, you know. You don’t look it, but you are.’ Then she went on to tell me that a priest had tried to kiss her mother when she was a young girl. I was aghast, she was lying. I did not speak to her again. Priests did not do things like that. Nor did Catholics withhold any of their sins in the confessional box. Catholics were different. I held this view of Catholics being different for quite a number of years after this incident, and perhaps it was because of this that I made no allowances for a Catholic doing a bad thing. Catholics should know better; Catholics were filled with the grace of God. They were the fortunate and favoured of God; there were a lot of nice Protestants, but, poor souls, they were as far removed from the protection of the real God as it was possible for the human mind to imagine.

  Yet on looking back I can’t ever remember praying to this Catholic God. I prayed to Mary, the Holy Family and every blessed one of the archangels, saints, and angels, and the ones who did the chores, known as guardian angels. I prayed a great deal to my guardian angel, and even at this stage of thinking when I retain not one belief of those years, I still have a confirmed feeling of someone guiding me. Nobody like a God or a high official in the archangel grade, but just a common or working guardian angel.

  I know now that I never prayed to God because I was afraid of Him, of the being in whose likeness I was told I was made. What was God but a male me, of gigantic proportions, sitting somewhere up there, with Jesus on His right-hand and the thief who died on the Cross on His left. But Jesus was minute compared to this being called God. Nor, I remember, did I pray very often to Jesus, as Jesus the man. As Jesus the infant, yes; as symbolised by the Sacred Heart, yes; but Jesus in His many stages of suffering I sheered from.

  I couldn’t understand a Catholic being petty and vindictive to another Catholic. Yet before I left Harton Institution understanding was brought home to me with considerable force. Get a really spiteful Catholic and the devil couldn’t ask for a better advocate.

  As my sojourn in the back bedroom of William Black Street had changed my outlook so did my stay in that side ward in the hospital. I returned to the house block outwardly the same Miss McMullen, but inwardly there was a wariness that hadn’t been there before, and a stronger determination than ever to show them.

  My urge, at this period, nagged at me day in day out. I now began a frantic search for knowledge. I took T P and Cassell’s Weekly. This magazine stirred my mind and sent it groping hither and thither. The magazine was about clever people – writers. I wanted to be clever, I wanted to be a writer, I wanted knowledge. But how? How was I to go about getting it? What kind of books should I read? There was no-one to ask. I never thought about going to the library. I was now twenty years old and I had never been inside a library of any kind.

  Perhaps concentrated thought is a form of prayer for my desire was granted. I found a tutor.

  It came about in this way. I read a book by Elinor Glyn, called The Career of Catherine Bush. I felt quite guilty about reading this book because Elinor Glyn was banned by the church. Didn’t she write about women lying on tiger skins? There was a great deal of borderline joking at the dining-room table about Elinor Glyn and the tiger skins and the repeated phrase ‘I did but kiss your little feet’. This always elicited howls of laughter. But there I was reading The Career of Catherine Bush by this forbidden writer.

  Catherine Bush was a girl of the common people who becomes secretary to a duchess, whose old lover, now a duke, falls in love with her. The duchess tells Catherine Bush that if she is going to marry a duke, she must first of all be well-read. She tells her the book on which to base her education. It was Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son.

  When I read this story, particularly the line giving the title of the book that was to turn this girl into a lady, my desires, my craving to be different, were compressed into a simple fact. I, too, wanted to be a lady. I flew down to the Library, the only place, I realised, in which I would be able to find this book, and made my acquaintance with Lord Chesterfield, and incidentally with a library.

  And here began my education. With Lord Chesterfield I read my first mythology. I learned my first real history and geography. With Lord Chesterfield I went travelling the world. I would fall asleep reading the letters and awake round three o’clock in the morning my mind deep in the fascination of this new world, where people conversed, not just talked. Where the brilliance of words made your heart beat faster. I would see myself beautifully gowned going down a marble staircase on the hand of Lord Chesterfield. At the foot of the staircase great doors would open, and I would enter a salon where would be gathered a selected group of people, waiting for me. And I would converse with them and would astound them with my wisdom, my eloquence, my knowledge, all round three o’clock in the morning, and wake up bleary-eyed when the bell went at seven, step out onto the freezing lino, wash myself in ice-cold water, make my way to the mess room telling myself that I was mad to read so late at night, that I was reading far too much because my eyes were becoming very sore. But come dinner time I would gallop my dinner, dash to my room and there read selected letters aloud, because my tutor said that to be a lady or a gentleman you must, simply must, articulate correctly, and I knew only too well that I did not articulate correctly. I didn’t talk Geordie but I had something wrong with my voice. I didn’t know then it was my inflection, I only knew as the French teacher had said, that it went up when it should have gone down.

  The end of this reading aloud came one day when the laundry bell rang and I had been so engrossed in the letters I had forgotten that I should be already at work. It would take me all of three minutes to get to the laundry and so I threw the book down and dashed to the door, and when I pulled it open I fell into a huddle of inmates – all mental defectives, who had been gathered round the keyhole – and one, not so mentally deficient as the rest, turned to her pals and said, ‘An’ they pay hor to lu
k afer us.’

  Lord Chesterfield became very real to me. Was he not writing to his illegitimate son? And did he not say in his fourth letter to the boy: ‘Although I now love you dearly, if you continue to go on so, I shall love you still more tenderly: if you improve and grow learned everyone will be fond of you, and desirous of your company; whereas ignorant people are shunned and despised. In order that I may not be ignorant myself I read a great deal. The other day I went through the history of Dido which I will now tell you.’

  Dear, dear Lord Chesterfield. Snob or not I owe him so much.

  Never for very long during this period of my life was the thought of my father out of my mind. I felt that I had only to see him and he would take me into his world – which of course was the upper-class world So much did I long to find him that I enlisted the services of a young man I was going with at that time, promising to marry him if he could get me any information concerning the man whose name I gave to him. I was not in love with this young man and had he succeeded in finding my father and had my hopes of a different way of life materialised through his research, he would have stood less chance than ever of me becoming his wife.

  In those days I didn’t blame my father for walking out on Kate. How could you expect a gentleman to accept anyone like me granda or me Uncle Jack, or even my homely grandma. And these were the people he had seen, the only time he had visited the house.

  There must have been long periods between his visits to the public house at Lamesley for when Kate found herself pregnant she had come home, and he, some time later going to the inn and not finding her there, had asked for her address. It was me Uncle Jack who had come to Kate and said, ‘There’s a fellow outside asking about you.’ I have a hazy memory of being told that me grandma went out and spoke to him, but it was Kate herself shortly before she died who told me that she went with my father to Newcastle for the day and he was greatly disturbed about her condition and said they must be married at once. When they parted that evening he gave her his address in Newcastle. Then, not hearing from him for some days she made her way to this address; no-one of that name was known there.

  Life in Harton Institution wasn’t, I think, far removed from the time of Dickens. The female inmates all wore a hideous uniform, the dress reaching down to their strong boot-tops, over which was an apron, and they all wore starched caps. They fed in the hall, which also served as a chapel. It was furnished with long white wooden tables and backless forms. The sight of the food they ate and the way it was served up used to make me sick, and filled me with guilt when, in the mess room, I was presented with a plentiful meal. The kitchen was overrun with thousands of cockroaches, which appeared in hordes at a given time each evening, when the staff went off-duty.

  The kitchen staff consisted of inmates, headed by a cook who had herself been an inmate. Whether she had suffered from the system which tied a woman for fourteen years because of a misdemeanour or she had to come in because she had no-one to support her family I am not quite sure, I wasn’t interested enough at the time to find out, I only knew she had been an inmate. What interested me more was that cockroaches, from time to time, found their way into the inmates’ porridge.

  There were three infirm wards besides a nursery in the house side. Infirm One was where the chronic patients were kept. This ward was divided by a main corridor along which I had to pass to get to my room, and the stench of urine from it always stung my nose, even though the place was kept scrupulously clean. I became closer acquainted with Infirm One and two of its inmates from doing evening duty there. The two women were both in wheelchairs. One was called Mrs Henagan. She was under thirty and suffering from a chronic form of arthritis, as was the older woman whose name I forget, but who was not much older, yet both looked aged with pain and despair and they instantly aroused my compassion.

  Of my four nights off a week I always went home at least on two of them and my visits were looked forward to with eagerness both by Kate and me granda, for I would entertain them with stories of the happenings in the Institution. I think I took a pride, more so in bringing them to tears than to laughter, and I achieved the former with Kate when I described to them the plight of Mrs Henagan and her friend. From this time I never returned to the Institution on a Sunday night but that I brought something for them. It might only be a piece of cake but often it was cooked chicken. Kate was nothing if not generous.

  If anyone was sorry to see me leave the Institution it was these two women, and in the years since I last saw them – they must be dead now – their plight has become clearer and more terrible to me; a young woman tied forever to a wheelchair in that foul-smelling atmosphere, surrounded by painted stone walls and without friends. I think I am right in my recalling that her husband left her when she became chronically ill.

  One of my duties that I really hated was to take the hall during Saturday visiting. As in prison, an officer had always to be present when the inmates had their visitors. It was while doing these duties that I discovered a new part of myself, a part that was vulnerable to the pain of others. This part would come to the fore as I watched a girl begging her parents to take her home – she was likely there for some misdemeanour and had been considered by the Courts as being out of control. Today she would have been put out to foster parents. Or to watch a simple-minded girl who had a baby being visited by the man who had given it to her, he probably already married and with a family. Or to watch a husband, who was on the men’s side, visiting his wife, and see them sitting silently together in wordless misery. Often these cases were the result of a family having had the ‘bums’ in, and, having nowhere to go, had to come into the workhouse, the man to the male side, the woman to the female side, the children to the Cottage Homes.

  Saturday afternoon duty in the hall did not come often for me, it would usually be as a stand-in for some officer who was sick, and I was very glad that it wasn’t my permanent duty for nearly always after the bell rang I went to my room and had a little weep, and I would realise with painful clarity the fear that had always been in me granda and in most poor people, the fear of the workhouse.

  I became very fond of certain inmates, particularly my deaf helper in the laundry. I had two helpers, one was an old woman of over seventy, her name was Mary Gunn, yet she was still sprightly with a good figure and beautiful skin even at that age. She was in the workhouse simply because she had no home. The other was also called Mary. She was much younger and deaf, and she had been brought up in the workhouse. She had a violent temper but she could make me laugh and would go out of her way to do so by relating one of the several times she had left the Institution to take up service outside. This girl had become so ‘institutionalised’ that she could not settle in the outside world and invariably returned to the workhouse from her several places. Being deaf she spoke in a quaint high tone and would relate to me why she left her place in Shields.

  ‘Because of the butcher boy, you know,’ she would say. Her butcher sounded like boot-chair. ‘The boot-chair boy, he came to the door and he said, “Mary, aa you comin’ out?”’

  ‘Goo way boot-chair boy,’ I said.

  ‘Aw, Mary, come on out. Come, on in the wash-house for a minute, Mary.’

  ‘Goo away, boot-chair boy, goo way.’

  ‘I’ll give you a bit of meat if you’ll come into the wash-house, Mary.’

  ‘Aa know what you’ll give me, boot-chair boy, an’ Aa don’t want it. Fourteen years is a long time, boot-chair boy.’

  This relating of the butcher boy episode would go on in her high squeaky voice while she mimed the butcher boy’s expression with her thin face. I have seen me granda and Kate double up when I have done Mary and the butcher boy to them. Often me granda would greet me with ‘Goo way, boot-chair boy, goo way,’ and we would all laugh.

  There were many characters among the women who worked in the laundry, but a good percentage of them were mentally deficient in some way or another. I remember the day when one young woman got her hand caught i
n a calender. She got it entwined in a sheet, and it was dragged onto the hot steel bed and crushed by the rollers. I was assistant laundress at the time, having been promoted from laundry checker, and was coming out of my store when I heard the screams. I knew what had happened and the next minute I found myself running out through the main door. Quickly I pulled myself together and dashed back into the place and helped to support the screaming creature.

  This girl was in hospital for some time, and when three months later and presumably better, with a much mangled hand, they put her back into the laundry I thought it was the most unfeeling thing I had as yet come across.

  The thought that turned my steps that day of the accident was, if you want to manage you’ve got to face up to things like this. And I did want to manage. My aim then was to manage the biggest laundry going. If I wasn’t fit to do anything else, I told myself, I was going to get to the top in this business, and so when the head laundress left to get married I asked the matron for her post.

  ‘No, Miss McMullen,’ she said, ‘you are much too young and inexperienced.’

  Not to be beaten, I waited a while, then asked her again. And again it was, ‘No!’ but much louder this time. On the third time of asking she bawled, ‘If you approach me again I will have you thrown out of the gates.’

  There was some difficulty in finding a suitable person to manage the laundry, none of the applicants seeming to have the required experience. Then they took on a young girl who had been running a small hand-laundry. I was indignant, but nevertheless put a good face on it. The girl and I became friendly and she admitted to me she was terrified of the responsibility and that if she stayed on – she was merely on trial – I would be doing the work and she would be getting the money.