Tilly Trotter (The Tilly Trotter Trilogy)
Page 1
Table of Contents
The Catherine Cookson Story
Tilly Trotter
PART ONE: THE OLD LIFE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
PART TWO: THE NEW LIFE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
PART THREE: THE WORKINGS OF THE WITCH
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
PART FOUR: AND THE BEWITCHED
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
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 wen3t 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 3 or 4 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 bed-ridden 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 80’s.
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<
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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
Tilly Trotter
Coming up sixteen, Tilly Trotter is different from the other girls in her village. Tall for her age and coltish, she is not afraid of taking on ‘man’s work’ to help out the grandparents who raised her in a cottage at the edge of the Sopwith Estate, only a few miles from the bustling Tyneside towns of County Durham.
Testing times lay ahead for Tilly, often hard to endure and even bringing her the undeserved taint of being suspected of witchcraft. Tilly, with her unusual beauty, envied by the local women and lusted after by the men, only loves one man – farmer Simon Bentwood. She is heartbroken to discover he is betrothed to another. A spurned suitor takes a terrible revenge, and a betrayal forces her into the cruel drudgery of the local mine and puts her life in danger.
But Tilly refuses to let her spirit be broken – determined that all this will only serve to make her stronger – and she grows to become a young woman of innate courage and fortitude. Set at the beginning of the Victorian era, this is a compelling story that follows the shaping of a young woman’s life and destiny.
TILLY TROTTER
Catherine Cookson
Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1980
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 1998
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 978-1-78036-098-0
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
PART ONE: THE OLD LIFE
One
He urged his horse up the rise, then stopped at the summit as he always did and sat gazing about him. The sky was high today, clear and blue, not resting as it usually did on the far low hills away to his left, or on the masts of the ships not so far away that lined the river. From this point he could see the town of South Shields lying in a bustling huddle along the banks of the river right to where it made its way into the North Sea.
From Tyne Dock to where the village of Jarrow began the land was bare of all but a cottage and a farmstead here and there, but once his eyes lit on Jarrow itself he had the feeling of bustle again, even if it were in a lesser way: the little shipyard he knew would be busy, and at the salt pans along the river where the work would be ceaseless.
Then came Hebburn. He knew it to be there, but it was obscured from his view by a series of hillocks. Always a shadow of pity rose in him when he looked upon any town, even the great Newcastle, for he could never understand how men, given the choice, would want to live among the bustle and hustle and, for the majority of them, stink and muck. But then again the majority of them had little choice. Yet if the chance were given them would they want to live out here in the open country? . . .
Open country! The words were now scornful in his mind. He looked down towards the earth. There was a mine underneath his horse’s feet. How often did the miners enjoy the open country? Once a week? Some of them were so worn out that all the Sunday privilege meant to them was bed.
He urged on his horse again, impatience in his ‘Get up there!’ Now why was it that on this monthly visit to William Trotter he should, winter or summer, pause on that knoll and ask himself questions that had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his life? Here he was a prosperous farmer, well set up; oh yes, he knew his own value. He would have liked another inch or two to his stature but five foot ten and a half wasn’t bad, not when you had breadth to go with it; and the hair on his head was as thick as a horse’s mane, and the colour of chestnut into the bargain. As for his face, well, the looking-glass had told him there were handsomer men but they were only to be found among the fops. His was a strong manly face; all strong faces had big noses. His mouth in proportion was large, and that was as it should be. And he had all his teeth; the bottom set as wide as they were high and as white as salt would make them. It wasn’t everybody who could reach twenty-four and brag that he hadn’t as yet had one tooth broken or pulled. Jeff Barnes had three missing in the front and him not twenty yet, all because he couldn’t stand a bit of face-ache, and him the size of a house end! No, his face, as his mother used to say, would get him past in a crowd . . . but only just. He used to laugh at his mother: she had been a joker.
At the bottom of the knoll he was still on a rise and as he turned the horse on to a narrow bridle path he was now looking over a mass of woody land where in the far distance a row of ornamental chimneys pierced the sky, and on the sight of them he again pulled his horse to a stop; and as he did so he now asked himself: Could the rumour be true? Was the Sopwith mine finished, or running out? Because if it was that would be the finish of the family and the Manor. But in a way it could be the making of himself, it could bring about the realisation of a dream. Yet if the place and the land and farm went under the hammer could he go to Mr Mark and say, ‘I have money to buy me farm’? He couldn’t for there was very little left of the big lot and the first thing Mr Mark would likely say would be, ‘Where did you get such money from?’ And what would he say to that? ‘An uncle died in Australia’? People did say things like that. He hadn’t an uncle in Australia and Mark Sopwith would know that. There had been Sopwiths in the Manor for the last three hundred years and there had been Bentwoods on Brook Farm for as long, and each knew the history of the other.
He urged his horse on again and the thought in his mind now was, I hope to God it is just a rumour. Aye, I do, for all their sakes.
He entered a narrow belt of wood and when he emerged a few minutes later it was as if he had come into a new country, so changed was the scene. Beyond the stretch of moorland lay a huddle of houses known as Rosier’s Village. They were mean two-roomed, mud-floored, miners’ cottages housing the workers in the mine that lay half a mile beyond, and the land between the houses and the mine seemed to be dotted with black coal mounds. Although there were only three of them, they nevertheless dominated the landscape.
As his eyes dwelt on the panorama of industry he wondered how it was that one mine owner, such as Rosier, could flourish when a man of more ability and stature such as Sopwith could go to the wall. He supposed the answer could be given in two parts: first, although, so he understood, Rosier had his troubles with water and explosions and the like, as every mine owner had, his was a shaft mine whereas Sopwith’s was a drift mine; and the second part of the answer lay in luck, which, in the coal industry, meant good seams and bad seams, although it was said that luck, bad luck, was just an excuse for poor prospecting.
Even when he was well past the village the stench of it still clung to his nostrils. He had ridden a further two miles or more before he came in sight of his destination. It was a thatched cottage, and it lay just off the bridle path sheltered in a flat-bottomed hollow, and within the boundary of the Sopwith estate. It had a large square of cultivated garden in front and a paddock behind, all neatly railed in. Away to the left of him the land dropped slightly before rising to a grass-covered hill which halfway up levelled itself into a narrow plateau, then rose upwards again and on to an apparently flat head.
He rode down to the cottage, dismounted and tied his horse to the gatepost. When he unlatched the gate and went up the path the geese in the paddock set up a chattering and screeching, and this seemed to be the signal for a door to open. When he reached it he spoke to the old woman standing there, saying, ‘They’re as good as watchdogs those two.’
‘Oh, hello, Simon. ’Tis good to see you. Come away in. Come away in. Isn’t it a beautiful day?’