PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Catherine Cookson: enigma
She died old (at 91) when she thought she would die young; she was one of the world's most prolific writers; yet she hid a deep insecurity and felt threatened by the most innocent criticism. With 78 books, selling more than 100 million copies in 30 countries, to remind us of her diligence to her public, no-one was more secure at the bank or in her public image that Dame Catherine Cookson.. She aimed directly at the hearts and minds of the majority audience (almost exclusively women) and displays of her work in bookshops were the envy of the rarified writers, who review each others' books in the better-quality newspapers. There was no cliquishness in her, no aiming at an elite, no vagueness. There was nothing of the literary salon about her. She spoke plainly. And never had a person of such wealth owed so much to poverty.
Poverty was the making of her and wealth was merely the measure of her reward; poverty is what gave her spirit and purpose and a subject to describe; it was the badge of her courage. To this child of Tyneside early life was the sight of drunkenness, humiliation and being illegitimate; it was scavenging the beaches for debris; it was sitting by the old black fire range which was inscribed, "Grieve and Gillespie"; it was the powerful image of a mother born out of wedlock, the woman she knew as Our Kate. Many a Socialist politician
would envy her such authentic suffering.
Her later life was the opposite of all this. It was as if she had stepped through a mirror and become a totally different person. Dark to light. Pain to pleasure, or what passes for pleasure in her, for she was a martyr to illness. Could anyone ask for more? Well, yes, one could, and she did. .In spite of all her success, she remained vulnerable to criticism to a degree that anyone knowing her confident attitudes and life-style would barely believe credible.
In the late seventies, we had a friendly relationship. For my part, we always did. I had written about her work and background at great length after visiting her at her then home in Hastings and she had been pleased with what I had written. But then, when she had returned to her Tyneside roots, a serial based on her Mallen trilogy appeared on television, and a young Daily Express writer (whom I have neither spoken to nor met and whose very name vanished quickly and easily from my mind), noted that "her literary style can best be described as Barbara Cartland with rape and pillage added." This was part of a TV criticism following an adaptation of her work.
Catherine Cookson was devastated. When I next saw her, she confirmed that her writing had been totally undermined by the experience. I had, in the meantime, written a piece much longer than the original criticism, and published in the same newspaper, in which I defended Catherine. She described this considerable effort as "the only salve to the sore." It did not end her newly-discovered insecurity. "I have never sought success," she said. "I have never written for money. Some would say: Why worry? You are laughing all the way to the bank. Well, I am not built that way." In her mind, I had to take part of the blame through association with the newspaper, although no man could have declared himself more firmly on her side either publicly or privately. What was published was beyond my knowledge and control.
Six years later, the matter was still much on her mind. "You may call on me when next in thisvicinity (Hexham, Northumberland)," she wrote, "and I won't be cool." I passed on the hurt she had described to me to Arthur Firth, editor of the Daily Express at that time, who happened to be an old Northern colleague. It was his critic, not the counterpart in Manchester, who had disturbed her.
"But she's only a kid at the start of her career," he said of the critic. "How can she possibly disturb an established writer such as Catherine Cookson? I find this difficult to believe. My wife reads all her books. Will you tell her that?" I did. But it made no difference. I found it incredible, too. But there were many things about Dame Catherine Cookson, OBE, that I found incredible. Courage, commitment, determination and insecurity were marching four abreast in her consciousness.
In Hastings, she had a garden sufficiently large for her to have planted 20,000 daffodils. I liked her immediately for her uninhibited conversation. She had no reticence and poured out her thoughts in a torrent. She was born on 20 June, 1906, and her first book was published when she was 44, in 1950. Here was the unlikely product of a raw environment, part mystic, part-monument in her own lifetime, since an area around South Shields was later designated Cookson Country, with its own Cookson trail of landmarks..
Much of what she said was woe, and more woe. "I was the only child who went to the pawn shop every Monday... I was the only child who, as I remember, went on the slacks with a sack - the Jarrow slacks where the tide brought up the refuse, all the stuff from the boats. If you could get a sackful of wood to keep the fire going and there was a big baking day, that was marvellous... I was the only child who followed the coal carts. The carts would come from Jarrow into Shields from the gas works and the carts were very like farm carts, with the sides up... Sometimes I would stand between my granda's knees and he would stick the hot poker into his pint of beer and let me drink the froth. He had the poker especially made and he called it Dennis..."
And so on, and so on.
The sort of background she described is not, of course, unfamiliar in the North: the difference is that she had the heart and mind and skill and romantic vision to make something of it. When Cookson Country was being made hallowed ground, I went there to follow the trail and talk to Catherine Cookson's contemporaries. One of these was Elizabeth Bullock. She said, "We sat next to each other at school. Catherine was a very pretty little girl with lovely curly hair, and otherwise ordinary; not specially outstanding - like the rest of us; in a way, a rather spoiled little girl because she was the only one and we were members of big fan-iilies. She was known as Kitty McMullan. Kitty always had sweets and things that we never had. She used to come to mother's a lot. We always kept in touch, always wrote long letters at Christmas, and
as time goes on there is less to write about. She moved up from her background. You can't go on forever about old times. There was always something different about Catheline Cookson."
Catherine Cookson's reaction to this was mixed. Her childhood poverty and deprivation were being challenged. "Perhaps I should say Mrs Bullock's memory must have gone a little astray when imagining that I always had plenty of sweets and was spoilt... when very often there wasn't any money for beer... It's very odd, but I have had people write to say they played with me when I was seven. Some were not yet born then. In fact, one old fellow who has just died at ninety-odd, remembers, he firmly states, playing games with me in William Black Street. He would likely have been courting heavy at that time. Such is fame. Quite candidly, you can have it."
Now why should she be hurt by the memories of another? If she had sweets at school - why should that be so bad? It was bad, one suspects, because of this clear and undiminished image of a time when she suffered most. She had a need to be the centre of attention.
Catherine Cookson (Catherine Fawcett) was always a romantic. At the age of 15 or 16 she was romantic about her possible father. And her Aunt Mary supplied a romantic answer - "He wore an astrakhan collar and carried a silver-mounted walking stick and he talked lovely. He always came into the best end of the saloon (pub). From that moment the child knew "the creator of my being. When I knew I was begat of a gentleman I knew what I was. I had this feeling that I must be better. I wanted what I called culture. I tried painting, writing; I bought a fiddle. And the turning point in any education I have I owe to Lord Chesterfield. Elinor Glyn mentioned Chesterfield's letters to his son in a novel which had come my way and you could not see me for dust. I flew down to the library and got out Lord Chesterfield, and whatever education I have began. Because this man became my tutor and the public library my university. Through all this came my writing, and in my writing the harshnesses of life became recollection and anecdote."
I have the Letters of Lord Chesterfield myself, as it happens (Dear Boy, Bantam Press), and in it she wrote an introduction:
"Why did I become an advocate for Chesterfield? It would have been understandable if, after a sound education, I had gone to university, and Lord Chesterfield had become my mentor and his period my platform for the study of politics, morals, and manners of the I8th century. But the opposite was the case. Here was a girl, a child born illegitimate, who had had a rough time of it..."
Perhaps in Chesterfield for whom I, for one, have limited regard, she found an echo of what she imagined of her father: "I always gave him (her father) credit for the artistic side of me. I wanted to talk proper. Swanky. I wanted to be like the da I never knew because he must be a gentleman. He had to be that."
Catheiine Cookson worked in a workhouse laundry in South Shields and went from there to similar work in Essex. By the age of 23 - in 1930 - she was manageress of a workhouse laundry in Hastings earning £3 6s a week. She intended to stay in Hastings a year and stayed nearly half a century.
When success as a writer had come she would go back to Tyneside "always the Tyne dock way, past the place where I was born. There's a garage there now. I could see myself playing round the maypole in the school yard when I was a child. Going to the first concert. Being pulled down those three steps that led to the stage because I had my shoes on the wrong feet, and all this I kept alive with my writing. I have changed and Shields has changed. Now, the women of Shields go to bingo, the lot. At one time a man would not think of washing up, or looking after the children, or even pushing the pram. He would rather be shot. My granda and my Uncle Jack, in my time, would not have washed a single cup. They would have smashed it sooner.
"And as for shopping - I think you could have asked a man to do anything on earth rather than that. Now you see young fellows pushing prams and carrying groceries. Humour has been their saving grace. Because, dear God, without that, how grey their lives would have been! They were grey in unemployment and grey in employment. Aggressive, bleak even now at times, struggling. I used to dislike the sun because it picked out the drabness. But all these things are stitched together by humour and in that is the power to survive."
There was a lot of sensitivity in her, an acute memory, the power of analysis, and yet I am not sure that she really knew herself. Ever.
Catherine Cookson, in the memory, always seemed to be ill with one thing or another. She had stupendous illnesses, and through them, she could be noble: "I can feel like death. I know I am dying. Any minute. Then somebody comes in and I rise like dough." She was rising like dough for more than half a century.
She had a breakdown in I945. "I had a weird feeling that I would never see the end of the war, and I had had a long illness. The business of being illegitimate began to assume mountainous proportions. Despair, shame, bitterness. The feeling grew against my mother. I hated the fact that she had borne me, everything. And I was ill for six weeks staring at a blank wall. "I had driven myself. I had wanted education, education. I was practising for an arts exam. I was writing. I had taken up the piano for a second time. Everything was out of proportion. I went away for voluntary treatment and, because I imbibe atmosphere, soak it up, I knew that if I stayed I would be worse than the worst patient there.
"I went back to my house. Twice I felt I could not go on. I went up on the hill to pick the biggest cliff from which to throw myself and I thought: When you drop down there it will be all over. You will not feel anything any more... But think of the people close to you who will suffer. I realised in that moment that I should stay alive a little longer, and I did. I could never sleep for more than two hours fitfully. And one night I had two big bottles full of sleeping tablets. I was tempted to end my life again. But it was as if some strength came from somewhere saying, No, by God, you are not going to go out without a fight. And I took the bottles and threw the tablets down the lavatory. I had the most wonderful feeling of release. I thought: I've done it!"
Through all this, she was sustained by the deep and abiding love of her husband, a former schoolteacher named Tom. They married in I940 and did not have children. Catherine had four miscarriages in the first five years of marriage, then admitted herself to a mental hospital. She had contemplated suicide. He was to die in June, I998, at the age of 85, within days of her. They had been married almost 60 years.
Tom - a mathematics graduate of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and later a schoolteacher - would be the one who answered the door while she composed her words in grand surroundings. Unobtrusive, quiet, gentle Tom. Saintly Tom, I concluded long ago daily tending the grand, decisive, combative Catherine obsessively writing, writing, writing, always barely surviving but going on for ever. Not to be disturbed. Walk softly. He was the sub-editor correcting her English in whatever she wrote.
"In life," she said to me, " one gets flashes of perception, and Tom knows that I get them when I am desperately ill. And the other night the twilight came and I was feeling terribly low (this is years ago) and I thought: We are in a moment of time, we two. You pass and will anybody remember? And I thought: It does not matter because we will go on. Wherever we go we will be together in spirit. We can not be separated, but we will die. Shortly, perhaps, I will die. Often when I see twilight it brings thought of death, but without any fear. And this is wonderful to know: that in the end you might welcome it. So I saw Tom there, and I thought of all I owed him. I could not have done what I have done without his help, and his understanding, and his criticism and his arguing. I used to be terrified of dying at one time, but not any more. I have this strong belief that I will go on. I feel a definite purpose." As Christmas, 1993, approached, I read that she had gone into hospital with a rare blood disorder; and then that she had left hospital after treatment only to return for an emergency operation on her colon. Tom, at 8 I, was staying with her. A sad festival.
And so it went on, until all ceased within days. Nothing left.
I never went back to be fully absolved from complicity in someone else's "crime" and she went on, still working, still ailing, apparently indestructible at any age. And why? Because absolute commitment finds its own rewards. And I do not suppose retirement ever entered into her vocabulary.
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
4 March, 2007