The Slow Awakening Read online

  THE SLOW AWAKENING

  Catherine Cookson

  Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  The Slow Awakening

  PART ONE One

  Two

  PART TWO One

  PART THREE One

  Two

  PART FOUR One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  PART FIVE One

  Two

  PART SIX One

  Two

  Three

  PART SEVEN One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  PART EIGHT 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 went 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 three or four 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 bedridden 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 80s.

  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

  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

  The Slow Awakening

  In the mid-1850s, life for an orphan was grim, as Kirsten MacGregor discovered when her parents died suddenly on a journey to Northumberland, leaving her penniless and alone in the hands of a cruel farmer.

  Somehow, Kirsten survived her terrible childhood—only to be sold, at the age of fourteen, to a traveling tinker—a vicious man who raped her and held her captive until the fateful day they were separated during a storm. Rescued from the flood by the Flynn family, she gave birth to a child as the waters raged about her. At the same time, Florence, mistress of the great house nearby, was told that her newborn son was dead. The two women entered into a secret bargain, an arrangement that was to change Kirsten’s fortune and place her in the middle of a bitter feud between two families.

  The Slow Awakening is a powerful novel, originally published under the pseudonym of Catherine Marchant, and reflects vividly the violence and cruelty that a poverty-stricken girl might endure in that period.

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1976

  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 978-1-78036-051-5

  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 CHILDREN OF GOD, 1850

  One

  She shouted, ‘Johnnie! Johnnie!’ then glanced fearfully about her as if the sound of her own voice had frightened her. She peered up the narrow cobbled street; one side was black with shadow; of the other, the roofs and part of the walls down to the narrow windows were picked out in harsh sunlight. While she looked up towards the light she held her head at a peculiar angle, but she lowered it, her chin touching her chest, before she ran up the street, again calling, ‘Johnnie! Johnnie! Come out wherever you are. Johnnie! Johnnie!’ her voice little more than a throaty whisper that would not have carried far even on the strong wind that was blowing.

  At the top of the street she came out into a small square and hesitated as if fearful of crossing it; her head, held again at the strange angle, turned sharply to the right then to the left before becoming still when she caught sight of a small boy being thrust out of a shop doorway.

  She didn’t call out to the child now as she ran, but when she came up with him she took him by the shoulder and shook him, saying, ‘You! You! You’ve done it again; you’ll have us murdered you will…Come on!’ Grabbing his dirty hand, she tugged so hard at it that his bare feet left the ground in a leap; and then they were both running towards the shadowed street again. They had almost reached it when out of an alleyway stepped two men. One was carrying a creel, the other had a long net draped over his shoulder like a Roman toga. The wind catching the end of the net, wafted it in the path of the girl, and as if she were blind she went to thrust it out of her way. In doing so she stumbled and to save herself she put out her free hand and her head came up and she looked at the two men.

  They stood still now, the man with the creel and the man with the net, as if transfixed by horror; and then the taller of the two, seeming to swell to twice his size, let out a bellow of rage, crying, ‘Blast your eyes! Do you hear? Blast your eyes! You unlucky cross-eyed whore, you! Another day lost. What did I tell you if it happened again?’

  As he bent down to pick up a stone from the ground she leapt forward, dragging the child with her, and just as she reached the entrance to the street the stone flew past her and ricocheted from the corner of the wall, missing her face by barely an inch.

  She was galloping like a horse, one hand pawing at the air like a flying hoof. The child was screaming in broken gasps, ‘Kir…Kir…sten! Kirsten!’ but she took no heed and kept him running.

  They were on the road above the shore now and below her the fishing boats were swaying like tethered dancers in the wind. There were a number of men on the boats and some on the shore, and they all turned and looked towards the road, not at her or the child, but at the man who was running after them, his yelling unintelligible but nevertheless signifying disaster. And to lose a day’s fishing was disaster indeed!

  She jumped the three steps down from the end of the long road, and although they both fell onto the soft sand the boy screamed out as his arm buckled under him.

  After pulling him to his feet she stood panting, looking down at him, for the moment unable to speak; and then she was rubbing his bare arm and gasping, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Johnnie, but it serves you right. It does, it serves you right. You’ll get us murdered, you will.’ She said us when she meant me.

  She lifted her head almost upright now, then cocked it to one side, and screened her eyes to look back in the direction of the quay—where the men were gathered together.

  Drawing in a long breath, she took the boy’s hand again and hurried along the beach to the far end and around a great jutting rock to where a group of children were seated in a cave.

  The children were as she had left them, each tied by means of a rope around its waist, one end of which was knotted onto a smaller loop of rope; this in turn was hitched over the top of a high black decaying timber, which had once supported a makeshift pier, and kept from slipping by a nail. She had long since devised this means of keeping them together, and they never protested at their restricted liberty.

  Johnnie’s liberty had not always been restricted. But his legs were straight and he liked to run; what was more the taffy shop in the square had become as a magnet to him. This was strange because he had never tasted any of its products. One day, about three months ago, he had run off and discovered the shop. Since then, if she didn’t hang on to him until she had him fastened up he would be away, and today she’d had her hands full with Florrie crying and Annie being sick.

  She now thrust Johnnie down amongst the five children. She did not tie him up; he would not run off again, he was tired and he was holding his arm where it hurt. She sat down on the outskirts of the ring the six of them made, and
she put her hands over her face and rocked herself for a moment. She knew what would happen when she got in; Ma Bradley would have her belted. Her instinct was to rise up and hustle them all back and get it over with, but she mustn’t go back for another two hours yet, not until the sun touched the sea. It was Hop Fuller’s day for visiting and she always had to clear the house when the tinker came, no matter what the weather. She had ceased to wonder why, she only knew that Hop Fuller and Ma Bradley did business, private business.

  When the smallest of the children began to cry, Kirsten dropped her hands from her face and, turning onto her knees, crawled towards the child, muttering, ‘Ssh, Annie! Ssh! What is it?’ But she knew what troubled the child even before Mary said, ‘She wants her bubby pot, Kirsten.’

  Kirsten did not say ‘Well, she’ll have to wait,’ but took the child onto her lap and began to rock her.

  Annie was a girl child, two and a half years old, and her legs were fleshless and bowed. She had never walked, and doubtless never would because she had the rickets bad. Mary and Bob, each aged five, and Ada, three, all had the rickets, but they could walk after a fashion.

  Looking up at Kirsten now, Mary asked quietly, ‘Can’t we go back, Kirsten?’ She didn’t say, ‘go home’, and Kirsten answered, as if to someone as old as herself, ‘You know fine well, Mary, we can’t yet. She’d have your hide.’

  Mary sat looking into the distance. She had the appearance of an old woman, and even her voice sounded mature as she said, ‘Do you think me ma’ll ever come back for me, Kirsten?’ She didn’t turn her head towards Kirsten, but Kirsten looked at her and gulped slightly before answering, ‘Aye, Mary, of course she will. She’s been held up likely; some places you’re in you can only get away once a year, I’m told, on fair days and such. She’s been held up.’

  Mary looked at her now and nodded as if in agreement.