The Fen Tiger (The House on the Fens) Read online

  THE FEN TIGER

  Catherine Cookson

  Table of Contents

  The Catherine Cookson Story

  The Fen Tiger

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  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 Fen Tiger

  Deep in the wild fen country, Rosamund Morley lived a cloistered, poverty-stricken existence with her sister Jennifer and her alcoholic father. She was the prop and stay of the family—and it was she who ran for help the night her father set his bed alight after a drinking bout.

  That night was to change the course of Rosamund’s life—for, fleeing through the woods, she met Michael Bradshaw, the man she christened the ‘Fen Tiger’. When she knew more of Michael’s past and the fate that had forced him to live in isolation, Rosamund’s initial feelings of dislike slowly changed to compassion…and then to something deeper….

  Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1963

  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 1988

  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 978-1-78036-048-5

  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

  Chapter One

  Rosamund Morley was dreaming; she was dreaming that she was putting her signature to the bottom of a document and this document concerned Heron Mill. She was not buying the mill—it was being made over to her as a deed of gift, and the donor on this particular occasion was her uncle. Sometimes, when she dreamed this dream, it was her cousin Clifford who would be the donor, and not only would she be getting the house but him too, not as a deed of gift but as a husband, and she looked forward to this part of the dream.

  This dream was as familiar to Rosamund as was the room in which she slept. It usually occurred during the early part of her sleep, and had she wakened one morning and told herself she’d never had her dream she would have been surprised and perhaps a little apprehensive—she always had her dream.

  Tonight the pattern of the dream was as usual—at least up to a point. She signed the document, she kissed her uncle (it was her uncle who was bestowing the gift tonight), then, turning from him, she ran out of the sitting room, through the low hall and to the top step leading down from the front door. There, below her, lay the garden that separated the house from the river bank. The river was narrow at this point, being merely a cut meandering off Brandon Creek, but it still needed a ferry to cross it. She could not see the little red boat below the bank, but the sunlight glinting on the chain picked out its moorings, on both sides of the river. The dream was still keeping to pattern: one minute she was standing on the steps of the house, the next she was climbing the wheelhouse inside the old draining mill itself. When she reached the top she ran out on to the rickety balcony, and, standing within an arm’s length of the decaying wooden slats of one of the sails, she threw her head back and laughed with pure joy. From this point she could see the world—her world. Except for the little wood across the river on the Thornby land the earth was flat as far as the eye could see. There were great tracts of yellow, and red, and brown, and patches of black, such black that no artist could have captured the depth, and intersecting the colours ran silver ribbons—the rivers. Far to the left of her the silver ribbon was broken by the high banks of weeds, that was Brandon Creek. To the right of her, away, away right, the silver was very faint, for the banks of the River Wissey were high, even wooded in parts. Then right opposite to her was the Great Ouse. Two hours run down the Brandon, but only six miles as the eye went over the top of Thornby House, the main river ran towards the sea, delayed only by Denver Sluice itself.

  At this point in her dream she would drag her eyes from the landscape and call out. Whether she saw him or not she would call out, ‘Hello, Andrew,’ and on her shout Andrew would appear. He would be sitting on his tractor in the middle of one of his fields and would shout back ‘Hello there, Rosie.’

  Although the nearest Andrew Gordon’s land approached the mill was a mile away where it met the boundary of the Thornby land, Andrew and the tractor would appear in the dream to be just down below her. She would lean now through the decaying struts in the old mill wheel and laugh down on Andrew, but at this point he would not be alone, for her sister Jennifer would be sitting perched up high beside him. She would wave to them both before turning and running down the rickety stairs again, filled with such happiness that the feeling was almost unbearable, even in a dream. Jennifer had Andrew, and she had Heron Mill.

  When she reached the foot of the winding stairs she knew she would be greeted by her father and that she would wave the deed of gift gaily above his head. True to pattern, she was greeted by her father, but the dream from this point changed. Instead of having the document in her hand, she saw it was in her father’s hand and he had set a match to the corner of it, and as the thick dry paper crackled, the smoke obliterated him from her sight and she heard herself screaming, ‘Don’t! Oh, Father, don’t! Don’t! You don’t know what you’re doing.’ And then her hands were on him and she was struggling with him to retrieve the remnants of the paper.

  ‘Rosie! Rosie! Wake up, do you hear?’

  She was sitting up in bed, being gripped by Jennifer’s hands while she herself had hold of her sister’s shoulders.

  ‘What…what’s the matter?’

  ‘Wake up! Get up! Oh, Rosie, wake up! The house will be in flames in a minute.’

  Rosamund was on her feet. ‘Where…where is it?’

  ‘Father—his bed’s smouldering. I tried to wake him—I nearly choked—I couldn’t get him off.’

  Rosamund, ahead of Jennifer and on the landing now, was met by a wave of smoke coming along the passage from the open door at the end.

  Just as a few minutes earlier in her dream she had groped towards him, now, in reality, she was doing the same.

  ‘Father! Father! Wake up. Wake…’ She coughed and spluttered as she swallowed deeply of the smoke. Then, motioning to Jennifer, she gasped, ‘Pull him off.’

  Together they pulled the heavy inert form on to the floor, then, backing towards the door, they dragged him on to the landing.

  Kneeling by his side and holding the tousled grey head between her hands, Rosamund pleaded as she looked down into the white face, ‘Oh, wake up! Father! Father! Wake up!’ She looked quickly at her sister. ‘He’s breathing all right…Look!’ She cast her eye along the passage. ‘Shut that door a minute. No, wait!’ She laid her father’s hea
d gently on the floor. ‘We’ll have to throw it out—the mattress.’

  As they heaved the smouldering mattress from the bed and struggled with it towards the window, Rosamund could not help being amazed at the fact that the whole thing wasn’t in flames, for it was burning to the touch. The window was narrow, and, although the mattress was only a single one, they had a job to get it through, and an exclamation of horror was dragged from them both as, with the first draught of air, it burst into flames.

  ‘Oh God! It might have…’ Rosamund closed her eyes for a moment before turning swiftly towards the landing again.

  Henry Morley was still lying in the same position and the two girls stood looking down at him helplessly.

  ‘He could die like this,’ Jennifer said.

  ‘Oh, be quiet!’ Rosamund’s voice was curt.

  ‘Well, what are we going to do? We can’t lift him.’

  ‘We’ll have to try. You take his legs.’

  As Rosamund put her arms under her father’s shoulders and attempted to heave him upwards, and Jennifer raised his legs slightly from the ground, it was evident to them both that they could do nothing but drag him.

  ‘It’s no good.’

  No, it was no good. As Rosamund lowered her father to the floor again she said, ‘Well, something’s got to be done. I’d better go for Andrew. I’ll phone for the doctor from there. Andrew will come back with me. That’s if he has returned from the show. Oh, I hope he has.’

  ‘Blast this leg!’

  This remark seemed irrelevant to the situation, but Jennifer always used it, in times of crisis, and Rosamund said sharply now, ‘Stop that!’ She was speaking as if she were the elder of the two, whereas she was two years younger than her sister. But it was she who had for many years taken the lead in the small family. She knew too at this moment that if Jennifer had not been handicapped with her limp, an almost imperceptible limp it must be admitted, she would have had no taste for running across the fen at night, even with the moon full. And so she said quickly now, ‘Get some blankets out of the cupboard; it’s warm, but you never know. I’ll take the Tilley.’ She turned to where a Tilley lantern was glowing on a little table near the wall. They had made a practice of always keeping the lantern alight for just such an emergency as had occurred. At times Rosamund had been very tempted to save on the oil, but she was glad now that economy had not driven her to this false move.