Two Katherines and grey weather

It's grey here in northern England at the moment.  The air tastes of snow and there's what - in Scotland - they call "a lazy wind" - lazy because it goes straight through you instead of going round!  The Mill is very damp, having been uninhabited for a while, and it takes a few days for the heating to get a grip on the thick stone walls.

My trip back home is proving unexpectedly busy.  Before I was even off the train I was being rung up by BBC producers wanting to talk about Catherine Cookson. Not having seen the UK newspapers for a while, I had no idea why and had to Google the subject.   'Catherine Cookson Country' is, apparently, to be abolished.  The inhabitants are shocked and horrified.  The novelist's sales have slumped since her death (inevitably), and she isn't the household name she once was,  but the landscape Catherine Cookson wrote about and made famous is still associated with her, even though the tour buses don't come in their hundreds as they once did. 
Apparently the tourist board in the north east have decided that 'Catherine Cookson Country' is not how they want to market the area at all, that it gives a negative image and they want to advertise their beaches instead.   Catherine would have been furious with rejection. And it does seem to be a curious decision.  The north east of England has some of the most beautiful beaches in Britain, but add in the Catherine Cookson connection and it definitely gives them an edge - beauty and books.    Like the Bronte's Haworth and Du Maurier's Cornwall, Jarrow and South Shields will always be Catherine Cookson's country, even if they take the signs down.

So this morning I'm talking about CC on Radio 4, and then this afternoon I'm 'doing' the Wordsworth Trust's Arts and Books festival talking about Katherine Mansfield and the Dorothy Wordsworth connection.  Let's hope I don't get the two C/Katherine's confused!

Cookson in Christchurch

I'm now here in Christchurch, in alternating sunshine and bitter showers, and working hard on a Preface for a book of scholarly essays on the novels of Catherine Cookson, though it seems a rather odd location!  It's quite a long time since I wrote my biography of Cookson (1999) , although I wrote a sequel in 2003.   But it's one of the interesting things about writing biography that the people you write about never leave your life, but continue to follow you around.   Catherine Cookson was a big part of my life for five or six years. I still own small objects that used to belong to her, have tapes on the shelf  that once recorded her voice - strong, vibrant, rather low-pitched with that instantly recognisable 'Geordie' accent.  I have her birth certificate, her wedding certificate and a traycloth embroidered by a fan as an anniversary present.  We have other oddments too, the result of an amazing stroke of luck.  When Catherine's belongings were auctioned off after her death, I couldn't afford to buy any of the memorabilia and most of the really interesting material was already earmarked for museums and archives.  But Neil bought a couple of carrier bags of electronic bits and pieces from the Cookson garage. The miscellany inside them included Tom's camera, the family slide projector and a whole collection of slides - intimate photographs of Catherine and her houses, which we still own.
The tapes were another surprising windfall.  I knew that her first agent, John Smith, had written a biography authorised by Catherine herself, which had never appeared.  But it proved impossible to trace him, as he had retired and it seemed no one in the Cookson camp wanted me to meet him.  I was invited to Catherine's memorial service and there, by a wonderful coincidence, I met John Smith.  He was an extremely interesting man, who told me that Catherine, who had requested a 'warts and all' biography, had hated the result, which he had agreed to destroy.  He said he would be very happy to talk to me about it.  A few weeks later, a jiffy bag arrived in the post with a collection of tapes which Catherine had recorded for him, talking frankly about her life and discussing areas of it that she had never talked about publicly before.  It was the most remarkable gift for a biographer and it altered the whole character of the book because the tapes revealed the difference between Catherine's actual life and the public version of her autobiography she had always preferred.
She was, without a doubt, one of the 20th centuries most remarkable women.  Born before women's emancipation, an illegitimate child in one of the poorest communities in the western world, given little education, she nevertheless became one of the richest women in Britain, and one of the world's best-selling authors.   
Catherine's vast output of novels and memoirs has always been sneered at by critics and the academic establishment, despite the fact that she created her own genre and wrote some excellent books.  Now a university press in America is giving her the attention she deserves as a writer, rather than just a remarkable woman.  Her stories of the 'social history of the north east' are going to be put into the context of the regional novel, alongside Walpole, Hardy, Scott, Gaskell and many others.  It's a totally new field of research, called 'Cookson Studies'.
I'm finding the Preface difficult though, because my head is so full of  that other Katherine, and I'm not at home in my office with my books and papers around me, but working in a strange library, or on someone's kitchen table.  No point in complaining though  - as a writer you have to meet deadlines whatever is going on in your private life. 
The new book is to be called, Catherine Cookson Country:  On the Borders of Legitimacy and should be available from Ashgate next year (if I ever finish the preface!)

Memory Lines

I've had a birthday while doing battle with the SF virus and it set me thinking about my childhood. Then I read a post on another blog about antecedents and inevitably I began going back through my own family history, digging through boxes of letters and birth certificates, war medals, ration cards and old receipts. My family were hoarders! I'm lucky to have photos of my ancestors and to know quite a lot about their lives. This black and white photograph is of my mother's side of the family, outside a tiny terraced house in North Shields. Several of the younger children in the photo were still alive when I was a child, which makes it more precious.


I grew up first on a croft in the wild border lands between England and Scotland and then on a hill farm in a remote area of the Lake District.


One side of the family was Irish - cattle drovers and horse dealers - the others came from sea faring Italian and Scottish kin, who had settled in a north eastern sea port. Neither side had any money. But what they did have was a love of story telling. My earliest memories are of eavesdropping on grown-up conversations round the fireside, long after I was supposed to be in bed, and hearing them talk about ancestors who went across the sea on sailing ships to bring back cargos of bananas and marry exotic women; of others who drove herds of cattle from Ireland to London; or despaired over errant children, disinherited their offspring and fought bitterly over religion. These were stories they'd learned from their own grandparents. I was aware, even at nine or ten, that I was listening to an unbroken memory line going back two hundred years - stories passing like heirlooms from one generation to another. The tellers seemed to know exactly what great-great-great grandmother Bridie had said to her daughter Frances Theresa when she came home with a baby she wasn’t supposed to have - fathered by a footman at the house where she was in service. The fine rooms, the uniforms, the very porcelain crockery she washed in a lead lined sink were all there in the story, leaping like a hologram in the firelight before my eyes. The account of my great-great uncle Edward who had stood preaching the gospel of temperance outside his father’s pub on a Tyneside quay, was pure Catherine Cookson.

Not surprising that I was addicted to books from the time I could walk - as the photo proves. Fortunately I no longer have the pouter-pigeon tummy!

Films and Fiction

Just watched 'I've Loved you so Long' and feel utterly wrung out emotionally. The story is tragic, but it unfolds with such restraint and economy you simply aren't conscious of having your emotions manipulated by the director - which always has me pressing the off switch! I wasn't surprised to learn afterwards that the director -Philippe Claudel - is also a novelist - the film was made by someone who understands narrative and who isn't afraid of silence. The story was simply told without any filmic or narrative tricks and the viewer was invited to be present in every frame, watching and listening and being allowed to write their own story in the spaces they were given. The ending has been slated by some critics, but I found it tremendously powerful - I wept and wept. The final lines of the film are hugely significant, echoing back through the script. In the prison Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) had been called 'The Absent One', and outside she remains apart, unable to relate - saying at one point to a man who wants to get close 'Give me time, I'm not there yet.' At the end of the film, he comes into the house and calls up the stairs 'Lea? Juliette? Is anybody there?' and she answers - not 'Oui, je suis ici', but 'Oui, je suis là' - 'Yes, I'm there'. This is a film where the words - not just the images - matter.


Tried reading Two Caravans, because I'd enjoyed the Ukrainian Tractors book so much, but began skimming and eventually gave up in disappointment. It's well written, but somehow lifeless. That set me thinking about the second novel and the Two Book Deal. How young writers have been ruined by the insistence of publishers on a quick 'next book' to cash in on the success of the first. Then, when they have disappointing sales, they get dropped. And the only reason there are disappointing sales, very often, is that the second book is not the one the writer would have chosen to write if they'd been given time. When is the book trade going to get back to its roots? Surely it's all about books and readers? You have to value good writing (and know what it is), and give the readers what they enjoy reading. You also have to stretch them a little - surprise them. You also have to invest in nurturing writers without expecting them to be instant best-sellers. Catherine Cookson (one of the best selling authors of all time) didn't publish at all until she was nearly 50 and it took her ten years before she got into paper-back and into the best seller lists. Her books were passed from hand to hand and recommended by one reader to another and gradually her popularity increased. Her publishers must have sleepless nights thinking 'what if?' What if they had cut her off after the second book? Or even the fifth? At her peak Cookson's books and films were bringing in millions a week - as much revenue as a middle eastern oil sheikh!