THE RAG NYMPH
Catherine Cookson
Contents
The Catherine Cookson Story
The Rag Nymph
PART ONE One
Two
PART TWO One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
PART THREE One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Twelve
Eleven
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
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 Rag Nymph
In the heat of a late June afternoon in 1854, abandoned by a panic-stricken mother in an all-too-obvious flight from the law, Millie Forester bursts into Aggie Winkowski’s life like a bolt from the blue. Aggie, who was known locally as ‘Raggie Aggie’ for her long-established business of trading in rags and old clothes, knew well enough the dangers waiting for such a strikingly pretty girl left alone in this rough and vice-ridden quarter. She could see no alternative other than to take her in.
But what began as compassionate expediency led to a new relationship that would grow and deepen, moulding Millie’s destiny and giving new meaning to the life of Aggie Winkowski.
Millie Forester’s advance through the coming years to the threshold of womanhood is the core of The Rag Nymph, as gripping and socially concerned an historical novel as Catherine Cookson has ever written. Her superb skills of narrative and characterization provide a spectrum of the good and evil of the Victorian era, frankly confronting the terrible menace of child corruption, which remains a constant issue in our time now as it was then.
Copyright © The Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust 1991
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 978-1-78036-031-7
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 Child
One
The road was narrow. It could be measured by the width of a coach with a man walking at each side, but even so it was wider than the streets and alleys leading off from both sides of it.
It was the last Wednesday in June, 1854. The day had been hot; in fact, the previous week had been very hot and so the roads and streets were paved with ridged flags of mud, hard baked, but not so hard as to prevent their surfaces being skimmed off into dust which, in some streets of the town, seemed to be floating waist high like a mist rising from water.
But Felix Road wasn’t in the main town, nor yet on the outskirts; it was situated to the north of the city and gave its name to the acres of housing that was home to the poor, the destitute and the dregs of humanity. It also housed countless bars and gin shops, as well as a number of churches, chapels and temperance halls, the latter set up, as it were, in opposition to as many brothels.
The members of the various denominations fought hard against the evils and wickedness of drink and immorality, and in this they were aided by the Constabulary. However, the law, it would seem, was not so much concerned with those who drank as with those who sold their bodies for gain.
It was five-thirty in the evening, and there were still very few people to be seen on Felix Road. It would be different at six o’clock when the surrounding mills spewed out their weary and gin-thirsty humanity. But now, along the middle of it came an old woman pushing a handcart on which was a pile of rags. She and the cart were half covered by the shadow of the buildings on her left; but further back up the road, walking deep in the shadow, was a young woman holding a child by the hand. Yet so striking was the colour of the child’s hair and of that which showed beneath the flat straw hat of the woman as to appear like distorted jogging lights in the dimness.
Then an odd thing happened. At the sight of a man approaching from a distance the woman seemed about to thrust the child against the wall but, changing her mind, she walked forward again, and she spoke to the man.
From the way he gesticulated the man was apparently upbraiding her, and when he lifted his arm and signalled to someone behind her she gripped the child by the hand and ran.
The rag woman was turning her handcart into a narrow alley when the child was almost flung against it, the young woman crying, ‘Go home! Go home!’ even as she continued to run.
Agnes Winkowski turned from the frightened child clinging on to the side of her handcart and looked back to watch two men of the law speeding after the woman. The sight was not an unusual one. Hardly a day went by but she saw some lass or other picked up by them snots. However, what she couldn’t understand was why any lass on the make would be lugging a child around with her.
She now looked at the child, saying, ‘Was that your ma?’
The little girl made a movement with her head but did not speak.
‘D’you know your way home?’
Again the same movement, but now the voice came out in squeaks, saying, ‘But Mama has the key.’
Mama, she called her mother. Not Ma, but Mama…‘Where d’you live?’
‘Nelson Close…the bottom.’
Nelson Close? Well, there were worse places than Nelson Close. But still, it was on the fringe of The Courts, with only the railway line separating it from Salford.
She took up the handles of the handcart and began to push it, and now there was room only for the child to walk by the side of it. And this she did, holding on for support to the iron rail that rimmed the wooden edge of the cart and which helped to keep the rags in place.
The alley opened out into a large square courtyard from which, on all sides, reared five-storey buildings, all in a state of dilapidation, and outside of each was a mound of filth and rubbish, some giving off a stench which left nothing to the imagination as to from what it was derived.
As the old woman pushed the handcart across the yard a number of children scampered from various heaps to gather around her, gabbling. But the gabble was such that the child couldn’t distinguish what it was they wanted, until the old woman cried, ‘No candy rock today! ’Tis all gone, all gone,’ at which, one after the other, the children, as if at a signal, stopped gabbling and took up the chant: ‘Raggie Aggie! Raggie Aggie! Baggie Aggie! Baggie Aggie! Lousy Loppy Aggie! Narrow old bugger Aggie!’
The old woman seemed not to hear the children, yet on leaving The Courts to pass through another narrow alleyway, she bitterly emitted one word: ‘Scum!’ Then as they emerged into a street she looked down at the child, and nodding backwards, she said, ‘It saves ten minutes of pushing that way
.’
She now pulled the handcart to a halt and, looking at the child, said, ‘Well, what you gonna do, love?’
‘I don’t know.’ The child’s voice had a tremor in it.
‘Got any neighbours…I mean, that you could go to?’
‘No. Mama doesn’t have neighbours, not there. It…it was in the cellar.’
‘What was in the cellar?’
‘Where…where we lived. It’s…it’s down the steps.’
Aggie looked closely at the child. Her hair was hanging almost to her small waist and it was of a colour she had never seen before, not around these quarters anyway. Fair-headed little ’uns, but none like this one. Then there were the child’s eyes, grey, clear, large and at this moment expressing fear, if she had ever seen it. The rest of the face matched the eyes and the cream blush-tinted skin. She was a bonny young ’un, right enough, and from a bonny mother, from what she had glimpsed of that lass as she skidded down the road with the pollis after her. She must be on the game, all right. But why take the child with her? That would put any bloke off, surely. Or did she use her an’ all? Oh, no, no; she wouldn’t want to think that. And yet, look at all the old buggers that would sell their souls for a little bit of humanity like this one. Kit’s brothel down there was noted for it; and the dirty old customers, and not so old, some of them, came in their carriages, but after dark, of course. Why didn’t the bloody pollis get on to him and clear his place out? They had cleared Paper Meg’s out last week. But then, that was nothing; they all knew she would start up some place else. But the churchmen had to be satisfied; hoodwinked would be a better word…
‘Please…’
‘Yes, love?’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘Come with me?’ Aggie looked from the child to the heap of rags, then down at the mountain of clothes covering her own body. She smelt; the contents of the cart smelt; the cart itself was impregnated with stench; and here was this gleaming child, yes, aye, that was a word to describe her, she gleamed, and she was asking to come along with her. Well, if she said no, what would happen to her? Oh, she had a pretty good idea: she only needed to go back to Felix Road or even Nelson Close, where she said she lived, to find out. Poor little bugger.