Wild bears didn’t scare off my intrepid sister
MY SISTER was three when I was born and she cheerfully took on the role of ‘Mum’ to the new baby in the family.
our own mother worked long hours in a mill so it was often down to Kath to get me dressed and take me to school.
Later, she told me her biggest worry was that I would fall down the well where we used to fetch our water — it was just a hole in the ground so it would have been easily done.
Growing up in the thirties in Halifax in west Yorkshire meant there wasn’t much work for our Dad, so Kath did what she could to help.
She’d set her heart on training as a nurse but left school at 16 to work in an office.
Her chance to fulfil her dreams came later, after she met and married her husband thomas, and they moved to Sunderland where Kath started training in a fever hospital. It was babies she loved, though — on top of having four of her own she moved into midwifery, as a district midwife in Durham.
She always said she liked going to council houses best as they always had a cup of tea waiting. the vicars, meanwhile, never did!
Later she became chief nursing officer at South Shields Maternity Hospital and she would have stayed there until her dying day if she could.
But she was let go — ‘shoved out’ as she called it — while only in her 50s.
She did various jobs to keep herself busy, from babysitting to housekeeping. But in her early 60s she got a virulent cancer that would have killed a lesser person.
She lost half her stomach, her gall bladder, bile duct and half her pancreas. As if that wasn’t bad enough she became infected with a hepatitis virus from contaminated blood. the brush with death was a wake-up call for both of us, and in 1988 we took ourselves off on a 44-day round-the-world trip.
Afterwards, I joked that our trip should have been called ‘washing round the world’ as Kath was so fond of doing her laundry at every opportunity. At a lovely hotel in Honolulu, she marked their Laundromat down as their ‘best feature’ in the questionnaire they left us!
on another holiday to Banff in Canada, she had me trekking through woods — where bears roamed freely — to reach a distant campsite laundry. when we arrived it was closed. Kath was most upset.
Sadly, towards the end of her life Kath got dementia and no longer knew who I was. Sleep tight big sister.
KATHLEEN CASSAP, born November 10, 1929, died May 7, 2017, aged 87.