Revealed: the secret memoir that exposes Catherine Cookson’s decades of torment
HER stories of illicit love and class struggle in her native North East made her one of the country’s best-loved authors.
Now previously undiscovered memoirs written by Dame Catherine Cookson towards the end of her life reveal she endured more hardship and heartbreak than any of her heroines.
In her memoirs, extracts of which are published in n The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine today, the author wrote movingly about the four miscarriages that blighted her marriage to husband Tom, the nervous breakdown that nearly destroyed her, and the ‘friend’ who aimed bitter jealousy and hatred towards her.
Cookson, who sold more than 120 million books, including bestsellers The Mallen series and The Fif- teen Streets, recalled the miscarriage at six months of her second child, whom she had planned to call Valentine. She wrote: ‘He didn’t get the chance of a life. I wonder if God looks after babies of six months. I absolutely refuse to believe that they go into limbo. He wasn’t allowed a grave because he wasn’t baptised. I felt so indignant for he had looked so sweet the first and only time I saw him.’
After Cookson suffered the loss of a third baby, she began to show early symptoms of a nervous breakdown that would consume the next 12 years of her life.
She wrote: ‘The form my breakdown took was aggression. I wanted to do something terrible in payment for what had been dealt out to me in my 39 years. My mind was now a hell filled with hate, fear and a desire for retaliation. I lost all feeling of love; even my feelings for Tom went. I had to tell him so, but the man he was, he understood.
‘I was in the continuing depths of the breakdown and fighting fear every minute of the day behind forced laughter.’
Cookson, who died aged 91 in 1998, recalled the moment a male member of hospital staff told her that she would never have children. The author, then aged 42, had asked if she might successfully carry a baby to term if she remained in bed for the entire nine months.
‘Don’t be silly woman, you’re past it,’ he yelled at her. ‘Even if you weren’t, you know there’s no chance.’
‘I burned with anger as I cried with humiliation,’ she wrote.
The memoirs also reveal how the jealousies of a mother-figure friend she called ‘ Nan’ led to threats of suicide and years of hatred after Cookson’s marriage in 1940.
‘My mind was now a hell filled with hate’