Blog: 'This in so many words...' - Tracy Gillman

Hello, Kitty Dear!

How are you?

Is it true that you are writing?

How clever

To come all this way

From your background of drink

And fighting,

And, really, no education!

My dear, how you must have worked.

And, of course, to you all the glory.

But tell me,

Did you get 

Some educated person

To edit for you

Your story?

This in so many words, was actually said to me

                                            Catherine Cookson (Just a Saying )

The Cold Boat project has received funding from the Catherine Cookson Foundation to continue our work on Poetry of Witness with our website, blog, new archive, pop-up events, podcasts and workshops. We aim to feed into the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts programme, with a presence on their main website and responsive events which reflect and engage in a discourse with the poets and writers invited to read at the NCLA.

But what of Catherine Cookson, our benefactor? How does she fit into an iteration of Poetry of Witness? We have been thinking about and discussing this, Cookson wrote poetry and in particular we have been looking at the anthology she published as her final work entitled Just A Saying, from which the above poem 'Hello, Kitty Dear' is taken. 

A phenomenally popular writer she began her life in South Shields in extreme poverty, brought up by her grandparents and believing her unmarried mother to be her sister; her absent father was a bigamist and gambler. Cookson left school at fourteen and entered domestic service, a common trajectory for the working women of the North East.  In 1929, she moved south and began running the laundry at the Hastings Workhouse, and saved hard enough to eventually buy her own home and take in lodgers. At the age of thirty-five she married Tom Cookson, a teacher at Hastings Grammar School, she suffered four miscarriages late in her pregnancies, after these traumas it was discovered she was suffering from a rare vascular disease which causes bleeding from the nose, fingers and stomach and results in anaemia, an acute physical and mental breakdown followed from which it took her a decade to recover.

That seems to us to be a lot of witness to deal with and although it persists within a personalised forum, we are interested in all manner of oppression and how writers, particularly in this instance female and those who identify as female, express their experience of social, psychological, physical, emotional and creative subjugation both in what they write and what persists of these pressures in silence and omission.

We are planning a future event which engages with some of Cookson’s writing, both to honour the use of her legacy to fund The Cold Boat activities and to begin to place Cookson within an alternate and woman-centred tradition, particularly with a scholarly emphasis within gender studies investigating previously over-looked, so-called low and middle brow feminine creative output and its place in the archive as an iteration of female experience throughout the ages.