Colour Blind by Catherine Cookson

So one of the interesting things about Cookson is that her life was as dramatic and engrossing as one of her novels.

So often in this podcast, we do a little bit about the author biog, but we don't kind of do a lot of that other books really based on her life.

But with Cookson, they really were.

And there were lots of elements of the novel we're talking about today that relate to things that did happen to her.

So we're going to do a bit of that.

And if you're really interested in that, I really recommend Kathleen Jones's biography of Cookson, which is an absolute rip-roarer of a book.

I learned so much and it's just a brilliant, fascinating story.

But Richard is going to introduce us to Catherine's life.

Yes, I mean, there is a lot of life, isn't there? And we'll come back to other bits of it, I think, as we go through the podcast.

But just to give a kind of brief summary of it, she was born, as I'm sure a lot of people here will know, but she was born as Catherine McMullen from an Irish migrant family.

And she was born, of course, in Tyndock in South Shields, not that far from where we are.

in a two-bedroom terrace in an area that was sort of settled by, mainly by Irish, largely by Irish immigrants.

Born in 1906, which interestingly puts her in the age group around similar sort of birth dates, would be W.H. Auden, Daphne du Maurier and George Orwell, which I think probably gives a sense of what a longevity she had, really, because...

You know, she was still current and books were published after she died when she was 91.

So she kind of had that, you know, she feels like somebody who spanned several decades and after those people's era, really.

The time, Doc, as again, as I'm sure people here know better than I do, would have been in decline then.

in the time when she was growing up there.

Her grandfather and uncle worked there.

She described it as a graveyard of industrial hope.

Millions of tons of coal flowed through it.

And although the river today is relatively clean, salmon in it famously, At the time, it would not have been clean.

It was fouled by effluent from the mines, chemical factories, soap factories, dye works, and so on.

So, obviously, that industrial setting was obviously very important to her, but...

More important probably was the fact that her mum was unmarried and Catherine, as she would describe herself, was illegitimate.

And she grew up unaware of that and not knowing anything about her dad until she was seven years old.