Seeking Catherine Cookson's 'Da

by Kathleen Jones

This is a real life detective story, tracking down the missing father of one of Britain's most famous authors - the father she didn't want anyone to know about! Best selling author Catherine Cookson created a profoundly affecting literature out of the personal tragedies of her working class upbringing and early life in the industrial North East. Her biographer gives this account of her search to discover the truth of Cookson's childhood and the mystery of her father's identity. As the story unfolds, the reader is led to a deeper understanding of the demons that drove Cookson to become one of the most popular novelists of her day. It is a story of terrible poverty, of harsh lessons learnt generation after generation, but also of hope and eventual reconciliation.

196 pages, Hardcover

First published May 27, 2004

About the author

I was brought up on a remote hill farm in the English Lake District. I started writing as a teenager, publishing small pieces in local magazines and newspapers, fanzines and teenage mags such as ‘Jackie’. I married very early and started travelling the world with my husband, had four children, worked in broadcasting in the middle east, and became a single parent. Back in the UK I went to university as a mature student, and wrote my first book which I was lucky enough to have published by Bloomsbury. Since then I’ve managed to (almost!) make a living as a writer, teaching creative writing pt-time to pay the bills.

I’ve probably made it sound easy, but it wasn’t. I know I’ve been incredibly lucky to be published and to be able to share what I love doing most with other people. Now I live with a sculptor who is working in Italy and so I spend as much time there as I can. It’s a bit of a scramble sometimes - a crazy life - but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Reviews

[Kathleen Jones]

This is the sequel to Catherine Cookson, The Biography. I had a deadline for the biography and couldn't spend the time I needed researching the identity of Catherine's mysterious father. She fantasised as a child (like many illegitimate children) that he had been an aristocrat in the big house where her mother worked as a maid. As an adult author she allowed readers to share her fantasy and denied publicly that she had any clue to his identity. But his name 'Alexander Davies' was on her birth certificate and Catherine finally admitted in two interviews that she knew who he was and that he wasn't someone she could be proud of. Her novel The Gambling Man, written just after the death of her mother, proved to be closest to the truth. Catherine says in her memoirs and the tapes she left behind that she and her mother talked about the missing Alexander while Catherine nursed her mother through terminal cancer.

I spent a year going through the records looking for Alexander Davies and, although I found his death certificate, I couldn't find a birth certificate or marriage certificate for him. Tracing him back through the electoral rolls I finally found other relatives and people he had lived beside and discovered his other identity. Alexander Davies Pate. He was born, one of 11 children, in a small mining community in southern Scotland. Like the hero of The Gambling Man, Alexander lived by gambling. He was famously handsome, a terrible womaniser with the charisma and 'gift of the gab' that his daughter Catherine inherited. But he was also a bigamist, marrying a young woman when she was almost 9 mths pregnant and later abandoning her and the three children they had together. Catherine was probably only one of his illegitimate children. Later, as Alexander Davies, he married someone else and (having abandoned all his own children) adopted the child of his wife's sister. Alexander suffered the same rare, hereditary disease as Catherine and it was also passed on to his other children. The link, ironically, can be proved by the same genetic research study that Catherine herself funded at the University of Newcastle.

[Fran · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was good. I always enjoy Catherine Cookson. Her work is comforting because she is a master of telling it all, telling it clearly and not romanticizing hardships. I just love her and think the world is a better place because of her and her writing.

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really like Catherine Cookson's books, but this book was awful. Too many details, rambles and confusing....