My Land of the North [antikvár]

Foreword by Tom Cookson Catherine at a fencing lesson in the 1930s, around the lime she first met her future husband, Tom. 'How do you do?' 'Do you fence?' I was being introduced by my landlady to her daughter Kitty McMullen; and I can still hear those words being spoken. The voice was strong; it was vibrant with life. I had heard nothing like it before. No, I hadn't overlooked that this girl, this woman, was beautiful; but it was the personality through the voice that was affecting me. The next day, on a trumped-up excuse, I called her at home. Would she like to go to the pictures? Yes, she would. From then on, the more I saw of her the more I reflected: my landlady was a working-class woman from the North East. Nothing surprising in that. Yet her daughter was living in no, was the owner of what had been described by the estate agent as a 'gentleman's residence'; and what is more, she spoke in a manner which, in those days, would have been said befitted such a residence. Her voice sounded cultured: she articulated correctly; there was no deliberate effort whatsoever about her pronunciation. And there was something else strange to my ear, a lilt or inflection, an inheritance from the North, that added to its charm, at least for me. From that very first meeting we have