Patrick Gale owes his editor, the late Patricia Parkin, two distinct debts. She introduced him to the Wexford Opera Festival, about which he and his husband Aidan Hicks, are “obsessive”, attending every year and, in turn, gathering up new enthusiasts. Parkin, who worked with such mega-sellers as Barbara Taylor Bradford and Robert Ludlum, also took Gale on to her list of writers, and gave him an invaluable piece of advice. “The thing about you, Patrick,” he remembers her telling him, “is you skate over the surface. You’re too busy trying to make people like you. And I want you to tell the truth.”
He already had 10 novels under his belt, but Parkin’s intervention, he believes, encouraged him “to write honestly about pain”, and thenceforth – from around the turn of the century, when Rough Music was published – his work has had a much “darker thread” running through it. “And I think that’s about recognising pain and not feeling I have to crack a joke, but actually going in deep. It’s made writing a lot harder, a lot more therapeutic, but a lot more painful to do.”
Rough Music was a story of two seaside holidays, separated by decades, in which intimate groups find themselves strained to breaking point; and, for Gale, it was also breaking new ground.
“I was 40, I think, before I finally wrote a novel that really turned the light on my family and my family experiences,” he explains, and it paid dividends. “It was the first novel of mine that actually made money for my publisher. And so I thought, ‘Oh, well, that didn’t hurt. I’ll do that again.’ And I’ve almost consciously since then been mining my family stories, and I suppose telling the truth.”
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That excavation of family history went several steps further with A Place Called Winter (2015), in which Gale introduced the figure of Harry Cane, a fictional reimagining of his great-grandfather, who left Edwardian England under a mysterious cloud, apparently abandoning his wife and infant daughter to become a wheat farmer in the Canadian prairies. To his descendants, “Cowboy Grandpa” was something of a mythic figure, in whose absence tales of derring-do and wilderness living seemed to multiply. But in Gale’s fiction, he acquired a vivid personality and an identity that explained many of the silences embedded in his story. Gale imagined him banished from London after the discovery of his homosexuality, painstakingly starting anew in unfamiliar and inhospitable terrain, and finally finding love with a neighbouring farmer.
It was a bravura piece of historical writing, Gale’s first foray into the genre; and for all that he seemed to have invented Cane’s story, it was backed up with solid research – the prairies, it emerges, were an entirely likely place for well-to-do families scared of scandal to send those who threatened to tarnish their image.
Now comes Love Lane, which continues Harry’s story, and expands it to include the daughter he left behind, in reality Gale’s maternal grandmother. Had he always envisaged a second act? “I always knew I would go back,” he replies. “The funny thing was, though, I had completely forgotten until I started work on Love Lane that I’d planned it all along. All my papers get taken away by the university archive at Falmouth and saved there. I wanted to look something up to do with ages and dates at the end of A Place Called Winter before I could start planning Love Lane. So I went to Falmouth, and I got the manuscript out of the archive and, bless me, at the back of the notebook for A Place Called Winter, there is the whole of the plot of Love Lane, virtually. It’s all there.”
The novel starts brutally: Harry’s lover, with whom he has enjoyed many years of mutual devotion, albeit under the cloak of secrecy, unexpectedly marries; shortly afterwards, he dies. Grief-stricken, and soon impoverished as well, Harry begins a correspondence with his daughter, Betty, now married to a prison governor and a mother of two daughters herself. Almost on a whim, Harry decides to go and visit her and her family at their prison house in Liverpool.
This much is true to the facts. “I knew Harry came back to England in 1952, and I knew he was sent back the same year and that he died not that long afterwards. And I loved my mother and father and my grandparents, and it’s an appalling thing they did, really. So on one level, Love Lane is a bit like a whodunnit, in that I had to write it to work out just why he didn’t stay, why they didn’t hang on to him.”
The really sad thing was that given the ignorance of the period that was still prevalent, my mother assumed he was a paedophile. So she never left him alone with me when I was a baby or a toddler. He adored his children ... But she never ever left him alone with me, ever
— Patrick Gale
One answer is that, although they forge a workable, and often affectionate relationship, father and daughter are essentially strangers to one another, and the subject of Harry’s sexuality remains concealed (though not to the reader, who is treated to some of Harry’s more fleeting encounters on board the ship to England, and on late-night walks in Liverpool). The other is that Betty and her husband Terry are exemplars of British postwar society, in which ensuring future stability took precedence over introspection and self-exploration.
Going through family letters, Gale was struck by their cheerfulness, and the “sort of fantasy land” they invoked; his mother’s, for example, are filled with drawings of beautiful skirts and hairstyles, and he still has stacks of her copies of Vogue from the time.
“The early 1950s, in a way, was the last period when men and women were still living really separate lives, and married men and women were keeping things from each other because that was the done thing. So just as wives were advised not to talk about their husbands’ jobs because that wouldn’t help them relax, so husbands were often told not to tell their wives when the wives were seriously ill. It’s a very odd period; they’ve been through two world wars in living memory, and the country is teetering on this revolution we know is coming in terms of social change and feminism, but there’s something intensely fragile about it and quite sweet really. It’s almost romantic, this attempt that they’re all making to keep things nice.”
But there are consequences to turning your face from things you don’t want to see. In the 2017 television drama Man in an Orange Shirt, and again in Love Lane, Gale explores the crisis unleashed in his parents’ marriage when his mother discovered a cache of love letters written to his father by another man. At the time, she was pregnant with Gale, the youngest of four children, and about to move the family to the Isle of Wight, where Gale’s father, like his grandfather, was to take charge of a prison.
“She was completely terrified,” says Gale. Fearing that her husband would himself be jailed, she immediately destroyed the letters and – even more shockingly – never told Gale’s father that she had found them. Thereafter, the couple never again shared a bed, “probably with relief on either side”, thinks the author.
“But the really sad thing was that given the ignorance of the period that was still prevalent, she assumed that this meant that he was a paedophile. So she never left him alone with me when I was a baby or a toddler. He adored his children; he loved helping at bath times and things like that. But she never ever left him alone with me, ever.”
I should be so lucky to have a 20-something reader. I live in hope
— Patrick Gale
It meant that Gale didn’t have a meaningful relationship with his father until much later: “There was something about him that never made sense to me, I just couldn’t understand his extreme emotional withdrawal from everything.” He assumed that his father was depressed, but when his mother told him about her discovery of the letters when Gale was 21, “suddenly it all made sense. I never told him, because we’re that kind of family – we don’t tell each other. But it made me much closer to him, because suddenly I understood. And I thought, ‘Well, of course, you’re withdrawn. You’re terrified of anything leaking out, and you don’t want it to show.’”
In spite of these painful repressions, the Gales were a happy and loving family. I ask how his parents reacted to his own homosexuality. “It saddened my mother enormously, initially, because she assumed I’d be sad and lonely, and wouldn’t give her grand-babies. Well, she never got the grand-babies, but I wasn’t sad and lonely. But actually they were very sweet and supportive. And in fact, my older brother was rather miffed that my father gave me a share of the family silver when I first set up home with another man, at a point when he had yet to give my brother anything. And my brother had been married for years!”
He credits the arrival of equal marriage with giving older generations a way to relate to their gay children through an institution they understand, with all its domestic and social traditions; he teases his mother-in-law that up to that point, she stumbled when introducing him, but now proudly reveals her son-in-law. How hard does he think it is to convey this level of societal change to younger readers?
“I should be so lucky to have a 20-something reader,” he laughs. “I live in hope. And if I get any and they read my work, I’m very lucky, and I hope that it maybe gets them thinking and reading more about the past. All you can do is write the best novel you can.”
And he’ll continue to do so, in between tending the spectacular garden that he and Aidan, who is a sculptor as well as a farmer, have created on their beef and barley farm near Land’s End in Cornwall. Right now, it’s a rush to get the garden in order for its public opening in June, as well as planning for a book tour that will see him attend several literary festivals in Ireland. And then it’s back to writing, and this time a contemporary novel; but it surely won’t be long before he returns to the family archives and to more home truths.
Love Lane is published by Tinder Press on March 26th
