Patrick Gale is the author of 17 novels, most recently A Place Called Winter. He lives in Cornwall.
Your new novel is based loosely on the life of your great-grandfather. Why did you choose to write about him?
The bare bones of the story are true. Harry Cane, my great-grandfather, left his wife and daughter and emigrated to Canada. He came back to England in the 1950s and his daughter, my grandmother, wouldn’t take him in, and clearly felt guilty about that. So I thought maybe there was a cloud of disapproval around him. The family had totally cut him off after he left.
You’ve invented the scandal of a gay relationship as the reason for his departure. What inspired that idea?
There was a mythology about “cowboy grandpa” and I was always suspicious – I thought, why would you call someone a cowboy when they’re just a farmer? Are you trying to make him more acceptable in some way? When I started digging into it I felt something didn’t ring true, so all I did was to project in the gay material as a way of making that comprehensible to me. But those stories did happen – often with the upper middle classes the idea was to avoid scandal and so, rather than being arrested, gay men would be hurried off to the colonies.
This is your first novel since Rough Music that’s had a gay relationship at the centre. Did you decide to move away from obviously “gay” stories to broaden your readership?
No, I’ve always followed my own curiosity about what I wanted to write. I was never interested in writing books that were just about a gay ghetto, because that wasn’t my experience. I always have gay and lesbian characters in my books, otherwise they wouldn’t feel realistic to me. But I have masses of women readers; I think women hold up two-thirds of the fiction-reading sky. The elusive readers are the men, although I hope this book is going to attract some male readers because on one level it’s a western and has a strong thriller element.
Do you remember the book that made you want to be a writer?
I had a very old-fashioned education. My father regarded Dickens as a children’s author, so I read a lot of Dickens when I was too young to appreciate how good he was, but I’ve never forgotten the excitement of discovering George Eliot, whom I go back to time and again. It was Eliot who made me realise just how powerful fiction can be; not just the enormous social range but it can recreate on the page a whole psychological history. She was a huge influence. But I was an omnivore – I think I learned as much from trash as I did from high art.
Was there a book that meant a lot to you because it reflected your experience growing up?
Probably Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, and Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran. I read both of those when I was 14, very much under the covers, although I think my mother would have looked at them and not known what they were about. They didn’t reflect my life because they were American, but they gave me something to dream about. I was convinced I was going to move to New York or San Francisco. But I ended up moving to rural Cornwall, which is about as far away as you can get.
Your husband is a farmer. Are you hands-on with the farming?
When I’m allowed to be – I’m the cattle boy because those are the jobs that need two men. But I love having that aspect of my life alongside the writing. Writing can be so unhealthily internalised and sedentary, and it means I can help out when I want and do something outdoorsy and physical.
What are you working on next?
I’m writing two original dramas for the BBC, about the changing experience of gay men, one set in the 1940s and one in the present. Music is a huge part of my life too; I play the cello and the novel I’m going to write next is about a cellist. I’ve written about music before, but I’m very interested in the transformative power of music, particularly amateur music making. The joy of playing with an orchestra again is so intense – we probably sound dreadful but I don’t care, I just love it. If I had my way, it would be compulsory in all schools.
A Place Called Winter is published by Tinder Press (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.59
