All Families Have Secrets - Patrick Gale's Art of Fiction

I think every family has turbulence

lurking just below the peaceful surface.

I find when I bring characters down here to the ocean's edge,

it releases something in them.

Secrets and desires seem to tumble out.

Patrick Gale is one of Britain's best-selling novelists.

He's known for stories set around the Cornish coast,

exploring psychologically complicated families,

often based on his own relations.

I've been reading his novels since the late 1980s.

Back then, he was known as a rare example

of being an out gay writer.

I was labelled a gay writer,

and gay lives and loves are still right at the heart

of everything I write.

But what really fascinates me

is seeing how they mesh in with the whole mess of family life.

I've joined Patrick to discuss his novels and latest project -

his first TV drama, Man In An Orange Shirt,

being televised to coincide with the 50-year anniversary

of the decriminalization of homosexuality.

It's an epic story about two gay couples - one in the 1940s,

and one in the present day, and a secret that connects them.

Like many of his novels,

the story is partly based on his own family history.

The secret is about his parents.

My parents' marriage wasn't a disaster,

but I look at this picture,

and it's a bit like watching a car crash about to happen.

Yes, because I know now

what my mother didn't know at the time.

It's lingered on the edge of my writing for a long time,

but this is the first time

I've really felt able to address it fully.

So, a major two-part BBC drama,

set in the Second World War with explosions...

HE LAUGHS

EXPLOSION

Well, don't just sit there, help him!

..and in the present day.

Did you make the story up out of nowhere, or did it...?

Not at all, it actually grew from a germ in my own family.

My mother, when I finished my first novel, which was a very gay novel,

I'd given it to her to read, and her immediate response was,

"Well, darling... I loved it, it was very sweet,

"very funny, rather sad, um,

"and I think it'll help your father come to terms with himself."

And, of course, my jaw hit the floor.

Wow...

Um, and she proceeded to tell me how,

when she was pregnant with me,

she found this stash of love letters hidden in my father's desk.

And she started reading them and thought, "Oh what fun,

"these letters from some girlfriend I'd never heard about."

And then realised they were from his best man.

Whoa.

She said, not only were they clearly love letters that covered, you know,

quite a long period,

but it was clear from the letters that my father and this man

had experienced a passion she had never experienced with my father,

and that they spent the night before the wedding in a hotel, together.

Oh, good gracious.

At that point, when my mother found those letters,

my father could've been sent to prison

on the basis of those letters alone.

She knew that men went to jail for this.

Did she confront your father with them?

This is the awful Englishness of it.

She destroyed the letters,

she never told him she'd found them or read them,

she never slept with him again, and she was... She assumed,

as a lot of her generation would have done,

that this meant he was a paedophile.

So she never, ever left any of us alone with him.

-What?!

-So in my childhood, I was never alone with my father.

Good Lord!

I felt terribly sad for my father, and my mother.

I've got the love letters between my mother and my father,

that also precede this photograph.

And it's clear from those just how young and inexperienced she is,

how little she really knows of the world.

And I think, "Gosh, would she have gone through this, knowing..."

I think she would have gone through with it,

but she'd have gone through with it with an extra layer of armour.

So I put it in Man In An Orange Shirt,

but with a difference that I have the confrontation.

She burns the letters, but boy, she also lets him know about it.

Um, just as a sort of what-if...

Well, you know...

Wondering how their marriage might have turned out

had the elephant in the room been named.

Are you safe around children?

What were you thinking, marrying me?

Do you even love me?

If I'm expected to lie around,

bringing forth like some broodmare for the two of you...

-Oh!

-Darling, sit down!

Don't touch me!

Never touch me, you're disgusting!

Criminal!

We follow the mother character across two episodes,

right up to the present day, now played by Vanessa Redgrave,

who is struggling to accept that her grandson is also gay.

My bridge crony's always asking me, when is he going to settle down?

And I say to them...

You know, some of us prefer our own company.

That's what I tell them.

I'm hoping that younger viewers will maybe have a pause for thought

about homophobia, as well,

because the central female character in it,

who is very loosely based on my mother, as I was saying,

has gone through this terrible journey of...

of betrayal and having to rebuild her life.

And she is deeply homophobic,

but in a kind of knee-jerk way that's based on real pain.

I've been ashamed.

All my life.

And I wonder why that was!

Yes, you should be ashamed.

Because it is terrible, it is disgusting,

to live with other people as if you were animals.

Animals?!

-SHOUTS:

-Yes! Animals!

Oh!

I always feel as if I'm in the wrong.

It's not fair.

And I think... I'm not saying all homophobia is, by any means,

but it's based on a fear.

-Yeah.

-And I think... I think in order to combat homophobia,

you need to...

-You need to understand it, like...

-To understand the fear.

Like anything you want to combat, you have to understand.

And I feel insofar as my novels are remotely political,

what they do in combating homophobia

is just to be out there and say,

"Actually, this is just part of the wider spectrum,

"this is part of family mess."

-Yes.

-And you might as well deal with it,

because it's not going to go away.

Yes, that's beautiful.

Patrick first came to my attention 30 years ago,

back when it was still unusual to be a so-called gay writer.

You kind of announced yourself with The Aerodynamics Of Pork,

which is a wonderful title.

-How old were you?

-21.

Right, so you were regarded as an early example of a gay novelist.

Were you concerned that you might be looked at as a gay writer,

and then deliberately chose to...

No, to start with, I embraced it,

because I was so thrilled to be published at all.

Well, it's an interesting thing about your writing, I think,

and it's probably impertinent to say,

but you're thought of as a gay writer,

because you're a gay man,

and there are gay characters in your books, and nearly always are.

But, um, you're really a writer about families more than you are...

Oh, totally! I've always been quite merciless with my gay readers

about making them... Reminding them that they come from a family...

-Yes!

-..and that they are attached in various ways

to these people who are not gay.

It was Patrick's decision to write about his own complicated family

that first brought him mainstream attention in the year 2000,

with the novel Rough Music.

It told the story of a troubled young family

holidaying on the Cornish coast.

"She walked across the sand, not caring if her shoes became wet,

"drawn forward by the sound of the breaking waves.

"'If I stood here long enough,' she thought, 'Just stood,

"'the sea would draw out more and more sand from underneath,

"'and bring more and more back in.'

"She dared herself not to move."

Patrick wrote Rough Music

the year he moved to his current Cornwall home,

a working farm, where he lives with his husband, Aidan.

It's situated at the very edge of Land's End, overlooking the sea.

And it is here that Patrick began mining his childhood memories.

For the first time,

I consciously based a novel on my own family

and my own deeply personal and private memories.

It's curious, some books come slowly, some books come very fast.

Rough Music was really fast and really intense.

And I became completely obsessed with the book,

because it was all in my head, and I needed to get it down.

Patrick had decided to write about his own youth in the 1960s,

growing up inside prisons

in which his father worked as the prison governor.

I think it's this odd thing, if you have a strange childhood,

you don't realise it's strange at the time.

-Yeah.

-Because in those days,

the governor's family lived in the prison.

So we met the prisoners all the time.

We were each, in turn, sent home from nursery school

with a letter saying,

"Please stop your child using this filthy language,"

because the prisoners delighted in teaching

these ghastly middle-class children to swear like troopers.

Um, looking back, do you think it's a bit odd for a father

to let a young boy consort with... I mean...

He... No, he felt it was part of the process...

-Yeah.

-..that these men,

who by and large came from pretty terrible backgrounds...

-Yeah.

-..should have daily contact with a happy family.

Um, he had less control over things like, you know,

me talking to them through the bars...

That's an extraordinary image.

In exploring his boyhood memories,

Patrick decided to tackle something rarely written about at the time -

the experience of gay childhood.

I was vividly aware that what I was doing was...

..risky, compared to what I'd written before.

I was writing about the very early sense that I was gay

when I was very little.

Which is not a comfortable thing to write about,

or to read about, I suspect.

What I wanted to capture was that sense

that I remember having when I was seven or eight years old,

that I was not like other boys,

that I didn't fit the mould.

I have vivid memories of parental discomfort,

and a sense that what I was was a cause of...

..yeah, discomfort for them, and embarrassment,

and something best not spoken about.

"The Happy Prince And Other Stories

"was a book he had read several times before,

"and found himself rereading at least once a year.

"Julian was compelled at his reading of them

"by an interesting fog of disapproval

"that seemed to hang about adults

"when they spoke of the book and its author.

"Ma implied that the stories were not quite nice,

"as though Mr Wilde had gone too far.

"There was a darker truth at work.

"She disapproved of the author, or was frightened of him,

"but something stopped her saying this aloud,

"so she voiced vague unease about the stories instead."

Rough Music got me a very big mailbag

from desperately guilty mothers of gay men.

Yeah.

Because I think it was...

It was one of the first times anyone had written a novel

-about a gay child.

-Yeah.

There have been plenty about gay teenagers, but gay childhood,

and here I was only seven,

and a lot of women wrote to me after reading that book, saying,

"I feel so guilty, because I knew he was...

"I realise now - it shone out of him as a child that he was gay,

"and I was in denial and pretended I couldn't see it."

Having analysed his childhood,

he then turned to his adolescent years in the 1970s.

He wrote the novel Friendly Fire

based on his own memories

of attending Winchester College boarding school,

where he followed the exploits of two teenage boys

coming to terms with their sexuality,

but all seen through the eyes of a new girl in school, Sophie.

As someone who has written...

In fact, my first novel was set in a public school...

I remember vividly.

And, you know, I know some people kind of groan when they think,

"Oh, God, it's another British person

"getting over his very special,

"and let's face it, privileged British upbringing."

Why should a reader be interested?

It's so blatantly my school life,

and yet I'm not actually in it at all.

No, it's a brilliant story, this sort of...

I've kind of put various friends of mine in it, and I put girls...

But above all, you put that marvellous girl, Sophie, I think?

She was a fantastic character.

Sophie, who is my alter ego,

and I use her to go back into my teenage years

and look at it through a girl's eyes.

And so she's much more critical than I was.

And she could be there for a double stranger in that world.

-It makes her a perfect explainer...

-Yeah.

-..for the reader.

They're thrown into it, and you're immediately in this school,

and it's fun, it's like...

It's like you've been parachuted into it yourself.

MUSIC: Love Is The Drug by Roxy Music

"The first time Lucas came to Sophie's attention,

"he was wearing a dress.

"Sophie paused one night in Flint Quad,

"and was transfixed by what she saw

"through one of the male chamber windows.

"Music was playing,

"Bryan Ferry singing Love Is The Drug.

"A girl in a soiled purple silk ball gown

"was showing an older boy how to jive.

"Then the dancer's manoeuvres

"caused the girl to be spun out in such a way

"that her eyes momentarily met Sophie's through the barred window.

"And Sophie saw it wasn't a girl at all."

Friendly Fire was inspired by the friendships Patrick made

during his teenage years at Winchester College.

I was incredibly lucky in that, within a year of arriving there,

I had a gang of four friends

who were all basically gay, basically out.

And we were out, but untouchable,

because it wasn't against the rules to be gay,

it was only against the rules to go to bed with somebody.

And you know, no-one ever got caught doing that.

Today, Patrick is still best friends with Rupert from his school days.

Looking back, it was extraordinary.

At the time, I thought it was perfectly normal,

-but we were a gang of...

-It WAS normal.

But we were a gang of five out teenagers.

-Yeah.

-In 1975.

Tall, out and proud, yeah.

I mean, it's hard to give credit to now that that was...

It was only eight years after decriminalization, so...

Yeah, partial decriminalization.

Yeah, so it was quite tender times, actually.

And looking back,

at no point did any of the teachers take me to one side and say,

"This isn't on."

We were like a gang of teenage girls, we met every day,

and we endlessly analysed our friendships, our siblings,

our mothers and fathers.

A lot of our conversation was about crushes.

We didn't JUST talk about men...

-No, no.

-We talked about hair products.

THEY LAUGH

"Charlie turned gay.

"There was no other way to describe it, there was no discussion,

"or announcement, or scene.

"He just suddenly started talking incessantly

"about which boys he had crushes on.

"With Lucas' gossip and Charlie's mimicry,

"they were a noisy gang of two,

"co-opting Sophie whenever their paths crossed."

Dare we talk about Friendly Fire?

When it came out, I found it quite hard to read because it was so real.

Yes. At the heart of it, of course, is a true-life tragedy.

One of our teachers, he had been caught out being, um,

inappropriately friendly with one boy.

He was sacked, and that very night,

he drove to the nearest railway crossing,

and without even stopping his car engine,

he walked under the London Express.

-Mmm.

-Um... And I did a version of that in the book.

It was a really, really shocking thing, though.

I can remember us discussing it in complete disbelief,

the four of us just really bewildered by it.

Thank God we had each other, because the '70s being what they were,

there was no question of boys receiving any counselling.

I mean, nobody actually explained what had happened.

-No.

-If I hadn't had all of you to talk it through with,

it would have been a really damaging experience, I think.

I can see that now, you know.

I knew that we were different from everyone else, and special,

and that we were stronger together than as individuals.

Patrick has never shied away from darkness and difficulties

within friendships and families,

perhaps never more poignantly than in one of my favourites,

Notes From An Exhibition.

Set in Penzance, it revolves around troubled painter Rachel Kelly,

who battles to balance maintaining an artistic career,

bringing up children, and coping with bipolar disorder.

Its central character, its dominating force,

is this remarkable woman,

this artist, Rachel Kelly.

And one thing that's interesting about her,

particularly now when this is a subject much more discussed,

and one very close to my own heart, is that she's bipolar,

she's a manic-depressive.

You present that, it seems to me,

with dazzling accuracy in terms of the, sort of

the phases and the swings of it.

I wondered if you'd researched that, or if you knew someone?

I definitely knew someone.

One of my beloved siblings had a terrible nervous breakdown, um,

when I was ten.

And this sibling tried to kill themselves for the first time,

the first of several suicide attempts, and...

I think, actually, I can pinpoint that

as the year in which I became - psychologically, at least -

-a novelist.

-Wow!

It's the year in which I suddenly just took a step back

from being a little boy,

um, and started looking at the world

through a layer of glass.

There's a very painful scene, it's on Garfield's birthday.

His mother is in hospital, Rachel has had another of her breakdowns.

Garfield has to spend the best part of his birthday

visiting her in hospital.

And that is almost exactly an evocation of visiting this sibling.

-Yeah.

-It was ghastly, really.

No-one explained to me...

..the reasons for this, I was just told,

"Oh, you're having a day out from boarding school."

And that little scene had sort of obviously been festering away,

and it came back to me when I was writing the book.

"He was glad to see she looked fairly normal.

"She was wearing daytime clothes,

"a dark blue dress covered in white spots.

"But she looked pale, and somehow uncooked without her lipstick,

"and there was something different about her eyes,

"and she needed to wash her hair.

"She had slowed down completely.

"Garfield was used to her being sharp and crackly,

"and rather frightening.

"But now she was so slow and placid,

"she was frightening in a different way,

"as though her mechanism was winding down,

"and no-one else had noticed, or thought to turn the key."

It's one of the most touching things about children,

when they're presented with a family trauma,

is that, rather than asking to be helped, they want to mend.

Absolutely, and I think it's especially true

-of the youngest child.

-Yeah.

-I was a classic youngest child.

So is that really what you are as a novelist?

You make broken families in order to put them...?

-Put the Elastoplast on.

-Yeah.

-I guess, yes.

And sometimes the cracks show,

but it's still... They are together at the end.

I mean, your books are very...

There is a real sense of a shining human spirit in all your books,

of a kindness and a, you know, a healing quality that comes through.

Patrick has always mined the memories and experiences

of his living relations,

but his most recent novel saw him investigate

a mysterious figure from his family history.

A Place Called Winter was his first historical novel,

which reimagines the life of his great-grandfather, Harry Cane.

I spent a lot of my early childhood with my mother's mother,

and I heard repeatedly from her stories about Cowboy Grandpa.

And I hadn't really worked out who Cowboy Grandpa was,

I thought he was like Father Christmas.

And it was only when Granny died,

and I came across this handwritten memoir which he had begun,

that I pieced together the pieces of the puzzle

and realised that Cowboy Grandpa was her father.

And about two years into the marriage, it seems to me,

abandoned wife and my granny to go off to Canada to be a wheat farmer.

"At this point, he went out to Canada.

"He had enough money left to buy a small farm, but the uncle said,

"'Our sister cannot be married to a farmer.'

"So he went, and I never saw him again until I was 49."

Granny doesn't really explain it, she just says

he'd always wanted to be a farmer,

which is... I don't believe for a moment.

And then she says he was a bit of a reprobate, and then on another page,

she says "and I think he lost his money".

None of these stories were true, um...

Did you just smell something about it?

I could smell something, what was the thing that she's not saying?

I then decided, OK, there was a huge scandal.

Inspired by the family mystery,

Patrick decided to imagine the possibility

that his great-grandfather had fled England

after he is discovered to be homosexual

and threatened with exposure.

We follow Harry as he journeys to Canada to become a homesteader,

and then as he finds love with a neighbouring farmer.

A Place Called Winter is a sort of gay romance, a historical romance,

but, actually, it's far from romantic.

It was extremely dangerous, for a start,

for any man in this period

to express any kind of love for another man.

I then started imagining,

might there have been other men out in Canada

on the run from scandals and secrets?

And I thought I was making all this stuff up,

but then when I went out to Canada to do my research,

I spoke to historians.

And they said, "No, what you think you're making up

"was certainly true."

They're getting more and more evidence that between, say,

the end of the Oscar Wilde trials and the start of the Great War,

the Canadian prairies were very briefly

a very useful place for the upper and middle classes of England

to send their black sheep.

Naively, the thought was

you could make a man of somebody by sending them out there.

"Paul arrived in a thick flannel over shirt,

"which he tossed aside, as working warmed him up.

"Harry found the shirt, and took it back to his tent with the tools,

"thinking to keep it from the dew.

"Lying on his camp bed after the evening's unvarying supper, however,

"he became aware of the faint scent coming off it.

"Paul's scent of nutmeg and wood smoke.

"And without thinking, he drew it to him as he never could the wearer,

"and pressed his face deep into its age-softened fabric."

The real challenge of that novel is to tell that story,

about a man who is gay without having words to describe what he is.

-Yeah.

-And who then, finally, thank God, finds love,

but that love can only survive

because neither man actually names it for what it is...

Yes, exactly!

And that's an interesting point, because we live in an age now

where being gay is an identity.

-Yeah.

-It's not what you do or how you love,

it's very much an identity.

Questions about the complexity of contemporary gay male identity

are central to episode two of Patrick's drama

Man In An Orange Shirt.

This time, we follow the married couple's grandson -

a troubled gay young man

who, despite the freedoms of a more liberal age,

is still struggling with his sexuality.

I bet you've still not told your granny.

Not in so many words, she's...

She's never invited confidences.

And you're scared she'd...

I, um... I... I don't know.

Is it just the romantic in me that sees the possibility

that you almost can believe there's something happier

about the gay couple in the 1940s

than there is in the present day?

My present-day gay couple are deeply, well, deeply unhappy.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

So, I used to just...

But that's... No, it's just me being strict with my viewers,

I think - the one thing you will not get from me

is a straightforward celebration. Isn't life...

Hurrah, we're all... We can skip.

Because I don't... I look around me, I look at my gay friends

who are single and trying to find love,

and it's no easier.

I don't think we will ever get over the tendency to self-hatred,

because we are taught it by our parents, often unwittingly.

Though 95% of literature and films

are about heterosexual couples

who seem to have exactly the same problems.

It's not as if gay people should have expected that the moment,

you know, decriminalization happened,

we would all have a life of absolute perfect relationships

because straight people have had legal relationships in all history.

It's very true, I'm not sure it has,

overnight, it has gone away, the sense that, deep down,

we are not entitled to happiness.

-No.

-And in Man In An Orange Shirt,

what I've tried to explore is that sense of a lack of entitlement,

and the sense that, you know, that this boy,

who, on the face of it, has everything -

he has a really good job,

he has Vanessa Redgrave for a grandmother,

um, is just on a self-destructive path.

It's OK.

It's not OK.

It'll be OK.

The young generation's been born into a world where, thankfully,

they don't have to consider themselves criminals,

they don't have to consider themselves pariahs

or outcasts in any way.

Nonetheless, they have to examine, as all people do,

the very difficult nature of love

and responsibility and relationships.

And I think the psychotherapeutic challenge hasn't changed.

And the problem almost of being given your freedom,

is that you think that means everything is fine,

that you don't have to think any more,

and, actually, it's the reverse.

You're now given the responsibility of being treated like proper adults

who have to negotiate through the very stormy seas of relationships.

What's upsetting with the young

is that they feel they have to pretend not to care,

because actually, sex is the least-frightening thing about life.

-Love is much more frightening.

-Yeah.

I want you.

I don't do casual, I need more.

OK.

The beauty of this story, as you've reinterpreted it,

is that it doesn't end in silence and poison and death,

but that the past reaches forward to the...

-Yeah, the past heals the present.

-Yeah.

I think young people, young gay men especially today,

there are lessons for them to learn from the past.

-Yeah.

-Not just the obvious lessons about the HIV epidemic -

even beyond then, to the 1940s and '30s, these amazing gay marriages

which were hidden in plain sight.

And I think, in the rush to grab all our freedoms,

and to have all the fun we can,

we need to be wary of the damage we can do

in the name of fun.

-Yeah.

-And remember that maybe sometimes love is what's needed.

That's a very beautiful way of putting it.