Scala Radio Book Club: Mother’s Boy Patrick Gale
A beautifully crafted novel of war, Cornwall, and the relationship between a mother and son
On Thursday the 8th of December, Mark Forrest welcomed author Patrick Gale into the Scala Radio Book Club to discuss his period novel Mother’s Boy.
Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura's husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius.
As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work.
Mark opened the interview by asking: ‘Mother's Boy is a fictionalized account of a real-life individual, this 20th-century poet, Charles Cosley. Tell me a bit more about him.’
‘He was a working-class Cornish boy from the little town of Lawton, right on the Cornish border, and he wasn't a poet to start with. He left school at 15. He became a playwright, and did pretty well considering he was self-taught. But then he went off into the Navy for the Second World War and something fascinating happens to his brain during that time, it turns him into a poet who will then spend a very quiet life living at home with his mother, teaching primary school children, and writing these truly extraordinary poems. And we should cherish him, not just for his war poetry, which is pretty special, but also for his amazing contribution to children's poetry. I think from his years of teaching primary school, he really got what makes little boys and girls laugh or stretch their eyes with wonder, and he never lost that childishness in his outlook as well.’
Mark Forrest followed this by asking: ‘You touched there on the relationship between Charles and his mother. This relationship is core to the story that you tell. How did it come to define Charles' life?’
‘Well, he was almost entirely raised by his mother because his father died when he was very young, and his mother was a labourer. She was a laundress. She was not hugely well-read or literate, but she clearly understood she had given birth to a rather special little boy, and without spoiling him, she seems to have put the right ingredients in his path to make him discover who he should become. One of the things she did importantly, was to give him a piano. Now that's quite an achievement for a woman who was only earning pennies and shillings. She somehow got a piano and hauled it upstairs into that tiny little tenement where they were living. And Charles became a really very good pianist. Early music training really helped his understanding of rhythm and meter and his writing of his poems.’
Mark questioned Patrick Gale on his connection to Charles: ‘And having immersed yourself in the study of Charles's life and his poetry, how much of a connection do you feel with him?’
I feel a very deep one. I think he'd have hated me. We very nearly met. He was still alive when I first moved to Cornwall, I was living up the road from him. And I think I'd have really freaked him out because I was basically out of the closet at 12, and he'd have found me a bit much. But we had in common this early music training. I went to a specialist music school at the age of seven and was convinced that's what I would do when I grew up. Like Charles, I got into acting at an early age. I think this is a very common thing among writers, they get into acting at school because it's a kind of metaphor for their hunger, for an audience, for a readership. But they don't know yet. And I think also, like Charles, I had an intense but slightly ambiguous relationship with my mum, and reading Charles' Secret Diaries to research the novel, I really felt for Laura, because she was clearly a very lovely but fairly straightforward woman. And she had an extremely complicated, spiky little boy. I hope that the reader reading the book will come to love Charles through Laura even if they can't love him face to face.
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