Stories of Cornwall: Meet Award-Winning Author, Patrick Gale - Seasalt Stories

Based in the far west of Cornwall, on a farm near Land’s End, award-winning author Patrick Gale shares our love of the ever-changing scenery of our coastal home. We sit down with him to explore his connection to Cornwall and the way the landscape and history of our coastal community shape his work. 

I think I’d be strongly influenced by whatever landscape I worked in – I’m a very porous writer in that way. This novel was a strange one for me, though, in that it’s largely set in a very different Cornwall to the one I live in. I’m in the wild and idyllic far west of the region, with sea all about me and amazing cliff scenery and wildlife. Charles and Laura, in the novel, live in landlocked Launceston (pronounced Lanson by them) which was then a highly industrialised little town where their days were dominated by the sounds of two railway stations, three tanneries, a saw mill, a slaughterhouse and a cattle market. Luckily it’s a town I know well and I was able to spend time living in their final home there, wandering about the place and imagining it in its noisy, smelly heyday. 

I‘m incredibly lucky. My husband is a sculptor (aidanhicks.com) and we have friends just up the lane who are composers, painters, potters and so on. There an old saying that Cornwall is like a Christmas stocking in which all the nuts have gone to the bottom, but it suits me!

Well originally a lot of them came (I certainly did) because it was so cheap! Writers and artists tend to live hand-to-mouth so need to be based somewhere they won’t be constantly be worrying about paying the bills. Visitors always comment on the glorious light but if you ask any artist down here they’ll soon be honest about the frequent fog and mist you get in any coastal situation. I think the reason so many of us like living here is that it’s so common to be creative in this area that you can be treated just like anyone else and don’t have to explain that you make a living in a rather peculiar way.

It depends on the time of year. In the spring, when the wildflowers here are spectacular, I love the sheltered stretches of coast path on the south coast that can be like walking through rock gardens. The stretch around Mill Bay is particularly spectacular, as are the deep valleys lanes inland from the North Coast between Camelford and Port Isaac where you’ll see great banks of primroses in April. But in wilder times of year I like walking up on Cornwall’s rugged high points, like Bodmin Moor or the breathtaking stretches of high moorland that stretch above the coastal road from Morvah to Zennor. That’s a landscape that hasn’t altered in centuries, which makes the walker feel deeply insignificant. 

I start and end each writing day with a walk with our dogs, often around our cliffs in the morning and across the fields towards Land’s End and the sunset in the evening. And then I spend most of my day in my granite office out in our garden, either writing by hand or reading or just staring into space. It’s an erratic process but somehow the books seem to get written that way.

I’d long been fascinated by the poet, Charles Causley, in particular by the fact that he chose to spend most of his life living in the same little town where he’d grown up, living with his mother and teaching in the little primary school up the lane he had attended as a boy. His poetry is full of volcanic emotion and yet his life appears to have been so quiet. I was also intrigued by his mother, a washerwoman who raised this young genius singlehanded and must so often have been baffled by him even as she cast a huge influence over the work he would go on to produce. The book is about the making of what became their marriage, in effect, and the processes, not least his training both as a pianist and a naval coder, that fed into his becoming a poet. 

I’ve celebrated different parts of Cornwall in much of my work – Polzeath, Penzance, Pendeen and now Launceston and in each case I proceeded very warily because I’m so sharply aware of being an ignorant incomer. Launceston on the face of it is so unromantic, so unlikely a setting, and yet when I started looking into its WW2 history, especially, I realised it was a gift for a writer, full of conflict and incident. Polzeath aside, I’ve always made an effort to write about the bits of Cornwall tourists don’t necessarily visit, places that are often all the more interesting for not having been romanticised.

Charles was an intensely private man and his mother an even more private woman, so it was a huge challenge to take them on as characters. Luckily there’s an amazingly rich archive of his papers held in Exeter University’s Special Collections: not just manuscripts, complete with crossings-out and corrections but tiny private diaries, letters, wartime postcards between mother and son, an abandoned novel, essays about his boyhood and scraps Charles evidently kept because they had emotional significance for him. And then, of course, there’s the poetry. Whenever he was asked if he’d write his memoirs he always said there was no need because it was all in the poems. Well it is, if you know where to look, but it’s deeply encoded. So a big part of the writing process involve going back to his poems and searching out the scraps of his life tucked away inside them. I was also really lucky to be able to talk to people who had known the two of them well.

Well I’d want them to start with the really famous ones – Timothy Winters and Eden Rock and Death of a Gunner and then I’d want them to follow their noses. The collected works isn’t dauntingly big. And for anyone with young readers in the house I urge buying his collected poems for children, which are a great delight, funny, inventive and full of the infectious energy that tells you just what an incredible primary school teacher he must have been.

Mother’s Boy is available to order on bookshop.org. I’ll be doing lots of events for it around the country, full details of which are on my website www.galewarning.org.  

You can keep up with Patrick on Instagram at @trevilley and Aidan at @hicksaidan.