Patrick Gale: I turned my great-grandfather gay
FictionEnthralling and irreverent, Gale‘s granny was full of family gossip – about everyone except her father. In his latest novel, the author tells the story of this enigmatic man who left his home for the life of a cowboy on the Canadian prairiesWe were imaginatively brought-up children so of course we had a dressing-up box. Actually it was better than a box; it was a Gladstone bag of ancient leather. There were cowboy hats, holster belts, high heels and baby revolvers, a multi-tiered frou-frou petticoat and a terrible old floral skirt, handy for combining with a battered black hat. There were matching his and hers “gypsy” outfits, a moth-eared rabbit costume, a bridesmaid’s dress in soiled salmon-pink satin and a pair of bearskin gloves.
These were the real thing and, when worn by a small child, as big as motorcycle gauntlets: heavy, with furry backs and dark leather palms, perfect for terrifying me when worn with the remaining accessory, an old gas mask. The older brother who dictated all our games assured me the gloves had been made by Cowboy Grandpa, who had shot and skinned the bear himself. I accepted this as gospel and, because both our grandfathers were already dead, I thought no more about it.
My one surviving grandparent, my maternal grandmother, was a powerful influence on my boyhood. This was partly because I was frequently sent to stay with her on the Isle of Wight and then in Lymington, either to cheer her up and keep her busy during the long desolation of an early widowing, or to get me briefly off an exhausted mother’s hands. Compared to my parents, who were impossibly good and respectable, Granny seemed glamorous and rather naughty. She drank Scotch at lunchtime, wore lipstick always, had an unlimited supply of barley sugars and a high camp way of slowly closing her eyes when passing judgment. She made me laugh by sucking out my tummy button fluff with the hoover hose and told enthralling stories.
I never tired of these stories as they were about her childhood. She seemed to have no father – at least she never mentioned him – and, like a fairytale princess, had a beautiful mother who died tragically young. She was raised by nasty nannies and an army of ambiguously teasing aunts and uncles, some of whom had behaved so badly that she would occasionally break off a story with a maddening “pas devant les enfants”. My stay often coincided with a protracted visit from one of her many cousins, involving much lunchtime drinking and impenetrable, fascinating gossip on which I could guilelessly listen in from behind the sofa.
She died when I was a student and it was only decades after that, when my mother elected to put herself into a retirement home, that I thought about Cowboy Grandpa again. Among the antiques my mother passed on to me was a pretty Georgian chest of drawers and I cursed her on discovering it to be stuffed to bursting with ancient jigsaws, seed catalogues and a mass of old letters. I stopped cursing, however, when I realised the letters were both sides of an unbroken correspondence, begun when my mother’s school was evacuated during the Blitz and only ending with Granny’s slow descent into dementia. Tucked away in the messy muddle of it all lay a treasure.
This was a nondescript plastic ring-binder full of lined paper on which Granny had been encouraged at some point to begin her memoirs. It wasn’t brilliantly written, partly because it adopted a stilted tone-for-strangers quite unlike the one she used when talking to me, but there were the stories I remembered: of my great-great-grandmother and her tribe of 12 surviving children, of sadistic nursemaids, marital hypocrisy and thwarted love. There was the story I had never heard, of her parents’ sad marriage – a rich young man, Harry Cane, urged to marry a girl still secretly in love with another man rejected by her family for being “trade”. Using maddeningly scant detail, she recounted how Harry had left her and her mother in order to become one of the hundreds of eager homesteaders lured out to the Canadian prairies in the 1900s by easy railway access and the offer of free land. What had become of him there? How had he coped? Why was there no question of his daughter joining him when her mother died of breast cancer? And how had the bearskin gloves come into our dressing-up box?
The memoir petered out but now I was obsessed. There was a family tradition of photography, fostered by Granny’s aunts, the Wells sisters, who were vain and fashion-conscious. These photographs were such a ritualised part of my growing-up that to this day I have trouble teasing out genuine memory from photographic record. Now that my mother has Alzheimer’s, her own albums have become one of the surest ways of striking sparks in her faltering mental engine. So it was doubly odd that my trawl should have produced just three pictures of Harry Cane. In two, taken during courtship and early fatherhood, he is young and really rather beautiful. In the third, taken on his brief, sad return to England in 1953, he is a ravaged shadow of a man, evidently toothless, shabbily dressed in second-hand clothes.
More than ever I needed to know what happened to him. Tidying my writing shed, I came across an old notebook in which I had recorded the results of three trips to psychics I had made in the 90s when researching an article. One had been an abject fraud, but the other two – compellingly odd and unpolished practitioners who regularly helped the police with their inquiries – had each told me to find out about the family’s black sheep, one even summoning my dead brother’s spirit to do so. At the time, I had dismissed this. Now, looking from the young Harry to the prematurely old one and back again, I reconsidered, and realised I was about to write my first historical novel.
In basing a novel on Harry’s story, I decided I must honour all the known facts, however inconvenient they might prove to my emerging plot. I travelled to Canada, rattling along the same train line he had ridden from Toronto to Moose Jaw and then on out to Saskatoon, and retraced the route to his farmstead. I found the acres this untried, barely trained farmer had ploughed from untouched prairie still under cultivation, which was oddly moving. I spent time in a remote cabin, to get a feel for the isolation he had experienced and see the dazzling prairie stars he’d have seen. I obsessively noted wild flowers and birdsong, soil types and tree species and pored over grainy old photographs of settler train interiors and surreally all-male bachelors’ balls. I found tiny references to him in local history projects stored in North Battleford library in Saskatchewan, saying that he retained his lovely table manners, had the best horses in the area and had always “batched it” – lived without a woman.
In constantly imagining myself in Harry’s shoes, the inescapable happened and I started using my own personality and experience to join the dots in the little I could glean of his nature. Picturing how a soft-handed man of leisure would have coped with having to hammer in fence posts or master ploughing with an ox, I fell back on memories of my own experiences as a novice farmhand harvesting cauliflowers or herding cattle on my husband’s acres. And wondering how I would have coped with being obliged to marry and have children or with being propelled into a harsh, isolated and almost exclusively masculine environment, it was perhaps inevitable that I should have turned my great-grandfather gay.
Only of course he couldn’t be gay. Or not in so many words. For given it was set initially in that illusory, endless, upper-middle-class summer of 1900s England, this had to be the story of a man furnished with no words for what he was or what he wanted, whose dream of fulfilment was, literally, unspeakable.
Among the family members portrayed, I changed just the name of my great-great-aunt Steve, which was just too weird. (I made her a George.) I tried to remain true to Granny’s portrayals of them all. What has taken me completely by surprise is the way in which my confected version of events has become like an artificial memory. I now repeatedly catch myself looking at Harry’s photograph and drawing spurious comfort from the thought of having a gay ancestor who found true, if secret, love at last on a prairie farmstead.
Patrick Gale’s A Place Called Winter is published by Tinder Press.
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