C
ommonly described as “the best Poet Laureate” we never had, poet Charles Causley (1917 – 2003) spent his life in
Launceston. Cyprus Well, the tiny twobedroom terraced house where he resided with his mother Laura (and latterly alone), looks much the same as when they lived there, right down to the furniture. Too small to be a museum, it is now made available to writers-in-residence, and it was only right that author Patrick Gale should spend a week here while researching his latest novel: Mother’s Boy, a fictional account of Charles’ childhood and his relationship with Laura. “It was strange, and powerful, to be sleeping in Laura’s bedroom, looking at pictures she would have looked at, knowing I would be writing a deeply intrusive novel about her life,” Patrick admits. “I didn’t dare sleep in Charles’ bedroom - as it was, it was quite funny coming out of Laura's room to be confronted by his portrait. I felt I had to tread carefully. “I could feel the ghosts of them and their cats and dogs. I imagined them winding up the grandfather clock whose tick I could hear while writing. I’ve spoken to other people who stayed there, and they say the same – it's a bit like being inside Charles’ head. Although he moved there after the period in which the novel is set, it’s easy to imagine the way he and Laura would have lived there – as soon as you walk through n 30 |
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the front door, you see Laura’s armchair next to the telephone table.” Patrick committed himself to honouring the facts he unearthed about Causley although these were “quite thin on the ground at a certain point in his life”, and were supplemented by the memories of those who met him and extracts from Causley’s own writings: sketches, articles and, of course, poems, some well-known and others markedly less so. “At every stage, I’ve used hundreds of bits of material – what he left behind.” The book explores the period from Charles’ conception to the start of his career as a schoolmaster in Launceston, wending its way through childhood, school days and his wartime years as a coder. Causley had started out as a playwright, and Patrick has a theory that his wartime experiences influenced his direction as a poet. "The discipline of being trained as a coder, working very fast in tiny amounts of words in code - it’s very close to how he wrote poetry, and he intimated that he found it much easier during the war to hold four or five lines of poetry in his head and work on them,” he explains. Causley was famously private, so how does it feel to be imagining scenes from his life, and presenting them for public consumption? “Extremely cheeky,” grins Patrick. What drew him to Causley’s story? “I’m interested in stories with unanswered
| Volume 2 Issue 71 | April - May 2022
questions, and it seems to me that the biggest question with Charles is what made him tick emotionally. In many ways, the public version he chose to present, especially later in life, was quite forbidding. He was friendly on the surface, but intensely private, which is very unfashionable these days, when everyone is examining themselves on social media. “I wanted to examine the construction of the public persona of Charles Causley, and worked back from that into his vulnerable boyhood. I think he would have made a very good spy, because he realised he needed to compartmentalise his life, and put his emotions and vulnerabilities into a locked and very well-guarded box.” Waterstones describes the novel as “tender, compassionate and rich in psychological truth”, while referring to “the secret desires he must keep hidden”. It’s not a huge leap from this to speculating on Causley’s sexuality at a time when homosexuality was some way off being legal. But Patrick, who lives near Land’s End with his husband Aidan, is quick to see where I’m going and heads me off at the pass. “I don’t want anyone saying ‘He’s making Causley out to be gay,’” he says, emphatically. But he continues: “It’s safe to say that in his private diaries from his teens and 20s ... he never gives a physical description of a woman, just simple names. If he mentions a man or a boy he has met, you get a vivid physical description.
