Patrick Gale invented a gay history for a forebear – and found it might have been the truth. By Jennifer Platt for the Sunday Times
A Place Called Winter
Patrick Gale (Headline)
*****
“I gayed my great-grandfather,” says the dapper Patrick Gale, who, at most times effortlessly charming and funny, at a quick change of the subject becomes passionate about social injustices of then and now.
His passion, charm and humour are the underlying forces in his new historical novel, A Place Called Winter, a fictionalised account of his great-grandfather, who suddenly and inexplicably leaves his wife and child in England to become a wheat farmer in the isolated Canadian Prairies.
“I knew something had happened. I made up all this gay stuff about him. But the more I got into it, the more believable I found it. When I was out in Canada I interviewed a couple of gay historians who were working on the hidden history of the prairies. They were piecing together all these stories and began to realise that what I made up is actually what frequently happened. For this brief period of the early 1900s until World War I, the prairies were useful places for middle-class families to get rid of their black sheep – far away from creating more scandal.”
The beginning of the novel is violently unsettling. Here Gale’s great grandfather, Harry Cane, is in a mental hospital, limbs shackled, forcibly dunked in a bath over and over again until he has required the necessary “tranquility”. He is then moved to Bethel where the seemingly good Dr Ormshaw wants to find out what happened to him – and the book becomes a thriller.
“There are really only two people alive who knew Harry,” says Gale. One is my mother and the other is my aunt. My mother has Alzheimer’s now but my aunt said that I might have hit the nail on the head. She always wondered why he left and why he was never spoken of after.”
When Harry decides to head for Canada, he knows he is giving up his life of leisure. On the journey there, he meets Troels Munck, a nightmarish figure who forces himself into Harry’s life, and his body.
In Troels, Gale has created a true sadist – the kind of man who was needed to colonise new lands. Gale says, “Historically, these huge colonial upheavals where a great body of men were expected to invade a country and change it, were only possible through the agency of psychopaths. These extreme alpha males were totally without fear or conscience, were also very strong, possibly very brave. And the problem was that yes, you needed them but then after you wanted to castrate them.”
When Harry finally gets his own piece of land he meets Paul and Petra Slaymaker, a brother and sister. Their homestead is next to Harry’s. Paul and Harry develop an affection for each other and they all live in a peaceful state – until Troels comes back.
In true life, Gale says, “Harry lived out there all on his own until 1953. He came back to England, expecting his daughter to take him in. She couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. She sent him back to Canada and arranged for him to have a pension. He died almost homeless soon after. I went looking for his grave because I wanted to put flowers on it, as I felt guilty about making up these stories about him – but I also wanted to celebrate him.
“The story I was writing was sad so I had to end it on a chance of secret happiness for Harry.” And there is redemption in the end of this tale, even if it is fiction.
Follow Jennifer Platt on Twitter @jenniferdplatt
Book details
- A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale
EAN: 9781472205315
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