This week we chatted to The Bookery patron Patrick Gale about his new book Mother’s Boy. Set in the early twentieth century, Mother’s Boy follows the life of the British poet Charles Causley. A story of love and war, class and belonging, the novel focuses in on the special relationship between Charles and his mother Laura.

What inspired you to write Mother’s Boy?
I was inspired by my growing obsession with Charles’ work and life, fired by my time as a director of the Charles Causley Trust, of which I’m now proud to be one of the two patrons. All my novels are fired by a question only fiction can answer and in this case it was, “What on earth made a boy who’d spent his early twenties longing to escape the disapproval of his mother and the constraints of home decide, after five years in the Navy during WW2, to come home and spend the next three decades living with her in a tiny house while teaching in the primary school he himself had attended as a bullied little boy?” If you want to know the answer too, you have to read the novel!

What did you learn when writing it?
I learned a great deal about coding and the effect its rigorous discipline seems to have had on Charles’ creativity; he went to war a playwright but came back a poet. I also learned a great deal about how to do laundry without a machine. Charles’ mother Laura takes up half the book and she worked as a laundress, so it was a job I had to convey with total confidence. I could now talk for ten minutes without interruption, deviation or repetition about the subject of stain removal. My long-suffering editor said, after reading the much longer first draft, that she could see laundry was to this novel what ploughing had been to A Place Called Winter, and that, as with the ploughing, most of it would have to be cut.

Did anything surprise you?
So much. Gibraltar fascinated me, and the strange life forced on the handful of WRNS and WAF women who were stationed there after all the other women had been removed. Initially I’d been worried that Charles’ adventures in the Navy would have nothing to balance them in Laura’s life back home in Launceston but then I discovered that Launceston was not only overrun with soldiers, including battalions of American GIs, but had a brutally punished racial mutiny and influxes of both German and Italian POWs. I was also amazed by the things I learned about the intimacy of life on a battleship.

How did you decide on the title?
Usually I dither about titles for ages and most of my novels have a shortlist of about four which I compile in the front of the notebook as I’m writing. In this case, however, I settled on the title really early on, as soon as I realised this was going to be a novel equally about the son and his mother. I like the ambiguity of it; it’s at once a cruel playground taunt and a calm statement of the deep love Laura feels for Charles.

If you were to interview one of the characters, who would you choose and why?
Not Charles – I think he’d be slightly terrifying and I know he’d be utterly appalled at my having written this novel about his private life – but I would dearly love to have met his mother. She was a very private person too, but I reckon if I made it seem that all my questions were about Charles and his childhood and how she’d raised him, motherly pride would see to it that she opened up. I’d make sure I baked a really good cake for her as well – nothing shop bought.