 Hello everyone and welcome to Kindred Spirits, Family and Belonging in the Queer Novel with Patrick Gale, SJ Sindhu and Kerry Andrew. The warmest welcome. My name is Udi and I work at Gay's The World Bookshop. I can't wait for tonight's discussion but before we meet the novelists I just have to do a little bit of housekeeping on behalf of the British Library. So welcome to the event which is a partnership between Gay's The Word and the BL. It's an evening of readings conversations about childhood, family and identity with our special panellists. We'll be taking questions later on and you can submit your questions to the panellists and to me if you like using the question box below the video here and a selection of your questions we put to the panellists. I'll do another call out for those a little bit later on in the event. Use the tabs above the video to provide the British Library with any feedback on their cultural events program and to donate to the library should you wish to. You can also buy copies of the author's book and I would strongly recommend you buy each of these books because they're all incredible and fantastic. From Gay's The Word using the link above the video and they're also available from all good bookshops. Unfortunately and I am sorry about this due to a technical issue we are not able to provide speak to text captioning during this event. I do sincerely apologize for that for anybody who is expecting it. So as I said my name's Uli and I'm beaming to you from the salubrious environment of Stockwell in London. My pronouns are he, him and I just want to pitch in with the rest of the panel and say hello. Beginning with you Patrick. Patrick how are you doing? Where are we seeing you from today Patrick? Well I'm at home. I'm in my writing shed out in the garden. So this is the Richard and Judy shed and it is situated very near Lanzand at the very tip of Cornwall. What have you been doing today Patrick? I have been frantically finishing the programming of the North Cornwall Book Festival which I help put together every year and I've been cursing writers who hide away and don't reply to emails. You've recently been at the Favish and Literary Festival. I have. Yes I had the big excitement of travelling to Favish and from Cornwall the day after or the day of the great storm. So at every turn I was being told you shouldn't be travelling and it took me 12 and a half hours I think to get there but it was worth it. I'm so pleased you're here with us this evening. I can't wait to talk to you more about your amazing novel. Kerry Andrew, welcome. It's so lovely to see you. I think we might have lost Uli. Hello Uli I'm not far from you. I'm in Denmark Hill in South London. So not very far at all and I'm just on my writing room. My study I live on the top floor on a hill looking to London so I'm very very lucky I get really big skies and can see the weather coming. So today this afternoon I had a single bolt of lightning, a single thunder clap very loud and then two minutes of insane hail storm and then it was sunny again so you know I see it all here. It's been a bit schizophrenic today. Tell us a little bit about the objects around you in the room. Maybe the bird the bird droid behind you but what's that? Well I like to just surround myself with wildlife it just makes me feel I don't know comfortable so I've always really liked birds. I'm a very big fan of foxes. What's that? That's a lovely piece of artwork that's also the cover to use as the cover in a lovely penguin classics edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner novel and then up there is sort of a hint of my other life as a musician and a big influence of my narrative monk who's an amazing American composer. Fantastic. I recognize the Sylvia Townsend now you've pointed it out. And going slightly further afield SJ Sindhu welcome where are you right now? I am in Toronto so I'm in a neighborhood called East York which is just east of downtown. So if you hear sirens going by it's because I'm on a main main street and that's why I'm muting myself what I'm not talking. And you teach creative writing there is that Chris? I do at the University of Toronto. Fantastic. And are you teaching at the moment? Have you been doing that? No we're on reading week so I'm actually you know not teaching this week but somehow today is still complete people of things and I don't know how it got that way. Fantastic. And is that the room you you write in or is that a surface? It is. Yeah this is the sort of the writing office I share with my partner and we you know the other desk is right there and we write side by side. That's completely terrifying. Most people respond that way actually. Okay so SJ if you're happy to we're going to start with Leuskin Gods and talk in a little bit more detail about it. I know you're going to read but before you do let's just open up the book slightly. It's set in Tamil Nadu. Where about is this in India? It's sort of the southeastern sort of tip of India. Cool. And at what point in time does the novel open? Because there's a sort of sense of openness. Yeah when it opens it's about mid 90s or so. So Kalki the main character is 10 years old and you know it would be yeah mid to late 90s when it when it starts and then tracks all the way up to the early 2000s. So Kalki let's talk about him in slightly more detail. As you say he's nine just about to turn 10 when the book's open. Can you paint a picture of this young unique extraordinary boy for us? Yeah Kalki is a young boy who is sort of nerdy, very shy and yet he has blue skin and he is believed to be the last incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu and he's believed to have healing powers. So he lives at this ashram that his father has started in rural Tamil Nadu and he you know the villagers come to him for healing and he heals them and on the eve of his 10th birthday he is supposed to start his trials as a child god. So he has three trials that he's supposed to pass to prove himself and that's kind of how the book starts with him very nervous about you know performing well in these trials. And pretty soon we meet Kalki's parents. So first of all maybe let's talk a lot about his father and if I'm pronouncing any names please do correct me. His father is called Aya is that correct? Aya. Aya. So Aya is extremely strict and controls every aspect of Kalki's life. It's very regimented. It's much more regimented than you know most childhoods are and Aya is very concerned about Kalki passing these trials even more so than Kalki himself because there is an aspect Aya that's sort of sinister and villainous and at the same time that you know Kalki cares a lot about pleasing his father. His father is also a very sort of strict stern controlling figure in his life. Yeah certainly a very dominant force in the book which will come to a bit later and then there's Kalki's mother Amma is that how you say it? Amma. Amma. Paint a picture for us of Amma. So with Amma I mean she is a very gentle sort of nurturing soul much younger than Kalki's father. She's his second wife so you know she's also walking in the shadow of his first wife who died and she's an artist she paints she's sort of at odds with this with the surrounding of the ashram because she is a sort of bohemian you know left to her own devices I imagine her more as a sort of bohemian figure but she's still being controlled by Kalki's father and living inside the strictures of the ashram and throughout the course of the book we sort of see the toll that that starts to take on her mental health. And the last character that we'll just explore slightly before you read is Lakshman is how you say Lakshman. Lakshman thank you. So Lakshman is is a little around the same age as Kalki. Yeah Lakshman is Kalki's cousin and his best friend the the person around whom the first part of the novel revolves this this relationship between Kalki and Lakshman and Lakshman is you know sort of outspoken and charming and in a lot of ways much more suited to the life or presentation of a child god than Kalki is but Lakshman is normal right he doesn't have blue skin he is you know he doesn't have healing powers and and so there's this there's all you know they're best friends and there's a lot of love and camaraderie but there's also this sort of competition that exists between the boys and Lakshman's always pushing Kalki's boundaries and and sometimes lashing out because he's so frustrated that Kalki's getting all the attention. Are you happy for me to invite you to read a little bit from the beginning of the novel? Yeah I've never actually read from the UK edition I've been reading from the the US this is my normal reading copy so this is exciting okay I'm just going to read from the very very beginning and this is this is actually it takes place 10 years before the rest of the novel or sorry after the best rest of the novel. The driver slammed the brakes whipping my head forward and back a chorus of honks crescendoed in the muggy New Delhi night. A few cars ahead in the middle of an intersection an auto rickshaw lay on its side its three wheels still spinning the metal poles of its sides cracked in half tire tracks swirled into a small blue car with its front end smashed glass littered the road glittering pinpricks of light people surged around us my father Aya opened the door of the taxi and we pushed our way into the crowd Aya weaved to the front I walked in his wake an older woman was sprawled down and ground next to the auto thrown out as it tipped over the auto driver was on his back near her his eyes stared right up at the sky red slushes glistened over their bodies people shouted in Hindi to call the police call the ambulance the woman was still breathing two men tried to lift her stop Aya said he raised his voice and yelled stop you could make her injuries worse if you move her he pushed his way into the clearing I followed out of instinct as if we had a string tied between us I'm a doctor he said let me look the men put her limbs back down Aya crouched over the woman he opened her eyes and checked her pulse she's losing a lot of blood he said she needs help or she won't last look someone said Kalki saw me can heal her a man pointed in my direction I wondered if he'd been at my prayer meeting earlier or if I'd healed him before a hundred eyes turned toward me yes Kalki saw me another man said you can heal her I walked toward the injured woman and knelt near Aya up close the overpowering smell of iron and urine and so much blood cavernous slashes in their bodies I put my shaking hands over the woman's head where a pool of blood grew on the asphalt I chanted over and over my lips quivering with the words ohm shri ram ohm shri ram ohm shri ram some of the crowd prayed with me I closed my eyes against the lights I chanted and chanted ohm shri ram two 12 years earlier a girl named Rupa arrived at her ashram in Tawanaru India dying from a sickness only I could cure this my father told me would be my first miracle it was the eve of my birthday an important transition I was the 10th human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu and I was turning 10 years old like every Friday the villagers filtered in with rice and lentils fresh milk from their cows spinach moringa and bitter gourd from their gardens they put these gifts in front of me as I sat on the only pillow in the room and they took their seats on the bedsheets we'd laid over the cement floor my father Aya sat to my left and my cousin Lakshman to my right we faced the open green door that led to the veranda the village kids played outside as a birthday treat Aya had promised to let us play with them after the prayer session if Lakshman and I were well behaved and lucky my mother had wanted to have an eggless cake made to celebrate with the villagers but Aya thought it too western and decadent one of the village kids had brought a cricket bat for the first time and he showed it to the others beaming as they touched it demonstrating how to hit the ball I'd asked my parents for a cricket bat for my birthday I imagined holding it showing it off to the boys when they came for next week's prayer meeting Aya nudged me with this elbow and I snapped back to attention ashamed I'd let myself be distracted now was not the time for cricket fantasies now was the time to focus and prove myself in whatever test would be demanded of me that night the Sri Kalkipurna the kindu text that prophesied my birth and life said it was on my 10th birthday that my trials as a living god would begin I would be tested three times and I would have to prove myself worthy of my birth Aya had reminded me of the scripture that morning I saw a vision he had said after our morning meditation I had seen a vision too early with the sunrise I had woken up dreaming of goat blood in the dream I'd wrapped my hands around the neck of a month old kid and held tight as it thrashed then stilled I'd put my hands through its skin and felt its insides I had smeared the gummy blood on my face my chest my feet until my skin prickled and grew fur and my nails knit together into hooves until I was the goat but I was afraid to tell Aya about this dream afraid my vision meant doom thank you thank you so much this is amazing thank you in that reading we really get a glimpse of this this pull this dichotomy between wanting to be a boy a young child and this weight this burden of expectation that rests on Kalki's shoulders at one point there's a the line in the novel gods don't cry that I mean childhood's tricky at the best of times but with the the burden of expectation of kind of being seen and improving yourself as a living god the pressure is kind of often incalculably burdensome there's this weird kind of like polarity of kind of the need to appear superior but also nursing kind of a great insecurity that we get with Kalki could you could you speak a little bit about that that conflict within their childhood the the most interesting thing to me about writing this novel the the thing that pulled me to it was this conflict between all of the expectation that Kalki is facing as a as a child who is supposed to be also a god and thus you know not a child at all right he's supposed to act like not even a small adult but a god somehow above the world of adults even and his desire to be just a kid he wants a cricket bat he wants to play with the village boys he wants to run around with Lakshman and yet he's the sort of young boy who who internalizes a lot of these expectations right who wants to who wants to be a good child god who wants to satisfy the expectations that are that that are put upon him so he really feels this sort of pull between these two desires these conflicting desires to please his father to please everybody else but then also like who is he outside of these expectations so I found it really exciting to write about and one of the one of the most beautiful things in my experience of writing the novel was sort of tracing how that conflict evolves over the next 10 years of his life so he starts out when he's 10 or 12 years and the novel ends when he's 22 and we see kind of how those desires those conflicting desires evolve over over a decade yeah very much so I mean we were talking earlier about Aya Khaki's father this controlling figure and there's a real sense of the toxicity of that control and the casualties of that control and and I guess the most kind of like apparent victim of it is the fragmentation of this family set up in the ashram that leads to separations of families which also kind of incubates this great sense of loss and yearning in khaki and there's a huge amount of synergy I thought between that that theme in your book and also in Kerry's book skin there's a sense that khaki very much is left yearning and needing and searching also within khaki's childhood there are these kind of threads of kind of queerness or kind of like gender non-conformity that kind of like creep in which I really like there's this wonderful scene where he's discovered by his mother Aya exploring her her clothing her female attire and can you speak a little bit about that scene and what happens there yeah in the scene he's talking about he's remembering being small and playing with his mother's saris so he you know opens up her armoire and there's all these like beautiful colorful saris and he sort of starts out by just like running his fingers on the on the saris and feeling the texture of them and eventually starts taking them out and trying to wrap them around himself and and trying to sort of inhabit her skin and I really saw it as you know one indicative of of this sort of almost non-binary identity that khaki has but also his his wanting to be really attached to the one parental figure in his life that that is positive right he has this really controlling father and this mother who's just you know really loving and being also victimized by his father and I saw that scene as a way for him to sort of bring her closer and she discovers him doing it and he thinks you know he's gonna get scolded but instead she's like no let me do it properly and she actually wraps the sorry the right way around him and she like puts makeup on him and he gets to sort of feel what it would be like I think to not have these expectations so that's the other side of a patriarchal culture right that that yes women are being controlled but also men and boys are being controlled and they have this burden of expectation also on them and I wanted to explore it from the other side because most of my writing has been you know very feminist in in sort of exploring it from from women's perspectives femme perspectives feminine perspectives and this was the other side khaki wanting to reject these patriarchal expectations of himself and and be free from free from that and kind of on that theme can you speak briefly to about a character who comes in a little bit later on in the narrative kalyani can you tell us a little bit about them and the community that they belong to in the book yeah so kalyani is a tiranangu which is the Tamil bird for trans woman and she sort of appears she's around khakis age she appears sort of you know midway through the novel and she's really there as as the first person who really sees khaki because everyone else is too close to him to really be able to see him fully in the in the cold light of day but she sees him and she embraces him without expectation and she that's the first encounter he has with someone who accepts him fully and doesn't have any expectations of him that he's supposed to perform and so he develops this friendship with her and eventually develops a crush on her and and you know he's 10 he's sort of starting to explore his sexuality and and figure out you know and he doesn't really understand what crushes are he doesn't really understand what this all means but but I just wanted it to be a very pure sort of infatuation that you have as a child and and their friendship as unlike you know these unlikely underdogs was was really interesting to me and and I really also because like Tirunar which is which means trans because the Tirunar community has such a long and deep history in Tamil culture I also wanted to be true to that and accurately or try the best I could to to create a character that sort of accurately portrays the community or at least you know you can't portray an entire community but at least gets at some sort of authentic heart at at that experience and so I did have you know sensitivity readers and and and such to make sure that that I wasn't doing anything off the mark but but Kalyani is is I think my favorite character she was a pleasure to write and she's just so pure she's so wholesome and pure and their relationship is is beautiful thank you Sja I loved her too and she she's an interesting almost bridge character to this other kind of like section of the book where the novel transitions to New York and there's this whole different kind of enclave of kind of queerness and identity that Kalki kind of gets to discover thank you so much for opening up the book for us a little bit more we'll come back and talk in a little bit more detail but now we're going to go from India to to Goldis Green and we're going to go to skin with you Kerry so the the the your novel opens in Goldis Green in 1985 and we meet Matty who is just a year older than Kalki 11 years old tell us a little bit about Matty sure well I'll say that the the book is in two main halves and each half takes place over six weeks and in 1985 it's six weeks between the end of primary school and the beginning of secondary school in the UK and a lot happens in that time but I feel that that's a real you know it's a big moment for any child who who goes through that process at that age of suddenly being at the top and then suddenly being at the bottom and feeling quite small in the very beginning of the book there's no spoiler to say this Matty's dad he's called Joe goes missing that's the first sentence and the first well the whole book really is about Matty trying to work out what has happened to him and get some answers the last place that Joe was seen was Hampstead men's pond in north London very close to Goldis Green and this is something of a surprise to Matty and Matty's mum Rosa who didn't know that Joe went swimming there but this is just the beginning of the mystery for Matty and so Matty in in the first part of the book goes to Hampstead Heath and the men's pond and manages to get into the men's pond as a child and swim there and is introduced to this world of wild wildish it's London outdoor water that is a really key relationship for Matty throughout the whole book carry on that note would you would you just the honour of reading your thing I'm going to read a bit I haven't read before and it's got a lifeguard who Matty thinks is Australian but is actually South African and I can't do that accent so I'm just going to you know use my normal accent for that Matty has been to the ponds once and this is a scene quite near the beginning of the book in which Matty is trying to get a little bit closer but is also wondering you know did did Joe drown in this pond was what has happened and also makes a new friend um the lifeguard looked down at Matty frowning as if no one was allowed to stand on this part of the platform except him today his sunglasses were pushed up on top of his head and you could see the thin lines at the corners of his eyes another lifeguard much older was sitting on a chair hands clasped over his stomach gazing outwards no church again mama mostly stayed in bed like John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they had all the journalists and photographers in there she had taken the plate of toast that Matty brought in without interest and put it on the bedside table maybe it was less like John and Yoko and more like the prisoners who went on hunger strike in Northern Ireland do you know Joe Ronan Matty said to the lifeguard arms tightly crossed who's that Joseph Ronan he hated being called Joseph mama would call him Joseph Ronan when they were arguing and dad would close his eyes before looking at the ceiling he comes he came swimming here uh-huh the lifeguard said look around you quite a lot of fellas swim here that's the idea yeah but he drowned in here you missed him lungs letting water in bit by bit it was the last place you were seen he glanced down are you talking about the missing guy do me a favor we've already had the police around here how'd you know about that Matty shrugged did they search for him no they just came and asked questions he looked down at Matty quite frankly they didn't go and look in the water sometimes police sent divers down on searches wetsuits and flippers and masks bodies float body boy not always sometimes they took ages like Virginia Woolf the writer in the encyclopedia she wasn't found for three weeks people had not been found for years another book had said and their bodies turned to candle wax because of a lack of oxygen sometimes you have to dredge the bottom the lifeguard looked irritable look we had a drowning in here two years ago daily never got over it never life guarded again i don't want to be reminded of it all right he narrowed his eyes and he bloody floated an impatient slightly suspicious glance what's it all to you yesterday Matty had pretended that the man with the balding head and bright purple trunks was dead just interested the lifeguard folded his arms so that you could see the veins on his biceps all right detective sergeant pipsqueak either get in that water or bugger off where's your dad today Matty put a flat hand against both eyebrows and squinted about around he sighed in you go then don't drown it was earlier in the day than last time and not busy the sun was hot when the clouds weren't over it an old man with a droopy wild west mustache was doing breaststroke very slowly and a couple of younger men were diving their stomachs sucked in as their arms stretched up two swimmers hugged close to the rope markers doing front crawl their mouths opening and closing like goldfish Matty swam slowly to the middle of the pond heading for the floating platform try to imagine dad in here tired after work having had a pint or two in the pub first and maybe gone a bit thin Lizzie like he sometimes said no one was on the platform today you'd be easily missed here in the water on the far side of it the lifeguards hardly seem to watch half the time chatting to each other caps pulled down low Matty turned over and floated face up arms out flat and eyes closed the sun beating down lungs like inflatables breathe in and you rose out and you sank just a little but dad might have done time to stop breathing arms sagged legs a line of cool liquid rose slowly into each ear the water rocked a queasy sway and Matty's body was lulled 180 degrees round facing the pond drowning it would be like dreaming suddenly a hand was dragging Matty back round and yanking a fifth's worth of t-shirt cough snot cough Matty fumbled holding onto someone's bare shoulders kicking blinking madly two dark eyes right there what in the bleed in hell do you think you're doing dickhead there was a loud whistle blown from the lifeguards area Matty stopped kicking partly held by the boy and gazed back heart full of water lungs full of air are you dead no the boy prodded Matty in the chest out up his face was very close still coughing Matty had clambered up onto the central platform and now sat exhausted as if having just run the london marathon the boy from the water was peering fiercely about two inches away slick dark hair his eyes so bog brown that they were almost black he sat back on his haunches running a palm over his hair and waggling the water off droplets that caught the light his shape seemed liquid his skin lined in the sun balancing on his heels the boy clasped his hands in front of him and let out a breath a really annoyed breath seriously you're a dickhead there seemed to be nothing to say you couldn't thank someone who had rescued you from drowning when you had been half trying to drown shivers started coming a head rush Matty jumped back in and swam very fast toward the walkway short shallow breaths where you're going the boy's voice was flung into the air but he didn't follow thank you Kerry that was fantastic so yeah there we see Matty at the hamster ponds and he really goes there because he's picked up from an interview with a police officer that's where his missing father used to spend time which is a bit and the elements of mystery around that and but it's Matty's only clue to what's happened to his father and and as he starts to attend the men's ponds and then the other ponds the secret ponds they're gonna not meant to swim in he's very much trying to rationalize this very adult problem from from a child's perspective I thought and there's this heady mix of kind of childhood invention um possibility threads of reading that Matty's been doing in the library and different things how was it concocting the rationalization of a child trying to work to process this this very adult problem I think I think that children tell themselves stories I was thinking about this particularly with reading SJ's book they tell themselves stories to preserve themselves as best they can and protect themselves as much as they are able with the information they're given which is almost always not the whole truth um yeah I had fun uh I mean some of it was instinctive you know I had fun sort of imagining a child thinking about really you know sort of imaginative things happening to Joe like being abducted by aliens being abducted by aliens or something through the mafia or the kjb you know lots of things like that but what was interesting to me was yeah the imagination of a child and how in the second part of the book when we see Matty as a young gish adult age 25 but a lot of that imagination has kind of gone um it's actually represented in another character who comes in towards the end of the book a child character and so I suppose I was just interested in the fantastic broad incredibly broad imagination that often the child has that can sometimes just get a bit kind of beaten down with life with all sorts of things you know not just a sort of difficult childhood but just the way that a lot of children are brought up and educated so I thought that sort of journey was was an interesting one to look into absolutely the mind is kind of alive with these different kind of threads there's threads of mythology they've been reading about Aphelia they've been reading about Houdini they've been reading about Chinese water spirits so there's this different fusion of different ideas going through their mind and and then but beyond that they kind of encounter a a logical family of sorts at the hamster ponds they meet the characters does and gets you for example tell us a little bit about the community that Matty meets at the ponds well this was very imagined I'm not allowed to go to the men's ponds so I really just tried to imagine and read it up as much as I could on the community in the 80s you know it was very popular with the gay community the gay male community the men's pond but not exclusively I did chat to a a straight guy who who is I don't know in his 50s or 60s now who was a regular at the pond so he was a bit of inside information for me there but it I am party to other swimming communities I used to swim I've been ill for quite a long time so I've been been off it sadly but my local Lido so it's not wild but it's outside is Brockwell Lido and there's such a community there all these mad swimmers who swim through the the winter including me and there's just something of the sort of camaraderie that you get I feel with swimming there's just something about it I don't know I don't know what it is that shared experience that's really interesting so I don't know I just wanted to represent yeah there are only two members of a large community but they're just very fun and very welcoming and very sweet really and kind of a bit protective I wanted to you know because this this traumatic thing has happened to Matty which feels very unsafe I wanted that community to feel like quite a safe a safe place for Matty the pons are a research project for Matty there are support system for Matty but they're also in escape they're an escape from home and they're an escape from from Rosa Matty's mother who essentially is shutting down as a response to the disappearance of her husband Matty's father Joe Rosa has a bit of a fiery Italian temperament tell us a little bit about what happens to Rosa and how Rosa deals with Joe's disappearance well we see it through the eyes of Matty so that's kind of all we know but yes the idea is that it's very much a shock that Joe's disappearance is very much a shock to Rosa as well it's not something that had been very obviously coming and yeah Rosa does does shut down and won't really talk to Matty and won't give Matty any sort of comfort actually or any sort of possibilities because she doesn't really know either so she's I mean she's really struggling but it comes out in really challenging ways for her child because she can be a bit aggressive and she can't really deal with the way that Matty is as an 11 year old child sort of working themselves out I feel like she's she's someone who needs to be in control and that that capability has been taken away from her and so she's trying to control as much as she can her own emotions and Matty Matty's looks and lifestyle in in the ways that she can I mean yeah she's she's a pretty challenging character but actually I think now I have a lot more love love for her than maybe I did when I was writing something. I could have oscillated between sympathy and finding her a complete monster to be honest with you I mean at one point I mean let's remember Matty is grieving and trying to process this incalculable absence of the father they love and at one point Rosa burns Jo's clothes and starts getting rid of Jo's possessions and even tells Matty that Jo is dead so I mean there seems to be trauma on top of kind of trauma going going on at home. Yeah trauma on top of trauma and different stories you know so different sorts of stories are being told and so Matty you know Matty thinks because he's gone he's something really really really awful must have happened he's got abducted etc etc he drowned in the ponds he's obviously died because they had a really close relationship where where on earth has he gone and eventually Rosa tells sort of tells that story as well because it's an easier story for her to sort of give but it's used as a weapon really as well it's it's control again it's her way of controlling the narrative in a way that suits her better. As you mentioned earlier it's kind of a a book of two halves in the second half it's 1999 Matty is now 25 years old and it opened in Ireland and Matty is on a bit of a pilgrimage in Ireland we almost I kind of think of them as a character so Matty is living in their their van which is called Shifty and journey around Ireland and is tentatively searching for Jo following up leads but they're essentially wild swimming their way across Ireland and tell me a little bit about wild swimming and water. I'll be frank with you the reason I wrote this book or what came out came out is because I wanted to write a book that had lots and lots of swimming in it because that was my complete preoccupation at the time I was just you know it was just my joy is and was and is swimming outside both in Lido's and finding rivers and lakes and locks and I just wanted to explore explore writing about it you know that was really it and this story kind of came out of that and when I told my then editor at Jonathan Cape Robin Robertson who's retired now that I told him about the idea for this book and what the first half was and I said and I want the second half to be somewhere else I really like writing about wet green places and he said you know the the sort of central belt of Ireland and I said no and he said well look at that and I looked at it on the map and it's just these diamonds and diamonds and diamonds of water going all the way up through the island of Ireland and then kind of along the border and out to the west and I was like oh I have to have some trips so I had some trips and some dips where I went swimming um swimming in the I wouldn't really call it swimming more more dipping generally dipping getting out writing some notes down getting changed um anyway so really that's that's what it was all about my passion for wild swimming and then it was sort of poured into this this character um so really part of the reason is I just wanted an excuse to write about Ireland's water but I just had this idea that um Matty uh has found out just before the beginning of part two Matty has found out something um pretty key about Joe and Joe's disappearance that that leads them to Ireland um but there's a little bit of resistance there's a lot of fear in finding out in getting possibly quite close to finding out what on earth happened to him so there's a sort of there's a propulsion forwards but there's also the fear and the fear is sort of ass ass waged by swimming a lot so okay well I'll go and find another lock okay well it's on the map this lock this lock is really nearby I'll go and swim there so water for a lot of the book but not the entirety provides a great deal of solace for Matty um in all sorts of ways um it's just a place of comfort it's a place where Matty feels um most themselves for most of the book um yeah so that that was the relationship I suppose I created with Matty and water absolutely um water does seem to be a kind of a medium of solace um uh for um a body that is questioned and interrogated publicly there's um there's there's a lot of as Matty travels around Ireland um there were voices going on partly they're still in dialogue with the voice of their absent father Joe there's a communication they can hear their their father's voice in their head and at the same time they're sensitive to memories of taunts at school about their identity and who they are they're constantly having to navigate um interrogation disguised as chit chat about their their gender presentation about who they are so what's for me is it is a kind of an enclave um for them to feel free to to to feel at liberty um and we touch on it slightly but um with regards to water um as maybe being seen as kind of a kind of gateway a gateway to a different realm a sense of comfort could you talk a little bit about the influence of folklore and mythology in the book yeah absolutely um so my my main life and my previous artistic life has been as a musician and composer and uh also as a folk musician so I've always really loved folkloric stories um particularly of these islands but elsewhere too and as I started writing fiction that just seemed to be my way forward and my first novel explicitly works with a particular folk ballad and for this my second novel for skin I wanted to still uh play with folklore but in a much freer way so I knew that I wanted a very watery story and I just uh looked up and researched lots of of water folklore and water mythology um especially in Britain and Ireland but in other parts of the world certainly as well and I wrote all this stuff down and then I kind of just let it influence the story so there are just lots of different um different allusions to folkloric stories or or folkloric characters that you might get in all sorts of different parts of the world um sort of floating throughout and as I write in my author's note it's really true that afterwards I looked at the story went oh actually there's also that but that's a bit like this song I know or this story so I really like the sort of interplay it's not just me kind of trying to shoehorn stuff in but I felt like things were kind of rising up out of the the story that I was creating and creating these extra layers um there's a particular uh a story the silky story silky story um which is a sort of sealed person uh that it's a folklore story from Orkney um that plays a part in the second half of the book um but there's also sort of yeah allusions to mermaids or the Irish marrow and water sprites and uh a water dog and lots of other things as well it's such a fantastic uh novel Kerry um I think you're beginning to realise just how much I loved it so uh so thank you for for opening it up for us I really appreciate it um so now we're going to move on to uh you sir um Patrick Gale um and I'm going to start with um my favourite kind of slightly uh confused question about which number in in your novel writing career mother's boy is because um there's always a slight element about which how many novels you've written isn't it I think it's 17 I think I tend to retreat and just talk about how many books that's easier um but there are collections of short stories and there's a novella and I don't know I'm old I'm just very old only leave it at that I'm very distinguished too um uh where did the inspiration for this book come from Patrick it's based on a real person so it's it's based on the early life of the Cornish poet Charles Corsley and his mother and we know quite a lot about Charles and we know very little about his mother Laura so that was my way in and all my novels really start with a question I can only answer by writing a novel um you know a question that can't be answered by straightforward research and in this case the the question really was why on earth did this poet Charles Corsley who had all these adventures during the Second World War why did he choose to come back to this tiny town in Cornwall where he grown up and live with his mother and teach in a little local primary school because in many ways he is the most unromantic of poets so when when you say someone's a poet you immediately think they're a heartbreaker they're self-destructive they're suicidal Charles Corsley has this really really quiet life and um I was determined that there was a volcano there somewhere and I in the course of my research I think I found it it's described as a novel of Cornwall but also of two world wars there's a real sweep to this yeah it's mathematically beautifully told if you don't mind me saying novel so it sort of opens pre pre first world war um um and and we kind of encounter a world before the character Charles exists really so we kind of start with Charles Charles's mother so tell us a little bit about war so Laura when we first meet her is a maid in a house in Tinmouth on the south Devon coast and this is this is all true she met Charlie her future husband when he was a servant in a neighboring household he worked for a doctor as a groom and uh I have the meeting by accident on the very first page of the book when Charlie driving the doctor's cat little cart runs almost runs over a little boy and ruins him and they bring him into the house where Laura is working so the doctor can stitch him up um and her eyes meet Charlie's across the child's body and it's the first of many scenes that go into quite gruesome physical detail I think one of the things all three of our novels have in common is they're intensely in the body and of the body and Laura works with her hands she's she's a manual laborer by and large so most of the novel she is working as a laundress and I had to do a heck of a lot of research into how the hell you do laundry when you haven't got a washing machine um I can now I'm an expert on it I'm obsessed with stains and how to remove them um and I was very I was very moved by the idea that Laura who is barely literate um has this child who is some kind of genius and without giving away too much of a plot um his father isn't around for long and so she has to raise this child on her own I'm like quite used now to the idea of one parent families but back in the 1920s that was a tough thing to be so um towards the beginning of the novel uh Charles's father Charlie goes um off to war um and whilst he does return he returns changed yes I mean I hadn't realized until I researched the book that there actually was quite a tb epidemic in the trenches I should have known this because one of my great aunts was a nurse out there and that was how she died um but a lot of the men who got caught up in the mustard attacks mustard gas attacks had their lungs profoundly weakened and then they caught tb all too easily and Charlie catches tb and is basically sent home to die so Charles the hero of the book only has a father for a very few years he was only seven when his father died and again this is something I think these books have in common it it's a novel that really explores the the yearning for a father and sometimes that slight ambiguity that that then lends to the relationship with the mother if you if you only want the the parent who isn't there what does that do to your relationship with your mother absolutely it's it's a it's a theme across these three fantastic novels um Patrick would you um uh do us the honor of reading first of course I'll read a bit from very early on um about about Charles's dad about Charles and Charlie uh so in this scene Charles the little boy is only five years old but pretty precocious is already learning to read quite well even though he hasn't started school yet um and he is going on one of his father for his father goes for a daily walk for his tb then Charles showed him what he'd been shown by Gweny and Brydie the other day there was a statue of Mary Magdalene at the back of the church and if you could throw a pebble so that it stayed there and didn't just bounce off you get a new suit it was quite a distance from path to statue and you couldn't make his pebbles get anywhere near but he knew from their trips to the quieter stretches of the river that father was clever with stones and could make them skip over the water like bouncing balls unlike Charles father wasn't from Launston hadn't grown up there and needed these things explaining to him just as Gweny had explained to Charles once he understood he fetched a pebble so tell me again he asked what must I do you have to stand just here and throw the stone so it lands on Mary Magdalene it's no good if it just hits and bounces off it has to stay there and if it stays are you winning you soon yes Charles giggled sensing he was being humid and if I knock someone else's pebble off does their new trousers suddenly disappear no so I just throw it so it stays like this and he threw a pebble very carefully so that it lodged tightly behind the statue's shoulder with a satisfactory click Charles clapped no suit he said no suit do you want one and all yes all right and father produced the second stone and tossed it and lodged it as neatly as he had the first Charles laughed he felt slightly giddy like when they'd been on the golden gallop this at the Shrovetide fair he began to feel a little nervous as well in case so much good fortune was not allowed like taking a second slice of heavy cake before everyone else had eaten the first one but then father slyly produced a third pebble and raised an eyebrow what do you think he asked best of three would your mother like a new suit a nice tweed one maybe and somehow the idea came to Charles's mind of mother not wearing the kind of suits ladies wore to church sometimes with a tweed skirt and matching jacket but in a man's suit bulky and baggy and with a man's hat to match and a pint it was so outrageous a thing to imagine there in a graveyard with grown-ups clicking by on their business with baskets and parcels and serious spaces like Aunt Ellen's when someone birthed that Charles laughed so hard he may have wet himself a little and then father was laughing too perhaps because Charles laughing was funny but then he stopped laughing and had to cough normally his coughs weren't so bad he would splutter tug out the day's handkerchief some days he had more than one before bedtime turn carefully away cover his mouth and cough once three times maybe but this time he coughed several times so hard that it must have hurt like when Albert from next door had whooping cough and his mother took him to breathe in the gasworks dunes every day to help him get better father had to grip a tombstone with one hand bracing himself as the coughing shook him and the lady made a clucking noise and stepped off the path to avoid them Charles didn't know where to look everyone always looked away from father when he coughed and he knew it was rude to stare but it was frightening and he couldn't look away for long finally the handkerchief was fumbled back into the suit pocket but not before Charles saw a splash of poppy red on it and then father had to make a noise a bit like someone about to be sick more tutting from passes by and made very tidy use of the day's blue Henry he tucked the little bottle away in his jacket's outer pocket where mother made him keep it as she was frightened he'd forget it and sit on it he'd be kept it in his trouser pocket took a few shallow breaths and leaned back against the tomb he saw Charles and Jack both watching him anxiously and ruffled Charles's hair which he knew he hated and whistled to cheer the dog up sorry about that he muttered we can go on a bit in a moment then he just stood there leaning against the tomb with his eyes shut for so long Charles thought he might have fallen asleep standing up Charles watched people stepping off the path to walk past a woman with a lively little dog on a lead the jack brother a man his father's age with a black leather bag two pretty girls with parcels from the butcher which was starting to leak blood Edna the tramp lady who lived in a hedge near the barns of whom mother always said mysteriously you can tell she's clean underneath and the vicar the vicar looked as though he was about to speak to father then saw his eyes were closed glanced down at Charles and visibly swallowed his words like a dry wafer as he walked past instead thank you so very much Patrick it's it's a joy to hear you read one thing i love about all of your books is is the tenderness that you have for your characters and every character it doesn't matter how central or marginal they are a full a fully rounded person even if they just sort of come in for a scene you can feel the kind of like the life of them even after they departed the page so it was a joy to hear you thank you going back to to Charles's mother Laura you mentioned that she was a laundry woman she's she's hardworking she's resilient she's kind she's generous what particularly motivated you to explore the relationship between a mother and a son in this book well i wanted to to write a novel about how Charles causely became Charles causely how he became a poet and i'm convinced that his mother played a huge role in shaping him after all she was pretty much his only parent and i had to extrapolate her character from his poems he does little thumbnail sketches and a lot of his poems of boys and girls he knew as a child or his various relatives and his mother i feel is there throughout mainly as his own kind of wisdom that creeps out so in a way causely's poems helped me to draw Laura but i had to extrapolate quite a bit and i had photographs of her and i find i often use photographs when i'm writing of characters they they photographs of people and buildings were real help and i have a particularly wonderful photograph of her when Charles is still a very small baby and she's looking at him with kind of awe in a way as if to say you what am i going to do now and this very intelligent baby is just gazing out at the world and i thought there's a really interesting relationship there and there are a few little hints i picked up about her one one which really amazed me was that although she was earning pence of that as a laundress she somehow plowed together enough money to buy her child a piano and that sounds ordinary enough but back then this was an amazing deal i mean they were they were living they went in a slum but they were in a a tenement um where they basically lived in one and a half rooms and just physically fitting a piano into this place was amazing enough and then i met an old man who had been a younger friend of Charles when they were little who vividly remembered sitting on the pavement outside the tenement to listen to the piano because none of the children in the street had heard one before it was the most amazing thing for them so i thought that that is a really interesting clue as to what Laura's nature must have been like i think you you fold in social history um uh sort of issues around class sacrifice um uh money privilege um and difference really artfully in this book um and uh Charles is different um uh he is peculiar um uh and unlike his contemporaries um uh um could you talk a little bit about his childhood relationship with Joe who's the son of the butcher a relationship that doesn't get up to the last start yeah i mean like a lot of the the elements in this book um Joe is it's sort of lifted straight from Charles's poems there's a wonderful poem by Charles about basically being beaten up by the butcher's son at school and um Joe is the butcher's son and he does beat Charles up he gives him a black eye and breaks his glasses but they go on to form a kind of friendship largely thanks to Laura who to Charles's horror marches him around to the butcher's shop the next morning with the broken glasses hands them over the counter and says i'm a war widow i can't possibly pay for new glasses every year your boy is going to pay for these and so the this poor lad who was you know just doing what boys do uh is shamed in front of the whole community but they do become friends and they become quietly left wing together uh Joe and Charles like a lot of their contemporaries uh in the 1930s fall under the spell of this wonderful thing called the left book club and they and this is all true i i based all this on Charles's early diaries um so they devour the poems of Ordon as they're published and the books of Isherwood and crucially George Orwell um Joe is totally straight Charles is distinctly queer but doesn't begin to name that in fact never really names it to himself even to the end of the book um but Joe is clearly his first big crush and uh there's a lot of water in this book as there is in Kerry's and there's a crucial scene early on on a perfectly horrible Sunday school picnic to the beach where Joe and Charles wander away from the crowd and Joe discovers that Charles can't swim and gives him his very first proper swimming lesson and that in turn leads to the two of them spending most of their adolescence and their early 20s when they can swimming in the terrible little um natural water bath in Launston which now doesn't exist anymore but i i know from Charles's diary that the water was usually green at the start of the swimming season and slimyly green by the end so this is in the days before chlorine or anything like that water is important especially as Charles eventually goes into the navy and but before he does he spends time in Plymouth his uh his other friend Ginger who's a bit more sort of queer um uh especially when it's just Joe um it takes him to uh Vellido in Plymouth um uh and before we uh sort of begin to think about transitioning onto the questions part of this event um it's a it's a moment of kind of humour and relief before the kind of horrors of the Second World War kick kick in tell us a little bit about it. Well again this is based on something I found in Charles's writing Charles kept these tiny little daris I ruined my eyesight trying to decipher them I had to use a magnifying glass um and there's one most of them are very boring they're about what yet for supper what he's seen at the cinema what he's reading and they're very very unemotional um but a current theme that runs all the way through is this friendship with Ginger and these excursions he has with Ginger and they often go to Plymouth and Plymouth is like the big city down here it's it's half an hour away on the train and it's full on the day of this particular excursion it is full of sailors um and in the diary Charles there's this moment where I just thought this man cannot be straight because there's this moment where he describes him and Ginger going up onto Plymouth Ho which is the big green park-like area above the sea above the Lido and finding themselves surrounded by sunbathing sailors and Ginger makes Charles sit on the grass with him so they can just enjoy the presence of all these men and in Charles's diary he just writes oh how I wish that I could draw underlined two exclamation marks and there's no more emotional expression anywhere else on the diaries I just thought okay this guy is gay he may not know it yet but he is totally gay um and of course at that stage these two young men are still talking rather romantically about the war that may or may not come and what are you going to do in the war if you sign up and Charles decides by the end of that chapter he's going to be a sailor but he's having all these fantasies rather erotic fantasies about helping these hunky sailors to write letters home and things like that and then of course the real reality of the war comes home and he does indeed join the navy um but it's not half as romantic as he was thinking but he does because it's a gale novel he does find some romance um indeed he does no one um creates fictional characters who I fall in love with like you do Patrick uh have you fallen in love with Christie Christie I would be putty in Christie's hands I think there's a queue I'm willing to fight um I'm aware I really want to hear from you the audience for questions so please if you do have anything you want to ask our panelists please do use that question box just below the panel um but before and while we're waiting to hear from uh from you I did want to um uh carry SJ um Patrick do you have any questions for each other you've you've read each other's books um um I don't want to put you on the spot but um I'm carrying that do you have a question for either the two panelists I did write I did my homework and I wrote one wrote a couple down and um I'd love to ask Patrick I'm I'm really interested in I mean your level of research is unbelievable uh it's just I find it absolutely fascinating as you said about you know the laundry you know I really understand that you really went into went to town with that and really went into detail um I'm really interested in how you um how much you how are you able to imagine child cause leads interior life um how how far you felt able to go I think that's what I mean how far you get able to go because he's so as much as I understand it from your note at the end he's so reserved and so private is how how far you felt able to take his his queerness especially that's a really interesting question I mean I I I I decided I would have to take it all the way um but I was really really intimidated um not least because I am one of the patrons of the child's causely trust so I feel kind of on a bound to handle him with care but funnily enough that I asked the trustees when I was embarking on this book how they felt because I I basically said look I'm I'm more or less going to out this national treasure um and they were really eager they said please please it's out and out and it turns out lots of people who love child's causely poems for ages have been thinking there's something we're not being told here it doesn't quite add up um so what I've tried to do in the novel then was to inhabit child's as faithfully as I could by using the voice of his poems and the voice of his diary um but to let him briefly express the things I feel he needs to express and can't quite get out it's very interesting whenever late in life he was asked why he hadn't written his memoirs he always gave this very dusty answer and just said oh it's all in the poems and it is all in the poems but my god you have to decode it quite a bit um anyway we do actually have a question from the audience um from Tim Tim O'Reilly thank you for your question Tim um and um please if anyone can take this one um it strikes me that in all three books the principal characters stand out as a very different from those around them do you think that is always the case for queer kids and makes life harder for them as they try to find their way do you want to take that one S.J. I was just gonna say please Kalki is such he's such a a moving figure because he he feels queer even though he's not entirely queer at least to start with um yeah I mean I think we're you know in all three books there's this sort of like queerness is sort it is infused in the child narrators or the child's perspectives and it's you know not not fully developed yet especially in in their in their own self-perception which I thought was really interesting across you know both of your books as well that was the case um yeah I mean I think that queer kids are always the odd one out right where you feel a sort of outsider status um it not always obviously but I I think from even my experience um has has always been uh looking from the outside in and and feeling yourself at odds with the world in some way um but I don't think that always means that you've you sort of feel isolated I think that's changing um for sure I think that you know uh the students that I have now don't feel at all isolated sometimes they're very like very comfortable in there for us in a way that's that's truly beautiful to see um but don't don't don't you think that so often though with queer kids it's it's their straight friends who tell them their queer first um they often don't because you they so want to belong they're not they're not looking I mean that's something I found really moving in Kerry's book the sense that this child who is gradually finding themselves even in the second half of the novel they've they've they've constructed a kind of armor of of muscle and of toughness um and you feel as this trembling shell behind that that that's been hidden deep deep deep inside yeah and I think the thing that was interesting to me in writing skin was that um Matty was Matty who is a gender queer character is trying to work out who they are without without the the world that we have right now you know without social media without that sort you know queer families around um you know there's a little bit of a couple of people that sort of sparks and recognition in the second part of the book but mostly it's sort of trying to work out stuff without the language that we have now um it was only 1999 that the second part is set but that that was interesting to me that I felt there was there was yeah a sort of protective armor because there's there's no way of articulating the way that Matty felt uh in their gender yeah I really loved that about both your novels is that like you know Kelki is is coming of age at a time when all of this he has vocabulary when he grows up but um Kerry and yours you know Matty is is you're right like gender queer in a world where it's not articulated the discourse doesn't exist yet so what you know that was really fascinating to see and Patrick same you know in terms of sexuality sort of this this um his this inability to really like join a large community and what what queerness can look like at different points when when that's the case when there is no when there's no you know discourse into which to walk but the funny thing is of course the irony is that Kelki being born blue um it's like this it's like this metaphor I often think you when people say why do you have to come out why do you have to come out and say well if we were born with blue hair if all queer children have blue hair everyone would know and you wouldn't have to do it and in a funny way his difference is like this this little metaphor all the way through for being being queer and out there and yet there's so much hidden within sorry we should let people ask more questions I'm getting carried away I think certainly we're beginning to uh to kind of get to the end of our allotted time um but before we do I might just ask you one quick fire question um each uh just to wrap up I mean Patrick not so much yours because we follow the trajectory of Charles kind of further into adulthood as he kind of engages in the second world war and beyond but um but childhood is a significant element of your book we're writing about childhood um a very conscious kind of like um the decision for you or in writing the novels did you particularly want to explore queerness and difference in childhood when you set out to write these books um let's start with you Kerry um not really I'm not really sure where it came from I think it was a sort of instinctive decision and I seem to want to write young characters all the time I like writing people who are on the cusp of developing into young adulthood or adulthood and this is something that really appeals to me uh yeah so not not really I think it was more the the fact of you know having a dad that suddenly went missing uh you know just at the end of primary school just felt like a really really sort of pertinent pertinent time for that question yes well I knew I was going to write about uh Charles's childhood and um partly because he writes about it so much himself it clearly mattered a great deal to him um but it was partly from Laura's perspective but I like the idea of writing a character who her her real motivation in life is to be a mother not she's not particularly romantic I mean she learns to enjoy sex all too briefly but um really her her selfhood is bound up in in mothering so I couldn't escape writing about about childhood because of Laura thank you and that's uh yeah it's sort of similar to Kerry uh when Kalki came to me he just sort of walked in as a 10-year-old boy into my head and and and sort of fully formed which is very rare I usually you know build character from the ground up but Kalki just sort of appeared um and and I knew and I'm actually not uh prone to writing younger characters I kind of like that um sort of late 20s uh that that sort of angst that comes in your late 20s as you as you figure out how to become an adult um but I think childhood is especially queer childhood is such a confusing time and is so rich uh in terms of narrative potential that that um it's you know I could one could probably write about queer children forever it just leads me to to thank you all um uh audience if you're at home um uh do uh do give a silent applause uh for Patrick Gale, S.J. Cindy and Kerry Andrew and thank you all so much for joining us um I hugely appreciate your company this evening um just to finish up on behalf of the British Library um uh I'm going to ask you to keep an eye on there what's on page um on the British Library website for details of more upcoming events and also you can watch past events on the British Library player and there's a dedicated page um on lgbt stories and histories please do jump on to Gaze the Web Gaze the Words website and treat yourself and anyone you care about to one all of these amazing novels thank you all so much for joining us this evening wishing you all well thank you bye