Patrick Gale
Patrick was born on 31 January 1962 on the Isle of Wight, where his father was prison governor at Camp Hill, as his grandfather had been at nearby Parkhurst. He was the youngest of four; one sister, two brothers, spread over ten years. The family moved to London, where his father ran Wandsworth Prison, then to Winchester. At eight Patrick began boarding as a Winchester College Quirister at the cathedral choir school, Pilgrim's. At thirteen he went on to Winchester College. He finished his formal education with an English degree from New College, Oxford in 1983.
He has never had a grown-up job. For three years he lived at a succession of addresses, from a Notting Hill bedsit to a crumbling French chateau. While working on his first novels he eked out his slender income with odd jobs; as a typist, a singing waiter, a designer's secretary, a ghost-writer for an encyclopedia of the musical and, increasingly, as a book reviewer.
His first two novels, The Aerodynamics of Pork and Ease were published by Abacus on the same day in June 1986. The following year he moved to Camelford near the north coast of Cornwall and began a love affair with the county that has fed his work ever since.
He now lives in the far west, on a farm near Land's End with his husband, Aidan Hicks. There they raise beef cattle and grow barley. Patrick is obsessed with the garden they have created in what must be one of England's windiest sites and deeply resents the time his writing makes him spend away from working in it. As well as gardening, he plays both the modern and baroque cello. His chief extravagance in life is opera tickets.
“And she does not feel jilted, even one year on. Ben was weak or, fatal combination, weak and good. Jilting implied, if not malice, then aforethought and he was considerate to a fault and not a planner. As he had confessed all those months ago he was not the powerful one in his marriage, not when Chloe was near enough to influence him.As the weeks wore on laura realisedthat whatever offstage battle had taken place, she had lost. Chloe might not love him more, but her love it seemed, had proved the most tenacious. And, who knew, perhaps she had surprised them both with her strength of feeling. Perhaps it had taken such a crisis for him finally to fall in love with her and he had woken to the novel wonder of her as a man returning from a fever would be astounded at the mundane pleasure of grapes or daisies.”
“Like all their peers they went about things in the reverse order to the practice of their parents generation. They had sex, realised they got on really well then fell in love.”
“I worry sometimes that we're apt to confuse forgiveness with forgetfulness. The potency of forgiveness comes precisely from the fact that it must be done while being goaded by an unhappy memory.”