The making of a poet: Mother’s Boy, by Patrick Gale, reviewed

Charles Causley was a poet’s poet. Both Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin considered him the finest candidate for the laureateship, which Hughes later won. Now Patrick Gale has made him a novelist’s poet in this richly engaging fictionalised account of his early life.

Mother’s Boy is bookended by two world wars: the first, in which Charles is born, and his father Charlie suffers the injuries that would lead to his premature death; the second, in which Charles, who had written schoolboy verse, ‘although poetry was not really his thing’, discovers his poetic voice while serving as a coder in the navy.

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The novel’s main subject is the intense, quasi-incestuous relationship between Charles and his mother Laura, a church-going laundress, who raises him singlehandedly. Charles is born after she instigates a bout of lovemaking with the exhausted Charlie on his brief return from the Front, because she believes a baby to be her due.