My Policeman (Penguin Books) isn’t your ordinary love triangle. In 1957, we meet Marion, a young woman hopelessly in love with Tom, her best friend’s brother. Tom — training to become a policeman — returns her affections, but holds a secret of his own. He’s started seeing Patrick, a confident gay man a few years his senior, who is a curator at the local art museum. Tom is torn between the safety of marriage to Marion and a desire for the life Patrick could offer him. In a time when homosexuality was criminalized, Tom and Patrick’s illicit affair is not without consequence.
The 2012 novel by Bethan Roberts — inspired by novelist E.M. Forester’s own relationship with a policeman — has been adapted for the big screen by Amazon Studios and will soon be available for streaming.
A FAITHFUL BOOK-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATION
The story jumps between two timelines and two perspectives. In 1999, Patrick has had a stroke, and Marion brings him into her home with Tom to live under their care. It is told in Marion’s flashbacks and in Patrick’s diaries that detail his love affair with Tom, who is anonymously referred to as “my policeman”, for both his safety and for Patrick’s. In this novel that reads like a character study, we see the fallout of their interwoven relationships, and how one dark mistake in the past has resulted in a tragic future.
A STORY ABOUT LOVE AND SHAME
Ultimately, My Policeman is a cautionary tale about shame, with each character playing a part in their own downfall. If the reader can see past Marion’s catastrophic secret — the source of her own shame — they’ll see Patrick and Tom’s complex love story steering the narrative.
Marion is easily seen as the antagonist to Patrick and Tom’s relationship, drawing the reader or viewer back and forth between admiration and hatred for her. She has been haunted for a lifetime by the selfish mistake she made that ruined not only Tom and Patrick’s lives but her own life as well. She is trying to do the right thing by bringing the ailing Patrick into their home, even if it is years too late. A small change at the end of the film grants us a chance to better understand, and even sympathize with Marion’s shame.
Patrick’s shame is directed toward the world that does not tolerate his sexuality. He knows what happens to gay men in the 1950s who are discovered. Patrick is ashamed of having to live in secret, but he does what he must to survive.
Tom is torn between wanting a conventional life with a wife, children and a job as a policeman. His own attraction towards Patrick frightens him, making him ashamed and confused because as a policeman, he is complicit in the system that arrests and abuses men like Patrick. His only hope for protection is a marriage with Marion, but if she learns his secret, everything will come crashing down.
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY
In one moment in the film, before Patrick and Tom’s first sexual encounter, we see Patrick try on Tom’s police uniform. For just a moment, we see this terrifying portrait played off in a moment of drunken laughter between the two lovers — a gay man embodying the very thing that threatens his existence.
The nuance of Tom’s status as a policeman is captured carefully and intentionally. Patrick sees Tom as “one of the good ones”, even as his friends and lovers are arrested and beaten for being gay. Patrick knows the risk of getting close to a police officer, just as Tom knows that his association with Patrick could incriminate him.
And at the end, we watch Tom set fire to the uniform, saying he has no use for it. Being a policeman was his safety and his defense, letting him remain invisible inside the system. Once that safety disappears, he has nothing left to protect him from the reality of his identity, not even having Marion as his wife.
QUEER TRAGEDY BROUGHT TO LIFE
Watching the film, set in Brighton in a quaint town by the sea, I was stunned at how many moments appeared on screen exactly as I pictured them. Visually stunning and true to the tone of its source, with captivating performances from many of its leads, My Policeman holds its form as a tragedy. Though it has a happy ending — bittersweet may be the better term — what the characters have to endure begs the question: do the ends justify the means?
Each movie that takes that first step of putting gay characters on the big screen brings us another step in the right direction. With other LGBTQ stories like Call Me By Your Name being adapted for a mainstream audience, I anticipate a push for more movies that prioritize happiness for gay characters. Instead of lingering on the trauma of coming out and of criminalized sexuality, where queer characters are beaten on screen and suffer at the hands of their oppressors, I hope to see more stories that celebrate queer love.
Through the harsh reality and the dark sides of LGBTQ history, stories of hope, triumph and acceptance will always endure. That is what stands out as the brightest point of My Policeman — not the secrecy, the lies and the trauma, but the time in which Tom and Patrick fell in love and spent their days with Marion, the three of them happy, in love and unashamed.
About Bethan Roberts:
Bethan Roberts was born in Abingdon. Her first novel The Pools was published in 2007 and won a Jerwood/Arvon Young Writers’ Award. Her second novel The Good Plain Cook, published in 2008, was serialized on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and was chosen as one of Time Out’s books of the year. My Policeman, the story of a 1950s policeman, his wife and his male lover, followed in 2012, and was chosen as that year’s City Read for Brighton. Mother Island (2014) was the recipient of a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize. She also writes short fiction (she has won the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Prize and the RA Pin Drop Award), and drama for BBC Radio 4. Her new novel, Graceland, which tells the story of Elvis Presley and his mother, will be published by Chatto in 2019. Bethan has worked in television documentary, and has taught Creative Writing at Chichester University and Goldsmiths College, London. She lives in Brighton with her family.
