It’s Harry Styles’ Big Screen Age and we’re all just living in it. As all the drama around his first big meaty role in the scandal-hit Don’t Worry Darling falls away, all eyes are now on My Policeman.
It tells the story of a love triangle between a married couple, Marion (Emma Corrin) and Tom (Styles), specifically an affair between Tom and a museum curator called Patrick (David Dawson). The film – directed by Michael Grandage and set in ‘50s Brighton – is based on a 2012 book by Bethan Roberts, and she’s previously explained the real life story that inspired her novel.
What happens in the book?
The novel centres on Marion, who falls in love with Tom, a friend of her older brother, who is the eponymous man-in-uniform. The young lovers marry, and Marion comes to realise and accept that Tom is also in a relationship with Patrick, who is the real love of his life.
As homosexuality was still illegal in England at this point, the two men have to cover up their long-term romance, but Marion’s jealousy of the pair eventually erupts and there are devastating consequences.
What was My Policeman inspired by?
Writing in The Guardian in 2012, Roberts revealed the love story that inspired her novel, and it centred around a love affair of EM Forster’s.
Forster was a celebrated author, best known for his works A Room With A View, Howard’s End and A Passage To India, and he tended to focus on the class divide and hypocrisy that runs throughout society. In his later work, some of which wasn’t published until after his death, he began to explore the subject of homosexuality.
His novel, Maurice, which he first began writing in 1913, is a coming of age story about a boy called Maurice Hall and his relationship with another Cambridge student, Clive Durham, which goes awry: Maurice tries to have conversion therapy and then is later blackmailed after having sex with another man, Alec. Despite staying in contact with the Durhams, he later falls in love with Alec.
The book was only published after Forster’s death in 1971, as he never believed it could be published while same-sex love was illegal and punishable with jail time. A note found on the manuscript reportedly read: “Publishable, but worth it?”, which appears to show Forster grappling with the idea of producing an issue perhaps so close to his own heart, to be denigrated by the public.
Forster was known to have had several gay relationships, which had to be kept undercover for fear of the law, but the greatest of them all, Roberts wrote, was with a policeman: “For 40 years, EM Forster and the policeman Bob Buckingham were in a loving relationship. Buckingham was 28, Forster 51, when the two met. They shared holidays, friends, interests, and – on many weekends – a domestic and sexual life in Forster's Brunswick Square flat.” However, just like Charles and Diana, she noted: “This was a relationship in which there were three people.”
Forster and Buckingham met in 1930 in the Oxford vs. Cambridge boat race, and the men grew close, with Forster writing to his friends to tell them he was “violently in liking” with him and that the “spiritual feeling” between him and Buckingham had now “extended to my physique”.
Two years later, though, in 1932, Buckingham married a woman called May, a nurse. As Roberts notes, so started the “the beginning of the triangular arrangement”. Buckingham promised to spend his days off split between Forster and May, but this came with its own heartaches and jealousies as three was definitely not the magic number.
Forster became godfather to the couple’s child, Robin, but when May suffered from TB and was sent to a sanitarium for a year to recover, Forster told her if she sent Robin to be looked after by his aunt, he would – happily! – make sure all of Buckingham’s needs were met. The two men later travelled to Amsterdam together to stay with Christopher Isherwood.
When May recovered, all three of their lives became even more intertwined, with May even caring for Forster when he suffered from a stroke. According to one of Forster's biographers, May remembered Forster as a bad patient, getting under her feet and insisting on engaging her in conversation when all she wanted was to get on with the housework. Roberts explained: “It was this anecdote, more than anything else, which inspired me to investigate the story of this fascinating triangle and use it as the inspiration for my new novel, My Policeman.”
Reflecting now on their modern set-up, she added: “Theirs was, to use a Forsterian term, a quite wonderful muddle.”
My Policeman arrives in cinemas now, followed by Amazon Prime Video on November 4.
