Stephen Gately was 'real-life Peter Pan', says his widower

London (ANI): Boyzone star Stephen Gately was a real life 'Peter Pan", his widower Andrew Cowles has said. In an interview with ITV"s This Morning, he said that his husband viewed the world through the eyes of a child and refused to grow up, reports The Mirror.

“Stephen was incredibly childlike, he loved Disney - every year we went to Disney [World] in Florida. I just think he never really grew up, he was like a child and children can maybe see more than the rest of us as well. They see the world in a different way and Stephen was like that. He was incredibly shy and private as well, but he liked to show off and be the centre of attention - but only in the way that a child does," he said.

Gately spent four years penning his fantasy novel, The Tree of Seasons, which Cowles called his 'legacy". The star had difficulty in getting the novel published while he was alive due to his lack of formal education.

“His education hadn"t been that great, so he didn"t use any grammar, any punctuation, any capitalisation, so it would be blocks of text that was quite tricky to read actually. Every few months, I would take chunks of it and send it to a proof reader and we"d get back a nicely formatted version that I could read!," Cowles added.

“This is hard work, I"m quite private," he said. “Stephen always kept me out of the limelight. I don"t want to be a celebrity, I don"t like cameras very much and I"m coping day to day, you know… I miss him terribly. The picture on the back of the book has been great comfort to me and I find myself kissing him goodnight sometimes because it"s a good size picture to kiss."

“Last night I was asking him for strength for today because I was fearful about coming on the telly but I"ve got to do it for him, because if he was around he"d be doing it himself. And this is his legacy in a way," he said.