Cuckoo in the nest

Caradoc King, the well-known literary agent, was adopted in 1948 as a baby into a family of three girls, shortly joined by a fourth, presided over by a difficult, unhappy mother and her feebly adoring husband. He grew up unaware of the adoption and has never discovered its motive. His adoptive mother, Jill, the moving spirit behind every family decision, may have simply longed for a boy. If so, she was singularly ill-prepared for standard boyish delinquencies. Young Carodoc liked playing with matches, embroidering the truth, and inspecting — in a spirit of scientific enquiry — the private parts of his younger sister. This memoir describes King’s upbringing in a spacious but sparsely furnished 18th-century house in the Essex marshes, where money was tight and discipline tighter.

Some of the harshness may have been generic to the period. The penalty for King’s fondness for matches was to have his hand pressed onto the scorching metal of the stove chimney.