Caradoc King is a boy who lost both his mothers

Problem Child

For a teenage boy to lose his mother is a tragedy. To lose two, as Caradoc King did, is barely comprehensible, and to survive, not just to tell the tale but to tell it with lucid generosity, is truly remarkable.

This book tells a shocking story of the damage inflicted by respectable, well-meaning middle-class parents on a child; but it also testifies to that child's resilience and enduring capacity to love.

Perhaps it was the respectability that was the trouble, concealing dark emotional undercurrents.

King was adopted from a Barnardo's home in 1949 when he was 15 months old, becoming the fourth child and first son (eventually there was another girl and the longed-for boy) of Jill and Da, a dentist living in a large house on the Essex marshes. They were reclusive, frugal even for the Fifties, and strict. He was beaten with "the dog stick" for riding his tricycle down the road, and had his hand burned on the hot plate for trying to relight a bonfire. He was five. Even now, he tries not to condemn them: "Parents treated their children differently then".

All the same, King recalls much happiness in his country childhood, especially time spent with his gentle, browbeaten father. And he discovered his lifelong passion, books, "the most valuable thing my parents gave me".

But he grew up terrified of Jill, her furies, her cold silences, her withholding of love. He started fibbing and stealing: classic behaviour of an insecure child.

At six-and-a-half, he was dispatched to boarding school.

At this point, King's story, with its touches of the Brothers Grimm, enters Evelyn Waugh territory. It was his great good fortune to spend five years at Nowton, a prep school run by two camp brothers and their stout sister and staffed by a curious bunch of ex-servicemen, worldly, clever and kind.

A bright boy, he discovered a flair for acting; desperate for attention, he was often in trouble, which led to more lies and more beatings; he confesses to "a need to embellish and glamorise my life".

When he was 11, his mother, under the influence of a sinister-sounding priest, sent all the children to Catholic schools. Abruptly removed from the place and people he trusted, King was wretched and disruptive. To please Jill, he spent a pointless year as a novice at a monastic school. Then, by a miracle, he found Father Roger, a sympathetic, intelligent young monk who saw his potential.

It was to Father Roger that Jill gave the task of telling the 15-year-old boy that he had been adopted. Just over a year later, after he was too terrified to return a gold watch he says he had borrowed for a party, she wrote again to tell him he was "degenerate" and no longer part of the family.

Rejected by the only parents he knew, King was saved by his eccentric Aunt Molly, the friendship of his old Nowton headmaster and by Father Roger's determination to get him into Oxford. He became a literary agent in London (he now heads AP Watt) until, when his first marriage foundered, he realised he had no idea who he really was, and decided to look for his birth parents.

The story of how he tracked his mother down to a nursing home where she was too far gone to tell him who his father was is told with painful simplicity. "It was enough to find her."