An immaculate mistake: scenes from childhood and beyond

This is Paul Bailey's account of growing up as a working class and gay man in South London just after World War I. His father came back from war to find that he'd been abandoned by his wife, and in early middle age - working as a road sweeper - he married a young servant girl. Bailey was one of three children brought up in such poverty that up to the middle of his adolescence he slept in the same bed as his father because of a lack of space in the house. Nevertheless it was a happy, secure home which he portrays with great affection. The second strand of the book is his discovery at grammar school that he's homosexual - a discovery which didn't go down well in rigidly conventional Battersea.