Miles Kington: The day Granny gave me a dirty book

When I was about 12 my father recommended me to read a book called Sorrell and Son, by a man called Warwick Deeping. He said he had enjoyed it very much when he was young and thought I would, but I didn't, and my father said "Well, never mind" but was disappointed that it hadn't given me the same thrill as it did him.

There was no way it could, really. For one thing, it was very period. It was set deep in the gloomy malaise of the post-Great War period, where people had come back from the trenches looking for a land fit for heroes, and hadn't even been able to find a job. For another, the main character, Sorrell senior, lived alone with his son, and seemed to spend all his time grimly battling with the world. The Oxford Companion to English Literature puts it neatly, under Deeping, Warwick (1877-1950):

"Prolific and successful novelist who caught the popular imagination with 'Sorrell and Son' (1925), the story of a wounded ex-officer who takes a job as under-porter in a hotel to earn money to ensure an appropriate private education for his son Christopher, where he will not be exposed to 'class hatred' or 'the sneers of the new young working-class intellectuals' in the social war that Sorrell envisages."

Blimey. I can see now why I didn't really get on with it. I can't have been attuned to all the class ironies engineered by giving an officer a job below his "real" status. (Nice, though, to think that porters made enough money in those days to pay for private education.) But I can also see why my father loved it. He was born in 1909. In 1917, when he was eight, his father died in the First World War. The book appeared when he was 16, and my fatherless father must have lapped up this tale of a son who did have a valiant, battling father. (Shades of Man and Boy by Tony Parsons...)

But where is Warwick Deeping now? Where is Sorrell and Son? I haven't seen a copy for years. Nor have I seen a copy of the other books my father heartily recommended me to read. For instance, David Blaize, by EF Benson, a meandering school yarn barnacled with more social attitudes of the time that left me quite cold. Or Stalky and Co, another school yarn that, even though it was by Kipling, is not nearly as funny as Kipling thought it was.

The only books of my father's I remember enjoying are the ones he never pointed me towards. The Great War memoirs of Frank Richards, for instance, Old Soldiers Never Die, which is a view from the ranks of the regiment (the Royal Welch Fusiliers) in which Robert Graves and my grandfather were officers. A strange book called Son of Apple, by Maurice Walsh, a long retelling of an Irish folk tale that I found quite magical, though I have long since lost my copy and cannot find another.

But the book I most remember came to me at my father's direction, and quite by mistake. Granny had rung up one day to ask what Miles wanted for Christmas, and instead of sensibly asking Miles what he wanted, my father foolishly said: "Get him The Water Babies – he's never read that." On Christmas Day I was given a package and told that this was from Granny. I opened it and found a book called The Water Gypsies, by AP Herbert. Not knowing that Granny had ordered the wrong book, I took it away and read it. It was quite good fun but rather grown-up. At one point one of the characters, an artist, paints a girl "in the nude"; I didn't know at 10 what "in the nude" meant, but it was clear from the context that one of them had no clothes on, so I imagined that a "nude" was a building warm enough for people to have no clothes on when they were painted, hence "I'll paint you in the nude".

Some sixth sense told me that I might have got it wrong, so one day I said to dad: "Dad, is there a nude in this part of the world?"

"What do you mean by 'nude'?"

"Oh, you know, that place where people take their clothes off and paint each other."

"Hmmm... Where did you find out about that..?"

"In that book that Granny gave me for Christmas."

"Is that so? Can I see that book that Granny gave you for Christmas?"

And so The Water Gypsies was taken away from me, never to be returned, and it was replaced by The Water Babies. It wasn't nearly as good as The Water Gypsies. And what was ironic was that in The Water Babies most of the characters spent most of the time swimming around with absolutely no clothes on.