An Immaculate Mistake: Scenes from Childhood and Beyond

by PaulBailey (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1990

  $3.79

  An autobiographical memoir, set for the most part in London in the 1940s and 50s, by the author of At the Jerusalem , Trespasses and An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne . It is composed of fifty scenes or fragments of memory which describe Bailey's parents, relatives, friends and acquaintances.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $9.37

  Paul Bailey's remarkable account of growing up working class and gay in south London just after the war. His father had come back from WWI to find that he'd been abandonned by his wife, and in early middle age, working as a road sweepeer, 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 lack of space in the house. Nevertheless it was a happy, secure home which he protrays with great affection. The second strand of the book is his discovery at grammar school (he was the brains of the family) that he's homosexual - a discovery which didn't go down well in rigidly conventional Battersea. The book is extremely funny in places, evocative, and particularly moving in its portrait of the author's mother.