Interview: Caradoc King, literary agent

Published on Sunday 27 February 2011 14:52

AT THE HQ of the esteemed literary agent the other big names face out from the shelves, but Caradoc King's first foray into print has pride of place. Well, he says, we're actually in the office of his joint MD who has also switched from book-hustling to book-writing. King is full of praise for his associate's efforts though I can't help thinking: isn't this all a bit incestuous?

But incestuous, meaning "improperly inter-connected", doesn't really suit King. To be cast adrift by one mother could be considered bad luck but this happened to him twice, the second time at 16. In a letter his adoptive mum wrote: "After long and painful thought we have decided that we can no longer accept you as a member of the King family." His school fees were to be stopped. "You must make your own way in the world… we wish to have no further contact with you."

This is the subject matter of Problem Child. Showing off his half-term holiday suntan, King doesn't appear to have too many problems in London today, AP Watt being the oldest agency in the world. Business, we must assume, is good, and King's personal standing is high; in a recent survey his "shark rating" was listed as four out of five. For the first 25 years of his career he says he was the archetypal "self-made man". His reputation as the toughest of negotiators on behalf of his authors was almost certainly born of a steel developed when the punishment for mucking about with matches was having his hands burned on the stove. But, perhaps not surprisingly, he hadn't been especially obsessed with his childhood.

And then, around the turn of the century, he became obsessed. "I had a mid-life crisis of tangled love affairs and leaving my wife of 20 years," he explains. "I took off to India and on this Keralan rice barge I started writing about the experience of meeting my natural mother for the first time. That encouraged me to believe that the voice was there because what I wrote has gone into the book pretty much unchanged as the final chapter. I think Problem Child has been me trying to reclaim my childhood."

Now 64, King was a Barnardo's boy, although he didn't know he'd been adopted until a teacher told him, the year before he was chucked out of the family house on the Essex coast. He writes that his mother Jill "scared me from the beginning. There was something deliberately severe about her, the double plaits pinned round her head, her plain unmade-up face, her tweedy unfeminine clothes…" He got on well with his father, who he called Da, and his three sisters, but yearned for Jill's love and was never cuddled by her. She told him he was named after a famous Welsh chieftain. "So you must try and be brave like him," she said, shortly before packing him off, aged six, to boarding school, following a spate of lying, pilfering and running away.

Typical agent, King frets about his likely bookshop positioning. "When I started the book the market was glutted with misery memoirs." Well, there are middle chapters about Nowton Court in Suffolk which could see Problem Child squeezed into the section on spiffing schools. He fell under the spell of the two brothers and a sister who ran it: "charming, witty, formidable, cultured, non-conformist and camp".

King, who lists his favourite school yarns as Tom Brown's Schooldays, Auberon Waugh's The Foxglove Saga and Vice Versa by F Anstey, unlocks a great trunk of memory for these reminisces, which serve as an antidote to all the beatings during his spartan, TV-free existence at home. Friendships with other boys turned into crushes. "My need for any kind of love was pretty strong, but after my first encounter with a girl – of the On Chesil Beach type, I have to say – I never looked back."

After the initial shock, King's reaction on learning he was adopted was relief. "Because my relationship with Jill had been horribly dysfunctional, I was glad she wasn't my real mother. Of course, from that moment on, I had to survive. And I had to be myself, whatever myself was. I remember an author friend saying he envied me for being able to get out into the world. I suppose you can be locked within a conventional nuclear family situation, however happy. It's true that I learned resilience, but I had the good luck of teachers and others being kind to me."

He managed to meet with his real mother, Joan, once before she died, and learned that his real father could have been a professional footballer, an opera singer, a neighbour's son – or a man with an eye patch who played in a dance-band on Bournemouth Pier.

"Did I wish I'd had more time with her? Not sure: there can be anger and guilt in such situations. But she was obviously wayward, a bit of a go-er and quite extraordinary and right away I thought: 'I'm glad you're my mum.' "

• Problem Child, 16.99, Simon & Schuster, is published on Thursday

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 27 February, 2011