My book-buying habits were driven by thrift. In England, the years immediately following decimalization were years of spiraling prices. I discovered that books priced in shillings would often be half the price of later printings, and so I would rummage my way through the shelves of bookshops checking the prices of books, looking for books priced in shillings, trying to get the most fiction for my limited pocket money. I read so many bad books just because they were cheap, and I discovered Tom Disch, who made up for all of them.

As a child, and as a young adult, I was reading adult fiction and children’s fiction with the same eyes and the same head, and I was reading anything in the space I happened to be in, indiscriminately, which is, I am certain, the best way to read.

I worry when people ask me how to stop their children reading bad fiction. What a child takes from a book is never what an adult takes from it. Ideas that are hackneyed and dull for adults are fresh and new and world-changing for children. And besides, you bring yourself to a book, and children are capable of imbuing words with magic that not even the author knew was there.

I had one book confiscated, when I was twelve, a cold war political farce by David Forrest called And to My Nephew Albert I Leave the Island What I Won off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game, taken away because, if I remember it correctly, the cover showed two naked female breasts with American and Russian flags painted on them. I tried to get the book back from the teachers by explaining that the cover was misleading and, apart from a sunbathing young lady, there was pretty much no sex or nakedness in the book. This did not work. I eventually got it back from the teachers at the end of term by claiming, falsely, that it was my father’s and I had taken it without his knowledge, and it was, reluctantly, returned.

I had learned not to read books in school with breasts on the cover, or, at least, to cover the covers with something else, if I did.

I was pleased that the Michael Moorcock Jerry Cornelius books I loved when I was twelve, with their surrealistic and extreme sex scenes, had such innocent, mostly breastless, covers.

And, of course, I learned the wrong lessons from this. Because I loved adult fiction as a child, when my daughter Holly developed a fondness for R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books at the age of eleven or twelve, I dashed down to my library and returned with a paperback copy of Stephen King’s Carrie. “If you like those, you’ll love this,” I told her.

Holly spent the rest of her early teen years reading books in which cheerful young heroines traveled in covered wagons across the plains, and in which nothing conceivably nasty ever happened to anyone. And, even fifteen years later, sometimes, when Stephen King comes up in conversation, she glares at me.