PLUCKED from Bennett’s bulging auto-biographical door-stopper, Untold Stories, but now published in a very pleasing mini (5inx7in) format, here are Bennett’s memories of his parents and his upbringing in Armley, a lower-middle-class suburb of Leeds.

It’s funny and sad, sometimes by turns and sometimes simultaneously as perhaps only Bennett can make it.

But one wonders whether Bennett has ever felt uneasy about exposing, however poignantly, the social gaucheness and pretensions of his “Mam and Dad’’, as he invariably calls them.

If you are a parent, would you like one of your kids to present you to posterity like this?: “Your Dad and me are going to start to mix,” Mam wrote: “We’ve got some sherry in and we’ve got some peanuts too.

“Never having tasted the mysterious beverage, though, they lacked any notion of when it was appropriate and treated it as a round-the clock facility. Thus the vicar… was startled to be offered a sweet sherry at ten o’clock in the morning. They, of course, stuck to tea; or, when they were trying to fit in, Ribena.’’

Still, Bennett’s portrait stands as literature – an affecting window on the tight English provincial life of the Fifties.

We must just trust that Bennett’s parents, who plainly loved him and did their best for him, are grateful to be immortalised, no matter how socially unsophisticated their famous son chooses to portray them.