The author was brought up in Warrenpoint and in this book describes his family life and the characters involved including his frail delicate mother, his brother who died of pneumonia at 14 months, and above all his father, a proud, resolute policeman with the RUC. In a house where religion was practised but never discussed he wrestled with the ideas of Augustine and Rousseau, and developed a passion for music and literature, bringing to bear on Yeats and Eliot, Keats and Synge the same fortitude he saw and loved in his father.