In this racy memoir, Irish author Aidan Higgins dissects the folie de grandeur of a Catholic family in County Kildare. He examines the mystery of growing up, his rearing on a rundown estate within the English Pale, the decline of a family fortune and the wide world that he discovers in London and South Africa. He also digs up family skeletons and rattles their vertebrae. The state of Ireland during and just after World War 11 is tackled boldly in this bawdy memoir which reads like a picaresque novel.