J.R. Ackerley was born into a seemingly bourgeois family living in Richmond, Surrey. His mother was a frail ex-actress, his father a well-to-do, heavily moustached Edwardian paterfamilias. Only after his father's death did the author discover that Dad had long maintained a mistress and three daughters in Barnes. In unravelling the facts behind his father's duplicity - which include an odd relationship as a trooper with a mysterious Count de Gallatin and eccentric entry into the banana business - Ackerley also reveals much of himself: from schoolboy to frontline subaltern, from shiftless student to tireless searcher for the ideal friend in the twilight of homosexual London. The author also wrote Hindoo Holiday, My Dog Tulip, My Sister and Myself: The Diaries of J.R. Ackerley and We Think the World of You.