Harry was born in Birmingham in 1936. He was evacuated to Riverside House in Herefordshire in 1940 where he lived with the Bellows family. When his natural parents are killed in an air raid, the Bellows family adopt him. It is a close family with a Welsh Grandfather, an aristocratic Grandmother, an uncle with his daughter, Charlotte, and his adopted parents. His adopted father is killed on D day and he becomes close to his mother, who, it is hinted, later falls in love with Harry. Harry's childhood is happy with a mother who loves him and his adopted cousin, Charlie. His grandfather tells him stories of his Welsh ancestry and the Celtic gods who inhabit the land, 'Beyond Hay Bluff' which marks the Welsh border. It is intended that he will be brought up and educated to inherit and manage their small engineering firm in Hereford but, after he marries Charlie, but on their wedding day, she falls and is crippled for life and Harry, despite being a talented engineer, has to give up his career to care for her. Years later the family firm is sold and, after Charlotte's death, he marries Tessa, a girl many years his junior. They have two children. Together, they found another company. This is successful but Tessa is more ambitious than Harry and, after she repurchases the old firm, they quarrel and separate. Harry, aged sixty, moves to their holiday house in the Isle of Mull where he finds a lover, Katy, to whom he recounts his autobiography. When Tessa has a series of disasters she has a nervous breakdown and Harry has to return home. He finds a fraud in the firm, and has to take over as managing director. It is the final irony of the story that he trains for the job that he only starts forty years later.