My Father and Myself

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.