Richard Wilde on being told that he is dying knows that he must spend his last months writing down the family secrets he has kept for most of the twentieth century. His story, interwoven with idyllic scenes of his childhood on a Shropshire farm, with his parents, brother and sister, his army life in India, both in peace and war and his overwhelming passion for Elizabeth who loved him and left him but never really let him go, evokes a time past where the beauty of the countryside hid an underlying madness. This story, partly fictionalised, is taken from a tattered hand written diary where the writing is faded the words trail away and the pages crumpled and tear stained.