The last shot of world war two has been fired and a boy is born, destined for life in a beautiful fishing village in South West Cornwall. He is surrounded, there, by friends and a loving family and his is a childhood that dreams are made of. But in this village they chain up the swings on Sundays, and as he grows, he finds that puberty and its consequences are hushed up and must never be spoken of.

This novel is an album of a boy's early years, a mosaic of stories, some funny, some harrowing, that trace his journey from birth to the brink of manhood.