Back from his father's funeral, the narrator starts reading a diary his father kept during his days as a soldier during the Second World War. The narrator revisits his father's past, as well as his own, to look for cracks in this façade, to find signs of weakness and displays of emotion. Episodes from the past are recalled and examined for any light they can shed on the matter. He has read things that his working-class father would never understand, let alone know that they would be used to understand him.