Neville tells of his parents' romance — his father met his mother when she was three and he was eight, they married when she was eighteen — and of his father telling his little niece at her lavish champagne party that at his own wedding he could ill afford a half-pint of rum.

Neville's father announced on the morning of his death, to Neville's brother Collin, that he was going that day, refused to be contradicted, and died that day — of a piece with a life in which he never doubted anything and read only the Bible.

In 1922 his father, a junior partner in a small grocery business who never looked at the books, was forced out of the partnership by false accusations and took to his bed for weeks, getting nothing of his equity; he then started again alone with his second son and a small loan from a friend, and the business multiplied until, when he died in 1959, he left his ten children millions.

Neville tells how his brother Victor, who made a real fortune, confided his vision only to their mother — never to their father or the rest of the family — and for two years remained faithful to seeing the biggest building on the main street of Barbados reading J. N. Goddard & Sons.

Neville's father stood on a Barbados beach thirty years earlier and saw it as the perfect site for a hotel; he never faltered in that dream, and when the property finally came up for sale the one man who could have outbid him was in Brazil and his cabled offer arrived twenty-four hours too late.