Dick's story begins with his apprenticeship on a farm before World War II, touches lightly on his war experiences and his childhood romance with the girl he later married, and then moves on to the core of his memoirs: the fourteen years he spent on Woodlands Farm. The eccentric cast of animal and human characters on the farm provided a wealth of material for his later writing. This is farming at its funniest but, when the farm failed, he remembers settling happily into teaching before blossoming into his third and best-known career as a writer, and finding international fame with the release of the film, BABE.