This work is a three-part memoir, looking back at religious indoctrination, first at the author's schooldays of the 1950s and 1960s, then his journey to India, looking for something different, but finding something similar. In the third phase, the adult man asks how much this still influences him, despite his efforts to rid himself of the hidden influence of religious indoctrination. Malachi O'Doherty is prompted to look back on his religious life one night when, working as a journalist in Belfast, he finds himself in the porch of the church at Harryville, recording sounds of picketers screaming, to drown out the sounds of the hymn inside.