Mortimer wrote: "I grew up the only child of a blind barrister and a mother who devoted her life to caring for him, in what was then a remote part of the Chiltern Hills. After my father's death, I began to write scenes about growing up with him and finally turned them into a play... (and) in what I read and what I write, and perhaps in my general attitude to life, it is his standards that I still refer to because he taught me everything". His father, the law, England, Dickens, and Shakespeare all come together when the old man turns conversation into cross-examination, sings snatches of music hall songs, envisages what dinner might have been like with the Macbeth's, and combines it with intransigent middle class eccentricity.