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Lady Barker looks back on a childhood lived in the margins of the British Empire, and what she remembers best are the animals. Three pet monkeys, each more disastrous than the last, each heartbreaking in its own way. Wild monkeys in India who outwitted her at every turn. A dramatic carriage accident in Jamaica that could have been fatal. Her little sister Jessie, always getting into mischief. The horses she loved and the freedoms of colonial life, far from the stiff parlors of England. Written with warmth and humor for young readers, these are not sanitized adventure tales but honest recollections: the joy of a monkey on your shoulder, the grief when it slips away, the specific dangers of growing up where you did. There is no sentimentality here, but there is deep affection for the chaos of it all. This is a book about childhood in its truest form: unsupervised, unpredictable, and full of creatures who needed you as much as you needed them.