In the last years of Queen Victoria's reign, Ned, a middle-class schoolboy whose parents are working abroad, spends his Summer holiday in the Bedfordshire countryside with his great-uncle Silas. Silas is sixty, but very hearty and still attractive to women. He does odd jobs and poaches on the sly, to the horror of his long-suffering housekeeper Mrs. Betts. His son Abel is getting married, and, at the wedding reception, Silas recalls his own happy times with his late wife by singing her favourite song with his new daughter-in-law.

Silas takes Ned to decorate the Railway Hotel and is appalled to find that the landlord, once a jolly man, has become a dour, strict tee-totaller, refusing to serve alcohol to his guests. Queenie, his put-upon wife, takes her share of the profits from the hotel safe, using them to have a happy, platonic day at the sea-side with Silas. On her return she vows that changes will be made, starting with the sale of alcohol.

On his way to see his solicitor to make a will Silas makes a detour to visit Mrs. Gadsby, a feisty, attractive middle-aged widow. Whilst Ned is sent into the garden to pick fruit, she and Silas share some afternoon delight but she gives him good advice as to changing his will to Ned's benefit.

Silas agrees to fight a much younger and fitter boxer known as the Gorilla, in a fairground side-show and plans to weaken his opponent by giving him a diet which will debilitate him. However it fails to work and Mrs. Betts is forced to take drastic action to save Silas from a good hiding.

All is revealed when Silas takes a bath and tells Ned how years earlier, when he was a teenager, he was swimming nude in the river and a girl stole his clothes. He had to bare everything in order to chase her and regain his trousers and says that, to this day, he has no idea who she was. Mrs. Betts does though.