Showing results by narrator "Margaret Sircom" in All Categories

Leeds, 1914. Sisters Julia and Margaret Wood are struggling to rise above devastating poverty while the threat of war looms large over their community. Angry feelings about foreigners have reached a boiling point; their German-Jewish father's search for work proves hopeless, leaving entrepreneurial Julia to keep the family afloat by hawking homemade pies on the streets of Leeds.

She made a promise, but can she keep it? When Lucy Patterson promises her dying mother that she'll leave the comfortable home they've shared with her mother's employer, Stanley Jones, to go and live with her Aunt Flo on the other side of the Mersey, she has no idea of the terrible consequences. Life with the Flanagans in the slums of Liverpool, and Lucy's new job in a factory, are totally different from the world she has known. Mocked by her cousins and the women she works alongside, and terrified by the brutality of her uncle and the unwelcome attentions of her cousin Frank, Lucy is desperately unhappy.

When Tim and Sue Marshall take in a local boarding school boy on their farm, they watch as the shy, bespectacled Quentin changes beyond recognition. As the years go by there are big changes for everyone, Sue sees her family growing up and realizes that things can never stay the same.