When Daisy’s family lose their croft on the Connemara coast, her Aunt Jane, housekeeper to Dr and Mrs Venables, offers to take Daisy back to Liverpool. There she can be companion to the Venables’ orphaned niece, Cynthia. Daisy is a tomboy, strong-willed and hot-tempered.

In Ireland, she was seldom in school but often in trouble. Now she tells herself that she must conform. She begins to work hard in school and life in Liverpool gradually becomes easier to bear. Although Daisy means to follow her friend Jake to university, war intervenes and she starts work at a munitions factory, falling in love for the very first time…