Hannah Delaney is a young woman with a secret and it isn’t one she can share and certainly not with her sister, dying in her Wicklow farmhouse, nor with her children that she was reared with. Hannah had left her home some years before to find excitement and maybe a better life for herself in Leeds in England and had fallen in love with a soldier, Michael Murphy.

Secretly engaged, they planned to marry on Michael’s next leave, but the troops were massing for D day and with all leave cancelled, he was unable to get home. Michael Murphy was blown up on a Normandy beach and Hannah was left alone, penniless and desperate.

Slowly, she picks up the pieces of her life again and travels from Leeds to Birmingham, where she finds work in a guest house, until the news comes of her sister’s impending death. Once there, she is asked to take and look after her sister’s youngest child Josie, who is only nine years old. Back in Birmingham, common sense tells her to marry reliable Arthur Bradley, who has a house of his own, especially now that she had Josie’s welfare to think about. She thinks she will have a stable and steady life with Arthur and hopefully one day a family.