This is a story of two middle-class families living in adjoining houses in a West-of-England town. In one house lives a priggish individual, his seemingly submissive wife and their three daughters who share in a varied degree the characteristics of their parents—a repressed unhappy household which hears little laughter. The other household includes a woman and her five children, and here everything is bright and gay. The story traces their interactions during the uneasy interlude preceding and following the Munich period, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
