I was just a girl and life offered only things I despised: houses, children, security, housework. I had to pass. I had to. I had to be different.'

Paddy is illegitimate, the daughter of another Paddy -- an active member of the IRA who abandons her English mother, Louey, at her birth. This is the story of that mother -- frail, but with an indomitable spirit -- of that daughter -- and of their life together, seen through the clear eyes of Paddy as a child and adolescent. The working class life of wartime England is wonderfully evoked and the subtle changing relationship between Paddy and Louey is movingly conveyed.