Young Kitty Drinkwater lives in Paradise Court, just off Burlington Street. Life is tough in Liverpool in the years after the First World War and Kitty is always hungry and dressed in rags. As the eldest child, she is the scapegoat for her feckless, drunken mother. She dreams of a better life...

Lilac Larkin's prospects, by contrast, are very different; she is a beautiful, self-possessed young woman, and even when her pleasant job as a lady's maid comes to an end and she starts work in a bag factory, she is sure that her life will be full of promise and excitement...

So when the two girls meet by chance in a millinery shop, neither can have any idea what changes in their lives the encounter will bring nor how strangely fate will work to bring them together once more.