As a little girl, brought up in an orphanage, Caroline Parker had always been told that Dept Ford was the place her disgraced mother had come from. So when years later her husband dies, leaving her penniless and with three young children to support, Caroline's first thought is to head for the place she has envisaged as home. But to her horror, she arrives at the station to find that Dept Ford is not the country village she'd imagined, but in the middle of London, a huge, teeming city the likes of which she's never seen.

Luckily a kindly passer-by takes pity on her and her weary children and puts them on the tram to a place where she might find lodgings which, as it turns out, is in Rotherhithe, not Deptford. And so it is Culver Road that becomes her true home, where Carrie – as her neighbours christen her – and her family find themselves battling through times both good and bad: through strikes and street parties, weddings and funerals, through the first war, with Kaiser Bill, and the tense build-up to the next. And it is in Culver Road that Carrie meets Jim, the enigmatic sailor who is to change her life...

(Paperback, ISBN: 0747236070, £6.99)