It is 1948 and Britain is struggling to recover from the Second World War. Half French, half English, Marguerite Carter has lost both her parents and survived a terrifying war, working for the SOE behind enemy lines. She has left behind her partisan lover Andre and returned to England to become one of the first women to receive a degree from the University of Cambridge.
Now she pins back her unruly curls, draws a pencil seam up her legs, ties the laces on her sensible black shoes and belts her grey gabardine mac and sets out on her future as an English teacher in a South London girls' grammar school. For Miss Carter has a mission - to fight social injustice, to prevent war and to educate her girls.
From the first Aldermaston march in the 1950s, through the rise of the Labour Party and the Swinging Sixties to the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and the spectre of a new war - in Iraq, through deep friendships and love lost and found, in telling the life of one woman Sheila Hancock has created a powerful, panoramic portrait of post-war Britain and a remarkable chronicle of our life and times.
