Ben Harcourt was only a lad when his unemployed father went off on the Jarrow march for jobs. And while the glamour and excitement of the send-off thrilled him, the politics of socialism failed to penetrate his bright young mind. When the Second World War forced his parents to send young Ben to safety in the country with his Aunt Ethel he was quick to see the advantages of wealth as he witnessed with envy and contempt the lifestyle of his soldier uncle's employers, the Pemberleys of Berringer Hall.
For his spirited cousin Josie, the desperate struggle of decent working class people for a living while the Pemberleys indifferently squandered their fortune could not be ignored. Her feelings for her adored cousin Ben suggested an alternative course, but her one ambition was firmly established from the first: to become a Member of Parliament for the triumphant post-war Labour Party.
Nicola Pemberley lived in a different world from the rough, attractive playmates who burst into her privileged existence just as her handsome father set off for war, never to return. As she grew into a beautiful but extravagant woman, her love for Ben blinded her to his faults as he amassed a growing fortune in the property world — a fortune that would never reconcile Nicola's snobbish mother to a marriage between her daughter and a boy of such lowly origins.
And as Ben courted the woman who would gain him entry to a world he secretly despised, his determination to ignore his growing attraction for Josie, who knew him best, and his business partner's increasingly shady dealings sowed the seeds of great trouble ahead . . .