Rachel Carswell would like a little more excitement in her life, and wonders if she should return to her job as a primary school teacher. Then a phone call changes everything. A death in the family is hard enough to cope with, but to Rachel's shock and amazement she finds she was adopted during the Second World War. She feels compelled to track down her birth mother, and with her teenage daughter Fiona she retraces her family's past, returning to the tenement block where she was born - but searching for the past can have a bad effect on the present.