Three very different girls sign up as trainee nurses at a big London teaching hospital in 1934. Dora leaves her overcrowded, squalid working-class home for a better life. But has she got what it takes to keep up with other, better-educated girls? Helen born for the job, her brother is a doctor, her all-powerful mother a hospital trustee. But will Helen's secret misery be her downfall? Millie an aristocratic rebel, her carefree attitude will find her up in front of Matron again and again. Will she ever care enough to make a nurse? Or will she go back to the glamorous life she was born to?