Lu Wilmott grows up in the Portsmouth slums of the 1920s. Stricken by diptheria, she is sent to the Hampshire countryside to recover. In this pastoral idyll, she discovers a robust fighting spirit and the first stirrings of sexual attraction. But, faced with little choice, she follows her mother and aunts into the city's infamous staymaking trade, where young girls and old women endure conditions so appalling that Lu comes to realize that things must change. And she can be the instrument of that change...