Even in the heat of battle, Geoff Fulton, a professional soldier, would always carry with him the memory of the night he was on leave, when his timely intervention rescued fourteen-year-old Lizzie from the oldest of perils for a young girl, and thereby began to change her life. Lizzie came from a desperately poor home, ruled by a vicious stepmother only too ready to profit from setting the girl along the same sordid road as her elder sister had been made to take.
Then, in 1943, when Geoff returned wounded from the desert war, it was to find a Lizzie he hardly recognized – she was mature and highly attractive. For her part, she soon came to realise that he too had changed. Embittered by his experiences at war and rejected by Ernest Bradford-Brown’s daughter Janis after a lengthy relationship long opposed by her irascible father, he now appeared to Lizzie to have a ruthless streak that was at considerable odds with the caring man who had, all those years ago, rescued her from poverty and deprivation.
Catherine Cookson’s powerful novel is the story of a girl who took the chance of a new life and seized the opportunities to make something of herself.