The author's memoir of childhood and adolescence brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire The period as well as the place is evoked with the crystal clarity from the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather, through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna's mother, to the brink of the 1960s, where the community was shocked by Lorna's pregnancy at sixteen