When Cathy's father finally returns from Occupied Germany in the years following World War II, Cathy should be pleased, shouldn't she? But she hardly knows her father, and his arrival means moving out of Nanna's house into the city. Cathy hates the change, yet when she has the opportunity to be the first member of her working-class family to go to Grammar School, it is her dad who is behind her all the way. Cathy is ostracised by the better-off pupils at her new school, and sneered at by the teachers, but with the help of German-Jewish refugee Judith, she begins to find her strength.