A riveting story of grinding poverty and casual cruelty in 1920s Halifax, UK. A time just within the edges of living memory when a four-year-old child danced for pennies on a pub table, to pay for her father’s drinking. And as a nine-year-old, that same child scrubbing the outside steps of the big houses in all weathers, for a few, desperately needed pennies.

Yet this is not just social history, a tale of a child and her mother trying to survive against the odds. This is the story of the author’s mother and grandmother, tales which Kathleen heard many times throughout her own childhood. Unflinching, unsentimental without self-pity, Kathleen’s mother refused to be defined by the appalling circumstances of her childhood, and with courage and dignity, grew into the woman known simply as Phyll to her friends.