Annie Murray

It is 1946: The war is over and three young women face a new kind of life. But peacetime brings its own pressures, with each facing life with all its joys, sorrows, and surprises.

Pretty 17-year-old Greta has never known a stable family life, and is happiest at work with her friends at the Cadbury factory in Birmingham. But life takes a turn for the worse when her missing vixen of a sister Marleen turns up during the freezing winter of 1962.

August 1939. Genie Watkins, a Birmingham kid, would love to have a proper happy family like her Italian friend, Teresa. But Genie hasn't reckoned with the outbreak of war, her already rocky family being split up and the strangely liberating effect it all has on her mother....

Anna Craven grew up captivated by stories of her mother Kate's childhood in Birmingham. But when Kate dies, she leaves her daughter one final story, and Anna is shocked to discover how little she really knew about the mother with whom she once felt so close.

Life is bleak for Rose Lucas, a spirited, intelligent girl, born into a large family in the slums of pre-war Birmingham. But her friendship with Diana, daughter of a vicar from middle-class Moseley, gives her hope. She learns to aspire to a different kind of existence, vowing never to become a child-bearing drudge like her mother. Life, however, never follows the way of dreams...

Emma Brown is a happy-go-lucky child, content to work hard at school, and to play hopscotch with her friends in the run-down Nechells area of Birmingham in the 1930s. But her life is turned upside down when her mother, Cynthia, has another baby, and doesn't seem able to cope.

1940: As war closes in and the bombs fall, on the Homefront two sisters must find their place in a new world of 'men's' work, in which a telegraph can break your heart and nothing in the future is certain.

In 1984, two young mothers meet at a toddler group in Birmingham. As their friendship grows, they share with each other the difficulties and secrets in their lives. They both come to discover the heartbreak in their own mothers' lives, and how mothers create daughters - and learn from them.

The Second World War has finally come to a close. Birmingham is welcoming home its menfolk, and a new chapter is beginning in Rachel Booker's life. As the 1950s dawn, a whole new world of opportunity opens up. But family life settles into a routine and Rachel, unsatisfied, starts to yearn for more. Do her loyalties still lie with the family and friends she clung to throughout the war years or is it time to move on ....

When young Rachel Booker's father dies, deep in gambling debt, she and her mother begin working at the market in Birmingham. Here she makes friends with Danny and soon the friendship grows into something more. But at just sixteen, as World War II breaks out, Rachel falls pregnant. They marry in haste but it isn't long before Danny is called up. If Danny ever makes it home, will he be the same boy she loved so fiercely?

Grace and Ted Chapman married at the beginning of WW2, but then Ted was called up to fight. With the passage of time, Grace begins to create a new life in the arms of another man. Then along comes baby Barbara. Then one morning, Grace receives a telegram saying that Ted is alive and on his way home. Grace panics and she begs her sister Joan to look after her daughter. When Ted returns back to Birmingham, he is shell-shocked and fragile. How far is Grace willing to go, in order to protect her secret?

It is 1942, and after a childhood of suffering in Birmingham, Maryann Bartholomew has built a life of happiness and safety with her husband, Joel, and their children, working the canals on his narrowboat. But the tragic loss of her old friend, Nancy, leads her to a desperate act which nearly costs her her life.

Birmingham, almost a decade after the end of the Great War, and the women of Lilac Street have had more than their fair share of troubles. These women, along with their neighbours, find strength in friendship, as they discover that the best way to solve their problems is to face them together.

To escape her abusive stepfather, young Maryann Nelson befriends Joel Bartholomew, who works on the canal. Aboard his narrowboat, she finds herself falling in love with her new life. But old nightmares that she had thought were long buried resurface, and in panic she takes flight...