Ingrid Eriksson, a social worker, decides to find out something about the problems facing housemaids and gets herself a job as one at the home of John Willman's family. John's son, Åke, falls in love with her and numerous complications arise before the course of true love runs smoothly.
News reel film sequences from September 1938 until the end of 1942, integrated with the fictive Swedish family Söderberg in their everyday life at home and the changes, because of the escalating war, that are brought upon them.
A lonely fisherman drowns and his elderly brother Efraim is left to do an inventory of the estate. He discovers that his brother had a son, Karl-Erik. Keeping it a secret, he travels to Stockholm to employ the young man as a hired hand. Plot by Mattias Thuresson.
