When ship's fireman Peter McCabe walks out on his long-suffering wife, he leaves her impoverished, with two young daughters and a boy born soon after his departure. After an absence of fourteen years McCabe returns, sacked and humiliated, trailing trouble in his wake.
Following her father's death, a teenage heiress moves in with her guardian uncle who is broke and schemes to murder his niece for her vast inheritance.
A group of children are evacuated during world war two into the care of an alcoholic woman.
