When Percy and Betty Harlency abandon their steady Streatham pub for the Copper Kettle tearoom in Kent, life for their daughter, April, changes dramatically. She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous Ruby, whose red hair and brutal home life emphasis her love of fire, and by the creepy but immaculately dressed Mr Greenridge, who likes to follow her around the village. Mingling the innocent with the sinister and laced with the tragic and the bizarre, this is a rare evocation of a 1950s childhood.