Yes, that's a good description of you, a cultured handmaiden. So agreeable, so polite, so damned eager to please, you let people wipe their boots on you'. Such was the devastating parting remark of the man Jinny Brownlow had thought for her. At twenty-one, Jinny is basically alone in the world working with a marked lack of job satisfaction in the typing pool of big engineering firm in Tyneside. She tries to find an outlet in the local amateur theatre group but again the only part she ever seems to play is that of a general dogsbody. However things are about to change. Two older men come into her life, both with demands to make of her, and who will each, in his very different way, prove a essential catalyst in the reshaping of her life.