When Laura Curtly announces that she wants to become a policewoman, her parents dismiss the idea as an unsuitable occupation for a young middle-class woman in 1930s England. At best, Laura could hope for a short period of employment as a secretary before marriage and children to a promising young man. But Laura is interested in people and eventually comes up with a new plan. Under the pretence of creative writing studies, Laura embarks on a correspondence course to become a journalist. Her final project, a social realism piece, leads her to conduct a series of interviews with an acquaintance of a friend of her mother's, a Mrs Harriet Hawkins. As Laura uncovers a story of poverty, homelessness and child abandonment, these interviews prompt Laura to question not only the attitudes of her parents' generation, but also her own, and her potential future happiness. This intriguing novella chronicles the changing attitudes and industrial progress over the course of the early twentieth century from the perspective of two very different women and their families.