Sarah Webster's life is so chaotic that on her sixteenth birthday she asks her Grandda Billy: 'Will I grow up like Mam?' Billy uses the Webster family's life on Teesside to show how circumstances and social conditions affect the way people live. Through the lives of five women, he and Sarah discover almost two hundred years of hardship, abduction, murder, and love. Bella fell for a First World War survivor, nursed him back to health and vowed to retrieve the family heirloom from his Aunt Jane. Jane denied her parents to leave the family home in California to become a Victorian lady of substance. She knows nothing of her mother Ann's traumatic adolescence. Ann's sister-in-law Mary married a 'Spanish gold seeker' but ended her life alone. Finally, drawn by Sarah's persistence, Billy confronts his own life and that of his daughter Sally, Sarah's mother. Billy hopes that Sarah might learn enough to answer her own question.