1963 - before the Beatles had long hair, afghan coats and Gerus, before trousers flared to fanciful angles and youth looked as if it were going to a fancy dress ball. Post-war greyness still clings on as Lizzie Dale, a young woman of just seventeen, opens her new journal. Despite the privations of early sixties bedsitter squalor, her expectations of leaving the parental home are optimistic, and she resolves to record an exciting new life for her to look back on. For often the mistakes of the present, become the past we learn from for the future...

Since spreading her newfound wings of independence, Lizzie has found low paid employment in a North of England food factory. The coldest winter since 1948 strains her meagre budget, but she copes by devious means to shore up any flagging spirits. She won't let the overbearing landlady (The Dragon) dampen them either. She has her own bedsit, and she is slowly making friends with the other tenants who share surprising stories of their own.

But nothing lasts forever. Her friends are coupling up, leaving her aching with loneliness and longing for love. The beginnings of a more liberal era of sexuality leaves her feeling adrift, lost, and behind the times as she waits for what may lie ahead. And suddenly, there he is, a man of everything she ever dreamed of. Colin is ten years older, mature, smart, good-looking and attentive. But even as she falls in deeper with him, troubling suspicions and whispers come to light. Lizzie must choose to face the truth and flourish before the danger that looms cuts her off from a bright future...for good.