In the shabby, cluttered confines of their small house in an English seaside village just after World War II, a family of genteel poverty struggles daily, unremittingly, with itself. To escape the endless quarrel, the romantically disappointed mother spends half the night reading novels in the railway station, while the melancholy father weeps in front of the radio. The fifteen-year-old daughter sneaks off after dark to meet a German P.O.W. in the woods, and her brother, Alan, through whom we experience the domestic nightmare, suffers the family he tries to ignore and cannot alter, at least not until it has been destroyed.