Thistlefinches

This is the story of Thistlefinches and how it changes from a family home to a private girls school. The novel follows the lives of its occupants and some of the schoolchildren and their parents. Told in patches, Thistlefinches, moves between present and future, concentrating mainly on the year of 1952. In that year, Margaret, a teenager from a Stepney orphanage, arrives on the eve of the spring term to help with the heavy housework. She is a great lumbering creature with a foul smell who in her own words "sometimes is seein' fings"