A young woman finds herself pregnant 'on the wrong side of the blanket' in 1961. The attitude to single mothers was very different then; her father kicks her out of their home and she moves into a dingy rooming house. Against her will she becomes involved with the characters who live there, some of them who are outcasts in their own way - Toby, the budding Jewish writer; John, the huge, gentle Negro musician and Mavis, the old dear living in a room stuffed full of souvenirs of a theatrical past. When she decides that she will keep her baby rather than offer him for adoption or have an abortion - which was highly illegal then - she begins to receive unexpected help from this odd assortment as well as her boss, an eccentric in his own right. A very well told story.