'God never allowed you to be a mother, and never will, until you learn how to treat your own'When you've just lost your first child, these are cruel words indeed. When they're from your own mother, who abandoned you for a fancy man, making your father place you and your sister in an orphanage while he went off to fight in the War, they're more than cruel - they're like poison in your veins. A Lancashire mill town is the background for this vivid family saga of blind irresponsibility and studied selfishness. The story is really the working out of all the bitterness and shame brought about by an offstage mother and father who remarried and cast his daughters aside 'like a pair of old boots'.Can the author shed her reservations about family life, get married and have children of her own? Can she prove her mother's cruel words wrong? Read this troubled autobiography and find out what emotional poverty means - and how the human spirit can rise above it.