Three children residing in Wendel Street mansions during WW1 are taken from their homes and begin suffering abuse. One of the children, from the age of six, starts working in a bordello as well as helping with farmwork. He copes with often daily brawls between drunken clients over drug-addicted prostitutes, then a few months after his twentieth birthday, he discovers a prostitute's body beneath a pile of rubble behind the bordello. The murder remains unsolved for weeks as the tension grows because the killer lives in the bordello. A year after that murder, he is reunited with the other two adults whom had lived in Wendel Street as children, then he begins a new and much better life with one of them in a Wendel Street mansion at the start of WW2.