Rosalind's childhood was little different from that of her school friends, except that she did not attend school very much. But home-life was not child's play either when you lived with a violent father, whose shadow lay across her childhood like the smoke that drifted and fell from every chimney. Set in a Yorkshire mining village, Rosalind's story provides an insight into family and village life in the 1910s and 20s in a community that could teeter on the edge of starvation but still absorb an orphaned family of nine. But looming over it all was Rosalind's father, a man as tough as any in the pit who felt the need to keep proving it at home.