Sadie Johnson is 6 years old and doesn't remember much about her life prior to this time. She is a mixed race child with a mainly absent mother, who has gone off to live her own life and has left her living with her maternal grandparents Levi and Kathleen. Her home is a dilapidated terraced house in a deprived area of Manchester that is earmarked for slum clearance. With no electric, very few toys and a 1960s society that is intolerant of white women with black men, and the children that are a result of those unions, Sadie feels like an outsider. Living with her white grandparents and auntie, and attending a school where she is the only black child in her class, and the teacher is a nun who makes her racist views clear; Sadie lives for the day that either her mum Cora, or her dad Clyde will let her come and live with one of them. She knows her dad wants her with him, but her mum won't agree to it. When she is eventually told she is going to live with her mum, she is over the moon. It doesn't occur to her that when this happens, the changes it brings about will affect her entire life.