Farmer's daughter Anna Lacey, fresh from the country and from teacher's college, takes a job in a new and bleak London suburb, in a school that already holds twice the children for which it was built. The story of her first teaching year in these challenging circumstances is told with gentle wit and an understanding of the vagaries of human nature -- even among schoolteachers. Anna survives not only the terrors of teaching (unruly students, crowded classrooms, monomaniac inspectors, ambitious school staff, and confrontational parents) but also the ordeal of what must be one of literature's grimmest landladies.