After a messy break up with her longtime boyfriend, a woman faces losing both her house and her business. Consequently, she takes in three roommates: a freckled college graduate, a mysterious divorced man, and a recently widowed female chef.

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.