Alice has a scrupulously organised, comfortable life in West London with Noel - her second husband whose main ambition in life is to sharpen his golf handicap in time for retirement. But Alice's once-famous bohemian mother Jocelyn, residing in shabby splendour in a crumbling house on a clifftop in Cornwall, becomes ill and Alice, with her daughter and stepson, goes to look after her. What she finds there appals her - her glorious childhood home falling into decay, her brother and his wife taking more notice of the illegal substances being grown in the vegetable garden than in the domestic arrangements, and their twin sons running wild and living according to the tenets of the SAS Survival Handbook (trapping rabbits and catapulting seagulls). Noel, helpfully, considers that Jocelyn offload the house ('She's sitting on a goldmine, you know') and move into sensible sheltered accommodation. But the children love the freedom and beauty that they discover in Cornwall, and Alice begins to wonder whether her chosen way of life is necessarily the right one...