John visits his ageing mother Mary in her nursing home by the sea & mourns the slow fading of her mind. Hoping to shore up her memory he prompts her with songs photographs & questions about the 1940s when she was a young woman & he a child in a small Cumbrian town. But he finds that most of all it is her own mother she longs for
- Grace the mother she barely knew. John sets out to recreate their buried family history delving into the secrets & silences of Mary's fractured childhood as he imagines the life of her spirited mother. Reaching from the late 19th century to the present this becomes a deeply moving reflective elegy on three generations linked by a chain of love loss & courage.