This book is about a woman from a terraced house in the shadow of a Lancashire textile mill, who won numerous scholarships to Oxford University. She went on to complete an important research project on Manchester dockers at a crucial stage in the Second World War - all by the age of twenty two. Yet, in the 1950s, she began over a decade of homelessness and wandering across the highways and byways of southern England. Her later years were ones of recovery, when she wrote tens of thousands of autobiographic words