Louise Halliday, Guy’s daughter, joins Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps in 1945, still a teenager. She is posted to a Field Hospital on the Lüneburg Heath in North Germany, where she encounters victims of total war and is determined to become useful in the field of mental care. She witnesses how vast tracts of that country are ruined, as was Virgil’s Troy. After disturbing and daunting experiences, she returns to Norfolk and marries. She pursues a career in Medicine at Bart’s and Cambridge on treatment of stress, to which she had been exposed in Germany. Louise and her banker husband live a full and rich life in their large country house estate, and have a son, Michael. However, events conspire to divert her life and she establishes herself in a new career close to her heart.
