Tragedy strikes a young married couple living in Bradford West Yorkshire in the late 1940s. Timmothy Dove's wife dies after prematurely giving birth to a set of triplets, two sons and a daughter. Timmothy struggles to bring up his new family on his own, he finally realises that he can no longer give them the love, attention and sustenance that they require, therefore he has no option but to put his three children into the care of the local authority.
Two of the children are soon adopted, the other one Sidney unbeknown to him was named after his late grandfather just seems to be the odd one out, he is in and out of different fostering family homes and regularly returns back into the care of the local authority because of his disruptive behaviour. None of the children were to be informed of the tragic circumstances in which both their parents died, and it was agreed by the authority's that the children's new parents would also be given no background details of their past life.