Set in 1910, this tells the story of one family's fight for physical and moral survival in the poverty and squalor of the dockland slums of Tyneside. At the centre is the apparently impossible love affair between rugged docker John O'Brien and Mary Llewellyn, a schoolteacher...
Thomas Mallen of High Banks Hall had many sons, most of them illegitimate. But to all of them he passed on his mark; this was a distinctive flash of white hair running down to the left temple, and known as the Mallen Streak. It was said in the surrounding Northumberland countryside...