Sarah is an actress and a single mother, living in a tiny top-floor flat in Camden Town, when she hears the news that Gaglow has been returned. Gaglow - the grand German estate her father's family once owned, but which was seized from them before the war.
'Tell me about the house,' Sarah begs her father, a man who has severed all links with the past, and he takes her on a journey through its many rooms, its corridors and attics, its kitchens with the hatches knocked into walls and the sloping lawn that runs up to the ice-house. 'I used to spend my summers there as a child,' he says, 'mostly alone with my grandmother, as my mother and her sisters always refused to go.'
Sarah has a photograph of these sisters, taken at Gaglow when they were young, and behind it, clipped into its frame, she finds another picture. Staring out at her is the handsome face of a young soldier, dressed in the uniform of the First World War...
As Sarah and her father are drawn back into the past, a rich and complex picture begins to emerge of life at Gaglow in Esther Freud's finely crafted depiction of a family, its intimacies, its tragedies and the powerful ties that still bind it.
'Tell me about the house,' Sarah begs her father, a man who has severed all links with the past, and he takes her on a journey through its many rooms, its corridors and attics, its kitchens with the hatches knocked into walls and the sloping lawn that runs up to the ice-house. 'I used to spend my summers there as a child,' he says, 'mostly alone with my grandmother, as my mother and her sisters always refused to go.'
Sarah has a photograph of these sisters, taken at Gaglow when they were young, and behind it, clipped into its frame, she finds another picture. Staring out at her is the handsome face of a young soldier, dressed in the uniform of the First World War...
As Sarah and her father are drawn back into the past, a rich and complex picture begins to emerge of life at Gaglow in Esther Freud's finely crafted depiction of a family, its intimacies, its tragedies and the powerful ties that still bind it.