It is 1946 and the people of France and England are facing the aftermath
of the war. Banished by her beautiful, indolent mother to England,
Barbary Deniston is thrown into the care of her distinguished father and
conventional stepmother. Having grown up in the sunshine of Provence,
allowed to run wild with the Maquis, experienced collaboration, betrayal
and death, Barbary finds it hard to adjust to the drab austerity of
postwar London life.
Confused and unhappy, she discovers one day the flowering wastes around
St Paul's. Here, in the bombed heart of London, she finds an echo of the
wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within
herself.