1937, Edinburgh. Attractive, dark-eyed Jinny Hendrie is happy enough in her job in the accounts office of a large bakery - until handsome Viennese cake expert Viktor Linden walks into her life with the promise of an exciting future. Although her father and her kind-hearted boss, Ross MacBain, warn against it, Jinny is determined to marry Viktor but, when war is declared between Great Britain and Germany, all her plans are in ruins. Austria has joined...

Edinburgh, 1911. When intelligent Elinor Rae leaves her crowded tenement family home to become a maid in an exclusive ladies' club in the idyllic Primrose Square, she doesn't look back. Two years later and Elinor is still in love with the square, and now also with Stephen Muirhead, her evening tutor. But it all goes wrong with the advent of WWI.