A Handful of Happiness

Jenny Gillespie has suffered her share of troubles during the Great War, not least the loss of her fiance, Robert Archer. For although Robert was not killed in action he is as dead to her as any sweetheart slaughtered in France when he eventually meets another woman. Jenny, meanwhile, is trapped in Clydeside’s dockland, unable to leave her mother, who is worn out and heartbroken. Jenny has little choice but to abandon her dream of making a new start in Glasgow and return to her job in the tracing office of Dalkieth’s shipyard and the domination of her relentlessly demanding family. Unexpectedly, Robert Archer returns to Clydeside and becomes Jenny’s boss. Single again, penitent and seemingly eager to rekindle his relationship with Jenny, Robert would offer her a way out of the dead end she finds herself in. But Jenny, to her surprise, receives a proposal of marriage from a decent man, one that offers the obvious way to fulfil her duties to her family, escape from their cramped tenement home – and to forget Robert Archer forever. Perhaps only then, Jenny thinks, will she finally be able to reach out and grasp the handful of happiness she longs for…