Sally Carpenter can’t swim and doesn’t like boats, so when her husband Fred announces that he has booked them a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads she’s far from enthusiastic.

          Together with their beloved bull-terrier Bill they set off, only to lurch from one mishap to another. Drowning their sorrows in a local pub one evening they meet Rosie, whose family is also boating on the Broads. The Carpenters befriend fifteen-year-old Rosie and when she has a fight with her violent mother it is to Fred and Sally that she runs.

          After the holiday, Rosie goes to live with her grandmother, but through the years that follow she relies on Fred and Sally whenever she is in trouble. They help her sort out the many and varied difficulties facing her in her new life, and come to look upon her as the daughter they never had.