Diane Butts interviewed about her experience of London. In a Welsh
valley, a man wonders what it was like during the Industrial Revolution. Diane
reads from Raymond Williams' The City and the Country. Two older men and a woman
try to identify people in an old photograph taken of their area. A children's
marching drum band is coached by a man who plays the bass drum. They practice
marching, led by a majorette.
Women on strike for equal pay at the Treforest GEC factory in 1976. Shirley,
the union convenor, and other women complain about the company's attitude to the
Welsh factory. In the replica of the South Wales Miners' Library at the
University College, Swansea, a man reads from an article about the origins of
the workers' library movement. Members of Cinema Action accompany Shirley on her
way home from work. She explains how her parents and grandparents made their
living and how much she enjoys working.
Some years later, Diane describes her reaction to meeting the filmmakers. She
narrates how Shirley lost her job at the factory and consequently had to leave
the union's District Committee. Arrangements for a motorbike rally. Shirley
selling refreshments from a caravan. She explains in more detail about the
strike's end and her anger at the union for not fully supporting the women's
action. She complains about the sexual discrimination implicit in jobs
advertised at the Job Centre. She hopes that things will improve for Diane's
generation.
Diane narrates events in the two-year gap. Shirley is still unemployed. She
watches for Royston returning to the house from the mine. She feels lonely
during the day and misses the union. Roy describes the history of the property
to which the family has moved and plan to turn into a smallholding.
Shirley's mother watches two of her great-grandsons playing cards and lists
her extended family. Diane and an archaeologist visit the site of an iron works,
with the workers' houses on the site. Royston's wife explains how each of them
would share the task of looking after the baby, depending on who was in work.
Diane in her metalwork class and writing a letter to Cinema Action in a break
from her exams.