Ann is a plain girl from Barking, a suburb of London, and she works for a living, having never been married or even proposed to. At the beginning of the novel, she is content to work as a senior embroiderer for the famous English designer Norman Hartnell, and she is starstruck by the royals, hardly believing that she could have a hand in making gowns for them. She is practical and aware of her station in life. Her one pleasure that is not practical is her flower garden. She expects nothing to change in her life. The narrator says:

All the while her certainty had grown that this was all she would ever know. The house on Morley Road and the workrooms at Hartnell and the anonymous spaces in between. This life, this succession of gray days and cold nights and loved ones forever lost, was the furthest her dreams would ever stretch (7).

Ann has been slowly beaten down by the war, so she doesn’t allow herself to hope. She lives her practical life expecting it to be the same forever.

Ann’s life begins to change when she invites Miriam to be her roommate and they are commissioned to make Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown.