Showing Pure as the Lily by Catherine Cookson

Mary Walton was the apple of her father’s eye. For a long time now he had been out of work, and Mary was his only comfort during those dark years of the Depression when unemployment and a nagging, ambitious wife gnawed away at his self-respect. Once he was a man who had held his head high with Geordie pride; now his only hope was that Mary would escape from the grinding poverty of the Tyneside slums that had held him a prisoner for so many years.

But then something happened to Mary that shattered all his dreams of her future – an event that was to tear a family apart and change their lives for generations to follow...