William Harriman, a retired civil servant, is a cultivated and kindly person in his late 70s. His relations, however, are quite eccentric, inhabiting a Dog Museum. Linking these two different worlds is Janice Harper, who comes to London for some excitement.

In London, Willian Harriman, a retired civil serant, contemplates widowhood, estrangement from his children and the collection of antique china. In Shropshire, his lunatic trio of cousins eke out a precarios existence with numberless rescued dogs. The young Janice Harper- the dog walker, shopper for the old and vean cake maker- is sent by them to lodge with cousin William and get a life at last. Meanwhile, floods, pestilance and disease are unleashed upon a reeling countryside.