When the rector Peter and his wife Caroline decide to go to Africa for a year to work in a mission, they take their twins with them. The village inhabitants whose lives revolve around the church and this family are bereft. They don't immediately take to the woman locum Anna who has modern ideas - happy clappy hymns and so forth but she does fill the church with parishioners determined to keep an eye on her. And then she brings Paddy, a down and out petty thief, into their midst. He lives at the Rectory and there is speculation as to whose bed he shares. However Anna is smitten by someone else, but he is a married man. It is The Women's Institute who come up with the idea of raising funds for Peter's Mission.