In his British Film Institute Modern Classics book, Paul Farley describes the inspiration that Terence Davies used for the biographical backbone of the film: Davies was the youngest of ten children, the baby boomer, born into a working-class Catholic household in post-war Liverpool.
Terence Davies's real-life father can be seen in a photograph which hangs on the wall in one of the film's central sequences when the mother and her three children, Tony, Eileen and Maisie, each walk out of the frame to reveal a tired and bleached photograph of their father.