There's time travel at the centre of The Ice Cream Girls (STV, Friday, 9pm) – the kind of time travel we all do when we encounter an object, a place or a sound that takes us back to childhood: a box of old belongings, the house where we used to live, the chimes of an ice cream van.

Serena (Lorraine Burroughs), the central character of the drama, encounters this kind of time travel in the first episode, when she heads back to her old family home after 18 years.

For a moment she just stands outside the house, unsettled and disconcerted by the effect, and what she experiences feels authentic. (Have you ever done that: gone back, after a long time, to the place where you were brought up, and discovered that it's duller and smaller than you thought it was, that the reality has spoiled the memory?)

The reason Serena finds it so hard is because she left her hometown to escape. Living hundreds of miles away was her way of coping with a childhood that had gone wrong.

She and her friend Poppy (Jodhi May) were accused of murdering a teacher (played with boyish creepiness by Martin Compston). Poppy was found guilty, Serena not guilty and, for 18 years, Serena has coped by being far away.

The story of Serena's return, and what happened to the teacher in 1995, is told in a double narrative, set in the present and the past, and the storyline set in the past is most effective. If you're a child who grew up at the seaside, as I did, you will instantly recognise the atmosphere, the cold and greyness, that feeling of being stuck on the edge that only Morrissey and Betjeman have ever properly written about.

The Ice Cream Girls is a hundred miles from their kind of greatness – it's based on a book recommended by Richard and Judy – but the dramatisation does create an effective feel as Serena walks along the seafront and visits the fairground.

Quite quickly, her memories start to flash up like the bulbs on the waltzers, and they bring up some interesting taboos: relationships between older men and younger women, relationships between teachers and pupils, women who commit crime, children who commit crime, and whether we – society – ever really let anyone move on once they have been accused, even falsely, of a crime. The only oddity was that, given one of the main characters was black, the other white, the one difficult subject that wasn't tackled was racism.

What The Ice Cream Girls did effectively tackle, though, was what it would feel like to be convicted of a crime you did not commit. For 17 years, Poppy has been in prison nursing her wrath and now she's out and, like Serena, is confronted with what happened when they were children. She is a character forced to carry a burden on her back, but what lingers is the imagery of someone on the edge of the country, the sea washing her memories out, then back in again. It's not as good as Morrissey or Betjeman but, for an ITV drama, it's a start.