England

Edie Fletcher is ten years old, and she knows exactly where she belongs: number twelve, in her own London street, with her mum and dad and the heavy front-door key she's finally big enough to carry herself. She knows the click of her own lock from any other on the street.

Then war is declared on the wireless, a label is tied to her coat, and Edie is put on a train to a farm in Devon — somewhere "safe," the grown-ups keep saying, though it's all mud and animals and people she's never met, and the boy there calls her a townie.

Night after night the family wireless carries the war a little closer. Edie keeps the key in her fist and counts the days until she can use it again. But safe and home, she is starting to learn, are not always the same place.

In a Bethnal Green kitchen, the wireless carries news from Europe that Vera Fletcher would rather not hear.

Her home is whole. There is Bill, her husband, home from the docks of an evening; there is Edie, their girl, at the kitchen table with her exercise book and her tongue between her teeth; there is the market on Saturdays, and the street that has always, always been theirs.

But the news keeps coming, and the name from over there comes up out of the set most evenings now, like a stone working up out of a cleared field. Bill begins to feel the old pull of the sea. And one day a single buff form comes home from the school — asking Vera to do the hardest thing a mother can: send her child away to keep her safe.

One last ordinary summer, and the love inside an impossible choice.