When Lily Robinson sees the telegraph boy cycling down Perseverance Street, she knows that he's coming to deliver bad news. Clutching the telegram in her trembling hands, at eight months pregnant and mother to three-year-old Michael, Lily learns that she must now face life as a widow. Fortuitously, she is soon visited by acquaintances, Bernard and Edith Oldroyd, who, hearing of her plight, offer to take Michael home with them for the weekend and Lily gratefully accepts.
But to her horror, just days later, the Oldroyds disappear, along with her son. With the help of her redoubtable Auntie...

Billie Challinor's mother dies during an air raid, but the child grows up confident that in her jazz musician father Chas she has the best dad in the world. Seeking refuge from the London Blitz by moving to Leeds, kindly landlady Liz Morris befriends them: the scarred, wisecracking man, who isn't afraid to overstep the mark if the cause is a good one, and his clever and resilient little girl. Billie needs every ounce of courage she possesses when her father joins the Army just before the D-Day landings and fails to return.
Though Liz is happy to raise the child as her own, Billie is...