Eighteen-year-old Alice Glass is rescued from her life in a small terraced house in the northeast town of Margrove when she volunteers to help in the wartime evacuation of schoolchildren to the Yorkshire dales. Here, she is reunited with shy, pretty Elsbeth Hobbs, a teaching assistant from Alice's hometown but from a privileged social background. Caught up in the mystery of foreigner Gus Rielke's nefarious connection with farmer Bob Symmonds, Alice is helped by her admirer, Davy Brown, a labourer on a nearby estate. But it is the truth about Alice's unacknowledged feeling for Elsbeth that brings about the most startling consequences.