Jenny O’Leary is devastated one morning in 1940 when she receives a telegram giving her the dreadful news that one of her brothers has been killed in action. Grief threatens to engulf her, but as an ARP warden, tending to Birmingham’s injured after the nightly raids, she is well-used to the suffering that thousands were enduring every day.
Linda Prosser is just twelve years old and very close to her mother and two little brothers. As the bombs drop around them in a devastating and dreadful raid Linda takes a risk which has disastrous consequences. A direct hi from one of the hurtling bombs hits their Anderson Shelter and kills her mother and brothers. She is unaware of this for she had returned to the house for something forgotten and the house was caught in the blast, She is in the pitch black, but the pantry and crawled inside where the stairs protected her a little but she is alone and terrified, trapped and semi buried beneath a mass of debris, .Jenny is the only one small enough to crawl in and locate Linda and see if she ids still alive, and she not only does she do this but, at great risk to herself stayed with Linda until they were both rescued..
When Jenny realises Linda is an orphan she offers her a home with them standing against her crabbed and ill-humoured mother for the first time. And so begins a deep friendship, which is to last through the years so hat when Linda falls in love with a man that she knew Jenny would despise, she is faced with sacrificing her future happiness for the friend who has given her everything.