Book description
When Kitty Green returns to the Gloucestershire school where she
was once a child evacuee during World World II, she discovers that it
is to be rehoused on the premises of the old boys' home Heaven House.
At the time Kitty had been inseparable from one of its inmates, Tommy
Glover, and so she begins to reminisce...In 1944 eight-year-old Kitty
is placed in Sheepcote village with a cold, unhappy couple Joyce and
Jack Shepherd, who find her Cockney chirpiness repugnant. They also
have problems of their own: 'Aunty' Joyce nurses a phobia against
germs while 'Uncle' Jack seeks solace from his frigid wife in the
pages of the Bible. Neither Joyce nor Jack approve of Kitty's
friendship with Tommy, and even seem to nurse a mysterious hatred of
him. Starved of affection herself, Kitty soon befriends all outsiders
in the village she sees as missing home or longing for love: American
airmen, gypsies, German POWs, orphans, and above all, her beloved
Tommy. In the end, it is her relentless curiosity that slowly
transforms the lives of the strangely unhappy Joyce and Jack. But it
is only when a long-buried secret is finally exposed that the lives of
nearly everybody in the village are changed forever.
