It is September 1941 and nine-year-old Hannah Flynn is about to leave her native Hull and become one of that illustrious number known as 'them townies'. Standing at the station, with few possessions in the little case she is clutching, she is ready to leave that scarred city to experience life as an evacuee in rural Lincolnshire, an environment as far removed as any foreign country. This child is a dreamer, a gentle, intelligent, passive soul, and not at all the sort of girl to cope with the coarse ways of her foster parents. Elsie Porter's rough and obsessive mothering combined with the horrors of earth closets, fat bacon, sexual abuse and complicity in murder cause deep unhappiness and a fear of life itself. When she finds herself suddenly orphaned, life becomes intolerable. This is a perceptive novel about Hannah's life, probing the effects of those early experiences as she grows into a young woman, until she is finally forced to confront the ghosts of her past.