'Everything in Renchester is so conventional, so narrow. You meet the same little circle of people all the time. I feel as though I want to escape.' Pauline Stanford didn't know how soon all the young people there would be scattered by a war as wide as the world itself and how, for some of them, 'wanting to escape' could have a dreadful reality. Barbara Ker Wilson ranges far from the High Street of Rem hosier to Germany, Czechoslovakia, and France, as she recreates the lives of a group of young people caught up in the nightmare of a total war.