1942. Fifteen-year-old Alma Braithwaite and her fellow boarders at Goldwyn's school huddle in an air-raid shelter as bombs rain down on Exeter. Twenty-one years on, Alma teaches music at her old school. She's moderately content, until the death of the long-serving headmistress brings a new broom in the form of steely modernizing Miss Yates. A new student starts too - the daughter of a man Alma hasn't seen since 1942, when he played a pivotal role in her life. Suddenly, Alma is taken back to the summer that followed the raids, a summer of numbing loss yet also of youthful exuberance, friendship and dancing.