AustLit

'Two frightened children. Two very different mothers. One night in a tube station during the Blitz...On a frozen January evening in 1944 young wife and mother, Nancy Levin, and her three-year-old child, Emily, flee their impoverished East London terrace as an air raid siren sounds. Not far away 39-year-old Diana Meadows, a middle-class woman from the comfortable Home Counties and her own child, three-year-old Abigail, have got on the wrong bus and, disastrously, now find themselves lost in the black-out as the air raid begins. Joining the other shelterers they hurry to the safety of the tube station. Mrs Meadows, the wife of a stockbroker who has managed so far to sit out the war in the distant suburbs, is terrified - as much by the prospect of sheltering in an Eastend tube station as of experiencing a bombing raid first hand...Far away Diana's husband, Gerald Meadows finds himself in a tank regiment in North Africa while Nancy's husband, Joe Levin has narrowly survived a torpedo in the Atlantic and is about to re-join his ship. Both men have their own wars to fight but take comfort in the knowledge that their wives, at least, are safe...But wartime is a time of extremes where ordinary people find themselves doing things they would never dream of doing in peacetime, risking everything to secure their own and their family's survival, even at the expense of others. Sheltering in the underground station the two mothers and their terrified children find themselves positioned next to each on the platform as the first bombs fall. It will be a night that changes all their lives forever...' (Publication summary)