Four years after Alfie Summerfield's father left London to become a soldier in World War I he has not returned but Alfie, now nine, is shining shoes at King's Cross Station when he happens to learn that his father is at a nearby hospital being treated for shell shock.

An elderly London resident befriends the little boy who moves in downstairs, but his parents' fighting brings her back to her harrowing escape from Nazi Germany at age twelve and grim post-war years in France with her mother. Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn't talk about her escape from Nazi...