The Last Ordinary Summer

In a Bethnal Green kitchen, the wireless carries news from Europe that Vera Fletcher would rather not hear.

Her home is whole. There is Bill, her husband, home from the docks of an evening; there is Edie, their girl, at the kitchen table with her exercise book and her tongue between her teeth; there is the market on Saturdays, and the street that has always, always been theirs.

But the news keeps coming, and the name from over there comes up out of the set most evenings now, like a stone working up out of a cleared field. Bill begins to feel the old pull of the sea. And one day a single buff form comes home from the school — asking Vera to do the hardest thing a mother can be asked: to send her child away, in order to keep her safe.

This is the story of one last ordinary summer, and the love inside an impossible choice.