The Wrong Safe Place

Edie Fletcher is ten years old, and she knows exactly where she belongs: number twelve, in her own London street, with her mum and dad and the heavy front-door key she's finally big enough to carry herself. She could walk the market with her eyes shut. She knows the click of her own lock from any other on the street.

Then war is declared on the wireless, a label is tied to her coat, and Edie is put on a train and sent far away to a farm in Devon — somewhere "safe," the grown-ups keep saying, though it's all mud and animals and people she's never met, and the boy there calls her a townie, and it isn't home at all.

Night after night the family wireless carries the war a little closer. Edie keeps the key in her fist and counts the days until she can use it again. But safe and home, she is starting to learn, are not always the same place.