Magnolia Square in South London was a friendly and vibrant place to live, not least for Kate Voigt and her father. Carl Voigt had been a WWI prisoner of war who had married a cockney girl and never gone back. Now widowed, he and Kate were part of the London life of the square with all its rumbustious and colourful characters. Then came the war.

Suddenly it seemed the Voigts were outcasts because of their German blood. When Carl was interned, Kate's only support was her best friend Carrie, and Toby, the R.A.F. pilot whom she loved. Finally, when Toby was killed, and even Carrie turned against her, she found herself pregnant and totally alone.

Late one Christmas evening, during the Blitz, she was approached by a wounded sailor asking for lodgings. Leon Emmerson, like Kate, was also a lonely misfit because if his parentage. It was to be the beginning of a new friendship, of startling and dramatic events in Kate's life. And as the war progressed, as the Londoners fought to help each other while their city was bombed and burned, so the rifts in the community were healed, and Kate and those she loved became, once more, part of Magnolia Square.