This story is mainly set in and around the small Perthshire town of Pitlochry during the Second World War. It gives an accurate picture of wartime civilian life with all the irksome restrictions of the severe food rationing and many other grim shortages. This terrible war is seen through the eyes of some ageing parents whose young sons and daughters are serving in Britain's Armed Forces and face the constant threat of sudden death. For six long years of this endless seeming war these anxious parents had lived in fear that one fateful day they would receive that dreaded telegram from the War Office, the Admiralty or the Air Ministry informing them that their soldier, sailor or airman son had been killed in action! For three of these aging fathers, old friends who had survived the horrors of Flanders in the First World War, this apparently remote Second World War suddenly erupted with dramatic force and violent death in the heart of what had almost seemed a tranquil rural scene. Then the immediate post-war years bring huge changes to Pitlochry.