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31st December 1942. In the middle of the North Atlantic, the deadly 'gap' where aircraft cannot protect them, a destroyer and 4 corvettes are shepherding a convoy of ships from America to Britain. But as midnight passes, the New Year is marked by a white flash on the horizon - a German torpedo. What follows is a night scarred forever in the memory of its survivors. But for Michael Villiers, officer on the HMS Daisy, it is just another chapter in an extraordinary life. The son of a beautiful socialite and a British diplomat, Michael is brought up in Sombreado, Uruguay alongside his guardian's daughter Maria, and the pair are inseparable. Even when he is sent to school in England, the family ranch remains Michael's home and when his schooling is complete, there is never any doubt that he will return to Sombreado, to Maria. But when Michael returns to Montevideo in 1939, his steamer crosses paths with a German warship - an ominous sign of the conflict to come. And though Uruguay is neutral in the coming conflict, Michael is to be allowed no such the British Legation want him to make the most of his family connections. In a war, the English ambassador explains, everyone has to take sides . . .

1943. The sleepy Suffolk village of Bedenham is jerked into the twentieth century and the harsh realities of war by the arrival on its doorstep of an American bomber base and its three thousand inhabitants. For Billy Street, fourteen, a London evacuee uneasily billeted with the village blacksmith, the American invasion is heaven sent - unlimited opportunities and acceptance at last within a community he loves. Yet a concealed past threatens his new happiness. Billy's schoolteacher, Heather Garrett, awaits word of a husband missing for eighteen months. A stranger to Bedenham, Heather's sense of isolation - and village suspicions - are heightened when troubled American pilot John Hooper, reaches for her friendship. And daily the skies fill with the bombers and their ten-man crews who, during that bleak autumn of 1943, suffered losses on a catastrophic scale. For Hooper, tormented by earlier loss, leading Misbehavin' Martha and her disorderly crew safely through their 25 designated bombing missions becomes a personal crusade.

In the midst of struggling to cope with a marriage in difficulty and a business under pressure, Jack & Alison Heywood suffer every parent's worst nightmare. Their two children are involved in a horrific road accident which leaves seven-year-old Frankie in a coma and her elder brother, Ben, severely traumatized by guilt.