Edie Burchill travels to Middlehurst Castle, the longtime residence of the Blythe spinsters, to seek out information about her mother, who was billeted there as a thirteen-year-old during World War II, and winds up finding out more than she imagined.

In 1933, as Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger hatched a daring and courageous plan: to smuggle her entire school out of Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler's hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils. She knew that to protect them she had to get her pupils to the safety of England. But the safe haven that Anna struggled to create in a rundown manor house in Kent would test her to the limit....