Elizabeth White Mason

A timid, unsure ten-year-old Londoner, awkward like her father, Elizabeth is the novel's primary heroine and focus. She is introduced with short, fair hair pulled back off her face, which is red and white at the same time. Her mother Violet asks her childhood friend, Eileen O'Connor of Kilgaret, Ireland, to take Elizabeth for the duration of the German bombing of London. Elizabeth leaves, wondering why her parents are angry all the time, and anxious about descriptions of the town twenty years earlier when Violet had visited. Elizabeth sees from the start that things are done far differently from in London, but quickly adapts and enjoys life among the O'Connors. Elizabeth is excused from catechism classes in the Roman Catholic convent school.

Under the supervision of Aisling O'Connor, whose birthday is within days of her own, Elizabeth grows in confidence, stops apologizing for everything in the...