Julie Monday, so called because she had been left on the
doorstep of the Foundling Hospital on a Monday in July in
1918, is taken with her classmates on an outing to the
seaside when she is eight. She wanders off alone and meets
eleven year–old Harry Walker. They enjoy a few hours
chatting together but then she has to go back to the
orphanage and her punishment for wandering off: being locked
in a cupboard.
Ten years later they meet again and fall in love. They
marry and have a baby boy, but then the second world war
breaks out and Harry joins the Air Force, leaving Julie to
look after her baby and cope with the rationing and the
blitz without him. Her one aim is to keep her son safe and
provide everything he needs and to this end she becomes
involved with a friend, Rosie, who brings her black market
supplies. Paying for them becomes a problem and Rosie offers
to baby sit for her while she goes off to raise the money by
pawning her wedding ring.
Caught out in an air raid on her way home, she is
directed to a shelter. Her time in the cupboard in her
childhood has left her severely claustrophobic and she is
fighting panic. The shelter receives a direct hit. Julie is
pulled out alive but injured, and taken to hospital, but she
has lost her memory and is given a new name: Eve Seaton.
Disturbed by flashes of memory she cannot hold onto, she
must make a new life for herself as Eve Seaton and Harry
must get on with his part in the war. She meets someone who
would like to marry her, but she refuses him, afraid of what
her loss of memory hides.