"On a cool, end-of-July morning in 1939, eleven-year-old Sylvia Couturie and her eight-year-old sister, Marguerite, escorted by their Irish nanny, "Wally," left their family's elegant French chateau for a fantastically ill-timed vacation. Cut-off from their family as France falls to the Germans, the penniless threesome is reduced to living in a miserable cottage without indoor plumbing on a remote strip of the Irish coast."--Jacket.