The Children of Platform 4

When Nell Harcourt clears out her mother's attic after her death, she finds a stranger's suitcase, a hand-drawn list of twenty-seven names, and a single child's shoe that matches nothing else in the house. What she does not expect to find, three names down the list, is her own mother's. Eighty years earlier, a London railway porter named Arthur Bellamy hears a child crying beneath Platform 4 during a raid and makes a decision that will consume the rest of his war: he builds, from nothing but nerve and a stolen supply of official forms, an underground network to save children the system has quietly given up on. Twenty-seven names, twenty-seven new identities, twenty-seven lives that were never supposed to survive long enough to be counted. As Nell traces the list from a Yorkshire farmhouse to a Devon artist's cottage to a solicitor's letter that arrives carrying a very modern kind of threat, she uncovers not only what her mother spent a lifetime hiding, but how far people will still go, two generations on, to keep the past exactly where it is. A quiet, deeply researched story about the ordinary people who decide, in an extraordinary moment, to mind - and about what it costs the families who come after them to finally find out. Grounded in the real, chaotic machinery of Britain's wartime evacuation system.