Nevil Shute · 1942 · exile

Nevil Shute's 1942 novel, written at night during the Blitz. John Howard, seventy and newly bereaved, goes fishing in the Jura in the spring of 1940 and is still there when the German army comes west. He starts for home with two English children and acquires five more along the way - French, Dutch, Polish, German - as the roads fill and France comes apart.

1. 1
   Cidoton

   At an inn in the Jura, an elderly Englishman fishes and grieves for a son shot down over the Heligoland Bight - and when the invasion begins, agrees to take two children from the hotel back to England with him.

2. 2
   Dijon

   At Dijon the plan is already obsolete: Calais is gone, the route must be changed for St Malo, and a third child is pressed on him - the first of the additions that will keep happening at every stop from here to the coast.

3. 3
   Montargis

   The trains stop running and the roads fill with refugees, and the party goes on by lorry, farm cart and on foot - picking up a fourth child on the road to Montargis and a fifth at Pithiviers, strafed from the air along the way.

4. 4
   Chartres

   At Chartres he finds Nicole, the daughter of an old acquaintance, and the party has somewhere to rest and someone who can pass as French - and Howard is arrested by the Germans as a spy, with seven children in tow.

5. 5
   Le Conquet

   Released into an occupied Brittany on terms he has no intention of keeping, Howard reaches the coast near Le Conquet, where a young fisherman is prepared to take a boat out at night for a great deal more than the fare.

6. 6
   Plymouth

   They cross to England and the children are dispersed to safety - and an old man who thought he had nothing left to be useful for is left in a London club, telling the story to a stranger during an air raid.