The novel opens in Scotland, two weeks into September, 1939, as the Second World War is beginning. Maureen and everyone she meets expects the duration of the war to be several months at most.

Monica Hughes needed to do no research on the setting for this novel. "It was all in my memory," she said in a personal interview. "At the start of the Second World War my school, in Edinburgh, was evacuated to a hunting lodge on a sea loch in Argyll, in the western Highlands." All that Maureen sees on her journey from Edinburgh and at Kintray Lodge that is now her school, is based on the author's own experiences.

Throughout the novel, as in all her novels, Hughes offers details of the Highland landscape, the grand building that is now the school, and the humble factor's cottage.

She explains the children's clothing, from school uniforms to...