In June 1940, the three Pearce children attend their grandmother’s funeral. Nine-year-old Anna reads Mary Poppins under a settee. Eleven-year-old Edmund steals sweets and taunts the vicar who presides over the funeral. Twelve-year-old William, feeling the responsibility of being the eldest, greets the elderly funeral attendees, politely accepting their condolences and hollow pleasantries. The attendees must leave the funeral early so the wartime blackout can be observed. England has been at war with Germany since the previous fall; though London has not been bombed, the children gather from the behavior of the adults around them that is imminent.

Edmund does not understand why people discuss deceased people in positive terms even if that person was a “miserable old cow” like their grandmother (6). Though their grandmother was their caretaker since their parents’ death seven years ago, she treated them as if they were “a right pain in the neck” (9). The three siblings wish that their elderly housekeeper, Miss Collins, could care for them. Secretly, William wishes that Miss Collins could be their mother, taking the pressure of looking after the other two children from his shoulders. Though Miss Collins loves the children immensely, she says she is too old to be a proper mother to them.