Set on the British home front during the early days of the war, this episodic movie shows the blitz through the eyes of nine-year-old Billy Rohan. At the war's outset, Billy finds himself alone in a house full of women, as all the men are called off to join the war effort. With wide-eyed wonder and an outsized imagination, Billy sees the war as a grand diversion, an extension of his world of knights, tin soldiers, and war games. As bombs fall and houses burn, Billy's mother struggles to keep the family together in her husband's absence. Even as Billy seeks to escape the harem of aunts and sisters, Dawn, his older sister, falls for a Canadian soldier who gets her pregnant. After a German bomb strikes the Rohans' home, the family is forced to move in with Billy's cantankerous grandfather in the countryside, where they spend the rest of their summer and enjoy an unusual idyll amid the raging war.