Julie Monday, so called because she had been left on the doorstep of the Foundling Hospital on a Monday in July in 1918, is taken with her classmates on an outing to the seaside when she is eight. She wanders off alone and meets eleven year–old Harry Walker. They enjoy a few hours chatting together but then she has to go back to the orphanage and her punishment for wandering off: being locked in a cupboard.

Ten years later they meet again and fall in love. They marry and have a baby boy, but then the second world war breaks out and Harry joins the Air Force, leaving Julie to look after her baby and cope with the rationing and the blitz without him. Her one aim is to keep her son safe and provide everything he needs and to this end she becomes involved with a friend, Rosie, who brings her black market supplies. Paying for them becomes a problem and Rosie offers to baby sit for her while she goes off to raise the money by pawning her wedding ring.

Caught out in an air raid on her way home, she is directed to a shelter. Her time in the cupboard in her childhood has left her severely claustrophobic and she is fighting panic. The shelter receives a direct hit. Julie is pulled out alive but injured, and taken to hospital, but she has lost her memory and is given a new name: Eve Seaton.

Disturbed by flashes of memory she cannot hold onto, she must make a new life for herself as Eve Seaton and Harry must get on with his part in the war. She meets someone who would like to marry her, but she refuses him, afraid of what her loss of memory hides.