Carrie Willow and her younger brother Nick are evacuated to a rundown mining town in Wales during the Second World War.

[3] After a traumatic difficulty in finding a family to foster them, they stay with a shopkeeper, Mr Evans, who dominates his gentle but weak younger sister, whom they call "Auntie Lou".

The housekeeper tells the children many tales, including one about a curse on Druid's Bottom, which will be activated if a mysterious skull is removed from the house.

It is revealed that Mr Evans has been estranged from his older sister, Mrs Gotobed, after she married a wealthy Englishman whose family owned the mines where their father was killed in an accident.

Despite almost universal contempt for Mr Evans, Carrie gives him a chance and sees that, beneath his rough exterior, he genuinely is a well-meaning man, who became embittered with the world due to his hard life and the feud with his older sister, to whom he was once very close.

Auntie Lou, meanwhile, becomes friendly with Major Cass Harper, an American soldier, keeping this secret from her brother, who would not approve.

Thirty years later, Carrie's children discover that Hepzibah and Mr Johnny are living in a converted barn at Druid's Bottom, having escaped the fire, which was seemingly accidental.

The more recent 2004 BBC television film version (broadcast in America on PBS – Masterpiece Theatre in 2006) starred Keeley Fawcett as Carrie, Alun Armstrong as Mr Evans, Geraldine McEwan as Mrs Gotobed, Eddie Cooper as Albert Sandwich, Jamie Beddard as Johnny and Pauline Quirke as Hepzibah.

[6] A stage adaptation by Novel Theatre ran at Sadler's Wells in 2006–2007 and had a successful West End run starring Prunella Scales in June–September 2009, despite mixed reviews.