[4] Emma, 20, lives with her elderly grandmother, Mad (short for Madam), a famous retired actress, in the small village of Poldrea in Cornwall.

After some hours of civil confusion, a television announcement is made by the prime minister: due to recent economic and military failures on the continent, the UK and the USA have joined together as a single nation, to be called USUK.

The new government of USUK declares a state of emergency, institutes roadblocks, and cuts local telephone and postal communication.

Andy, 12, one of Mad's adopted boys who has an obsession with bows and arrows and a hazy understanding of the concepts of right and wrong, shoots and kills one of the Marines.

Early one morning, Emma and the boys are woken by aircraft and what appears to be gunfire, explosions and depth charges, while Mad sleeps on.

It was to be "a mockup of what this country may be like in the mid-seventies”, and on its completion she was sure that she had pulled off a fast and funny piece of satire that would be "popular autumn reading".

[6] Ella Westland, in her introduction to the 2004 Virago reprint, called the tone of the book "mocking" – shifting from the funny and farcical to the bleak and bizarre.

[5] Westland suggested that du Maurier's motive in writing the book was to explore her own feelings about the Britain that her grandchildren would inherit.