Dowager Lady Arndale presides over the smooth running of the house, whilst her son Charles manages the vast estate and Nanny Stone rules the roost in the nursery. Diana Arndale, just sixteen and back from finishing-school in Paris, looks forward with giddy excitement to her coming-out in London, as the protegee of her glamorous Aunt Selina. It is a well-ordered, comfortable, predictable existence, in which master and servant each knows his place. But the storm-clouds are gathering over Europe, and with the outbreak of 'The War To End Wars', the world of the Arndales and their servants is turned upside down. Life will never be the same again, for any of them.