The Orchard Walls

June 1941, and the Battle of Britain is raging overhead. In London, sixteen-year-old Jenny is packed off to her Aunt Ella's house in rural Hampshire, out of the way of the bombs. But evacuation is supposed to be the safe option. What she finds in the countryside is a household holding its breath.

Mrs Thorn is elderly and preoccupied, her mind fixed on her son away fighting the Germans in North Africa. Uncle Daniel goes about the place looking dismal. Aunt Ella is acting oddly, and nobody will say why. Jenny is bright, observant and stuck in a house where the adults are quietly coming apart. She watches, she pieces things together, and in the end she discovers a secret. The results are tragic.

The Orchard Walls is one of the series' standalone adaptations, written by Jacqueline Holborough with Ruth Rendell and directed by Gwennan Sage. Honeysuckle Weeks plays Jenny with the sharp-eyed intelligence the part needs, and she's well supported: Marsha Fitzalan as Clara, John McGlynn as Daniel, Sylvia Syms as Mrs Thorn and Fiona Dolman as Aunt Ella. Rupert Procter plays Tom, Cherith Mellor is Mrs Leithman, Alexis Denisof appears as Dennis and James Bree takes the role of the vicar. Jon Glover pops up twice, as the radio and as a Pathe news announcer, which helps stitch the wartime atmosphere together.

The title gives the game away in its own quiet way. The orchard walls keep the outside world out and the family's secrets in. For a story set in the middle of a national crisis, it stays stubbornly domestic, and that is exactly why it works. The war stays in the background, its voice arriving through the radio between the ordinary sounds of the house. The real damage happens at the kitchen table. It is a quiet episode, and the sadness creeps up on you.