In 1938, Franz von Heiden, the son of a Nazi official and an English mother, comes to England to visit the Braithwaites, his English cousins, to study them and to report back to his father. But he finds the English are not the weak and decadent enemy he has been taught to expect, but are as hard-working, upright and honourable as he is himself, and as he still believes his Fatherland to be. He is half German, half English; where do his true loyalties lie? His dilemma increases as world events unfold: Munich, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and war itself. And then he falls in love. The English Air was D. E. Stevenson's war work. In it she says she tried to give 'an artistically true picture of how ordinary English people stood up to the frightfulness of war and what they thought and did during those awful years of anxiety, so that other countries might understand us better.
