In 1964, British Railways closed numerous loss-making branch lines. The coastal Cornish village of Polmouth is cut off from the outside world and faces slow extinction. The village's only asset, Polmine Estate, potentially valuable building land, loses all value overnight. Historian and Latin teacher Felix Ingram has an audacious plan to buy the estate to save his beloved village, but his project founders upon his death in 1974. He bequeaths his fortune to former pupils Colin Penpolney and Petra Zabrinski, who hardly know each other. They set out to realise Ingram's ambitions but suddenly find themselves faced with calamitous interventions from the Ministry of Defence and an East German assassin. Will Ingram's project ever be realised? A delightful romance with a sequence of hilarious comedy scenarios is set in a Cold War conflict played out in a Cornish village on the brink of extinction and its defunct tin mine. Everything looks set for the renaissance of Polmouth, until Zoltan von Horváth arrives from Berlin.