His niece is apparently orphaned and had a 'non-Aryan' mother. He is accused of being a spy and threatened with death by the Gestapo, but in a final plot twist, the German commandant secretly allows Howard and the children to sail to England on the condition that they take his niece with them and send her to her uncle in the United States. However, when one of the children is overheard speaking in English, the Nazis discover that Howard is an enemy Englishman and arrest him. Along the way he is overtaken by events and turns for help to some acquaintances in Chartres whom he barely knows, but remembers from a skiing holiday he took with his son, some years before.Įventually, Howard and the children reach Brittany, hoping to escape Nazi-occupied France on a fishing boat. Along the way, Howard accepts two more children: a boy whose parents were killed on the road by German aircraft, and a Dutch boy who is being attacked by panicking French villagers who mistake him for a German. While delayed in Dijon by the sudden illness of one of the children, he accepts a request by one of the hotel maids to also take her young niece to safety in England where the child's father is working. They ask him to take their two young children to England and safety. His urgent desire to return home is delayed by a request made by an English couple he meets at the hotel. Second World War has begun, he does not expect the speed with which the Nazi German forces invade France. The story concerns a 70-year-old Englishman, John Sidney Howard, who goes on a fishing holiday in Jura, France partly to recover from grief at the loss of his son during the Battle of the Heligoland Bight.

The title is a reference to the traditional German folk tale, ' The Pied Piper of Hamelin'. Pied Piper is a novel by Nevil Shute, first published in 1942.

Pied piper shute