'He's got no one else...and nowhere else to go. After all those years, he's found his son and you've found your father.

Doesn't that mean anything to you?' Cessie has never seen her grandfather, not even in photos, until the day he turned up on the doorstep out of nowhere...The old man has a stroke.

He recovers, but he has lost his memory. Popsicle is impossible to live with - moody, forgetful, clumsy.

Only Cessie loves him and believes in him. So when he is sent off to Shangri-La, an old people's home, she is determined to help him escape and to unravel the truth of his past.

A past that comes to him only in glimpses - a lifeboat, a tin of condensed milk, and a terrifying night on the beaches of Dunkirk in World War II...Gradually, Popsicle recovers his memory and, with Cessie's help, realises a dream by taking the residents of Shangri-La on an adventurous journey across the channel in his lifeboat.

When they return to the port, Popsicle and his son, Cessie's father, are finally reconciled.