Build a movie plot around this: The children get out, but who perishes in the fire? The Wickens.
The film begins in 1918,[2] where a war widow, Mrs. Allen (Dorothy Alison) and her children, Lucy (Lynne Frederick), Jamie (Garry Miller) and baby Benjamin are reduced to living in a squalid, Camden Town flat. Just before Christmas, a mysterious old man, Mr. Frederick Percival Blunden (Laurence Naismith) visits the family, introducing himself as a representative of a firm of solicitors.[2] The family are told there is an opportunity to become the caretakers of a derelict country mansion in the Home Counties named Langley Park, which was gutted by fire years before, and is now in the charge of the solicitors. Mrs. Allen takes the post despite rumours that the house is haunted, her instructions to care for the property until such time as the heirs to the estate can be traced. The air of mystery deepens when the children see a portrait at the solicitors office of a man they believe to be Mr Blunden. The solicitor confirms this, but reveals that the portrait is of a man called Mr Blunden, but who has been dead for a hundred years.[6]After they have settled into the new post, Lucy and Jamie see two ghostly figures in the grounds of the house: a teenage girl, Sara Latimer (Rosalyn Landor), and her younger brother, Georgie (Marc Granger). They are two children who lived in the house a century earlier.[7] Sara tells them that she and her brother are orphans, under the care of their dissolute and hapless Uncle Bertie (James Villiers) and the solicitor Mr. Blunden, until Georgie comes of age. Bertie marries a music hall performer, Bella Wickens[8] and her parents then move into Langley Park, ostensibly as the housekeeper and game keeper.[8] The children come to suspect that Mrs. Wickens (Diana Dors) and her disturbed (and often violent) husband are plotting to kill them to get hold of Georgie's inheritance. Sara and Georgie find a book with instructions for travelling through time, so that they can get help. Lucy and Jamie agree to travel back with them; they arrange to meet Sara the next day.Jamie searches the...