“An abyss is a deep and terrible chasm.”
Helga, Act One, Scene One (p. 3)
The play's first exchange is a child asking what a word in her storybook means, and Helga's calm answer plants the image that runs through the whole play. The abyss is where the Ratcatcher leads the children of Hamlyn; Eva later asks whether she is in it, and the adult Evelyn uses the word for the past itself.
“There’s no ‘later’ left, Eva.”
Helga, Act One, Scene One (p. 4)
Eva asks whether she can sew her buttons on later. Helga's reply treats time as a supply that has run out, turning a household chore into training for survival. The audience senses the danger before Eva does, and the firmness that looks like coldness to the child is really fear. The word returns at the quayside, when Helga is the one kept waiting.
“Because any good parent would want to protect their child.”
Helga, Act One, Scene One (p. 8)
Helga explains why parents who can are sending their children away. The logic is simple and loving, but it contains the play's central paradox: protecting Eva means losing her. The line sets up every later parent in the play, Lil and Evelyn included, who must decide when to hold on and when to let go.
“A chipped glass is ruined forever.”
Evelyn, Act One, Scene One (p. 10)
Evelyn's first appearance is spent polishing glasses for Faith's new flat, and this blunt verdict, with its absolute “forever”, reveals her way of thinking: damage cannot be repaired, only put out of sight. Read against what the audience learns later, the glass becomes an image of Evelyn herself, damaged in childhood and convinced the damage is permanent.
“You are my children. You are my jewels.”
Helga, quoting her grandfather, Act One, Scene One (p. 13)
Helga repeats her grandfather's words just after revealing the real jewels hidden in Eva's shoes, so the metaphor and the object arrive together. Children are the family's treasure and its future. Later Eva takes the jewellery off and wants to sell it, and her rejection of the jewels becomes a rejection of the inheritance they stand for.
“I will search you out whoever wherever you are.”
The Ratcatcher, Act One, Scene One (p. 16)
The storybook villain speaks for himself as the story is read aloud in past and present at once. The breathless run of “whoever wherever”, with no comma to slow it, makes the threat total and inescapable, and in a sense it is kept: the Ratcatcher finds Eva at the border, in England and in her own memory.
“If you don’t know it you might forget who you are.”
The Nazi Border Official (labelled OFFICER), Act One, Scene One (p. 19)
The official means that without her label number Eva is lost, but Samuels makes the line a prophecy about identity. The regime has reduced a child to a number, and yet the play will show Eva forgetting who she is in quite another way, by becoming Evelyn. One of the most frightening men in the play speaks one of its truest lines.
“Over. Finished. Done. Goodbye.”
Lil, Act One, Scene Two (p. 27)
Lil says this as she takes the numbered label off Eva, and the four minor sentences, simplified for a child with no English, sound like kindness: the persecution is over. But the words are also a farewell to everything the label connected her to. The line captures Lil exactly, warm and well meant but careless of what she is erasing.
“Aren’t I real now?”
Lil, Act One, Scene Two (p. 33)
Faith has been asking about Evelyn's real family, and Lil's rhetorical question shows how the word “real” wounds her. It is a moment of sympathy for Lil: her whole claim to be Evelyn's mother rests on the past staying buried, so Faith's discovery threatens her place as well as Evelyn's peace.
“Don’t hide behind the German. It won’t protect you”
Lil, Act One, Scene Two (p. 37)
Lil rebukes Eva for answering her in German. To Lil, German is a shield Eva uses to avoid blame; to Eva it is the last thing she has of home. The irony is sharp: Lil is right that German will not protect her in England, and the lesson is one of many that turn Eva into Evelyn.
“He won’t take you anywhere ever again.”
Evelyn, Act One, Scene Two (p. 46)
As the Ratcatcher's pipe music plays and his shadow looms, the adult Evelyn soothes her frightened younger self, and the two figures speak to each other across time. In the same speech the prescribed edition has her say “You’re with me now. He can’t touch me.”, slipping from you to me, which suggests that the child and the woman are one person. Act One ends on a promise nobody can keep.
“Through our children we live. That’s how we cheat death.”
Helga, Act Two, Scene One (p. 47)
Helga returns to the jewels metaphor at the start of Act Two, while the adult Evelyn sits beside an ashtray of stubs in the locked storeroom. The line hands Eva an enormous responsibility: she is how her family survives. It explains why Helga will later treat her daughter's refusal as a second death.
“The whitewash has been stripped away and underneath is pure filth.”
Evelyn, Act Two, Scene One (p. 55)
Evelyn describes her uncovered past in the language of dirt. Whitewash is a cheap coat of paint that hides what is beneath, which is exactly what her English life has been. That she calls the truth “pure filth” shows shame rather than grief, the same instinct that makes her polish, scrub and later feel “cleansed” by baptism.
“Did I start the war? Am I Hitler?”
Lil, Act Two, Scene One (p. 61)
Lil's two rhetorical questions are meant to show how unfair Evelyn is being, and they do. But Evelyn answers that Lil might as well have been, and the exchange exposes how grief looks for someone within reach to blame. Samuels lets both women be right: Lil did not cause the war, and she did help to erase Eva.
“Part of me is dead because of you.”
Evelyn, to Lil, Act Two, Scene One (p. 61)
Evelyn's accusation turns the language of the Holocaust inward: the part of her that died is the German Jewish girl. The short, plain sentence carries great weight, and it is soon followed by “Child-stealer”, which casts Lil, the woman who saved her, as a version of the Ratcatcher.
“All our children leave us. And one day they never come back.”
Evelyn, to Lil, Act Two, Scene One (p. 68)
Evelyn is talking about Faith, but the sentence describes her own childhood exactly: she left and never came back. The generalising “All our children” makes loss sound like a law of nature, which is how Evelyn copes with it, and it may explain why she has pressed Faith to go rather than wait to be left.
“Did they die for you to forget?”
Faith, Act Two, Scene One (p. 73)
Faith finds the letters and photographs torn up and asks the question the play has been building towards. The rhetorical question makes forgetting a moral failure, a betrayal of the dead. It is harsh, and Faith has not lived what Evelyn lived, but it shows the second generation claiming a right to the past its parents buried.
“That is how we survive.”
Helga, Act Two, Scene One (p. 76)
In the hotel after the war, soon after learning that Eva has been adopted, Helga says that everyone has done bad things in these years that they regret. It sounds generous, yet it frames Eva's new life as a regrettable necessity to be put right, when Eva regards it as her life. The line sets up their final quarrel.
“She would have handed me back like a borrowed package.”
Evelyn, about Lil, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 80)
Faith has asked whether Lil knew that Helga survived, and Evelyn explains why she was never told. The simile reduces a child to a parcel on loan, and it reveals how Evelyn sees herself: not loved for herself but held until claimed. The Kindertransport label, which treated her as luggage with a number, is still shaping how she understands love.
“I have a background, a context.”
Faith, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 80)
Evelyn has just told her not to hanker after the past, and called it an abyss. Faith answers with calm, almost academic nouns, and the contrast is the difference between the generations: what is a bottomless drop for the survivor is, for her daughter, solid ground to stand on. Before, Faith says, all she knew was a blank space.
“Germany spat me out. England took me in.”
Evelyn, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 81)
Two short, balanced sentences with opposite verbs sum up Evelyn's version of her life. “Spat” makes Germany a mouth rejecting something disgusting, the same imagery of dirt she uses for her past. The neatness is the point: it is a story told so often that it has stopped hurting, and the play is about what it leaves out.
“I was cleansed that day. Purified.”
Evelyn, on her baptism at eighteen, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 81)
Evelyn remembers her baptism in religious language of washing, and the one-word sentence “Purified” lands like relief. The imagery links to her polishing and to “pure filth”: she experienced her Jewish origins as something dirty to be scrubbed away, a painful sign of how deeply the persecution got into her.
“Home is inside you. Inside me and you. It is not a place.”
Helga, at the quayside, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 84)
Eva says she cannot leave home yet, and Helga redefines the word. For a woman who has lost her house, her husband and her country, home can only be a bond between people. It is a moving idea, but it asks Eva to give up the home she has made in England, which is why it fails to persuade her.
“Hitler started the job and you finished it.”
Helga, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 85)
This is the cruellest line in the play. By setting her daughter's rejection beside genocide, Helga shows how completely she had staked her survival on her child. It is unfair, and Samuels means us to feel that, but it comes from a woman who has lost her husband and her world and now her daughter.
“You were the Ratcatcher.”
Evelyn, to Helga, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 85)
At the climax the storybook villain and the mother merge. For Evelyn, the woman who put her on the train is the figure who takes children away, however loving her reasons. The short declarative sentence shows how the child's fear has hardened into the adult's story about her life, and why the reconciliation Helga hopes for cannot happen.
“I had to let go to float.”
Evelyn, to Helga, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 85)
Evelyn pictures herself thrown into the sea with her mother's baggage on her shoulders. Letting go is both the crime Helga accuses her of and the only way she could stay alive, so the metaphor turns Helga's charge of betrayal into a story of survival. It is the play's clearest defence of Evelyn.
“Stay my little girl forever.”
Evelyn, to Faith, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 86)
Faith asks what she can do to help, and this is Evelyn's answer. After pressing Faith to stick by her plan to leave home, the imperative reveals the wish underneath: Evelyn, like Helga and Lil, wants to keep the daughter she is sending away. “Forever” echoes her verdict on the chipped glass.
“Yes we are.”
Faith, the last line of the play, Act Two, Scene Two (p. 87)
Evelyn has asked whether Faith has everything, and says “All done in here then”; Faith agrees, holding her box of toys. Her plural takes her mother in, so the last spoken word of the play is shared. Yet it is followed by the final stage direction, the Ratcatcher's shadow covering the stage, so the play ends on qualified hope under a lasting fear.