Comic adventures of an 11-year-old boy and his neighborhood pals.

Poor New York shop girl Nadina receives the unexpected news that she is next in line to be queen of an Eastern European country. On her arrival in Ruritania, a revolution is in progress, and only minutes before her coronation, Nadina is forced into exile. She flees to Paris with her nurse, and then travels on to Switzerland. There Nadina encounters the Ruritanian revolutionary leader Carl, recuperating from the trials of revolution, and the couple unexpectedly fall in love. When the revolution collapses in Ruritania, they return and marry, thus forming a constitutional monarchy supported by all the people.

It is pouring with rain at one minute to midnight on Friday the thirteenth, and the driver of a London bus is peering through his blurred windscreen as his vehicle sails down an empty road. Suddenly, lightning strikes, and a vast crane above topples into the path of the oncoming bus... Then Big Ben begins to wind backwards. Time recedes. And we discover the lives of all the passengers and the events that brought them to that late-night bus journey, from the con-man with a hundred-pound cheque to the businessman's distraught and elderly wife. Time flows on, inevitably, to the crash -- and past it, as some live and some die.