The years did what years do, regardless of war or peace, sirens or silence; they passed, one folding quietly into the next, and the frightened four-year-old who had once stood weeping on a London platform grew, almost without my quite noticing the precise moment of the change, into someone else entirely.
By the time I turned seven, I no longer needed Samuel to walk me to the school gate, having long since claimed that walk as my own confident territory, often with Alice or one of the other village children at my side, chattering about whatever small dramas occupied a seven-year-old's world. I had grown sturdy and sun-browned from years of farm life, my hands calloused in the particular way of a child who had genuinely learned to work rather than merely visit a farm, and I could, by then, feed the lambs and gather the eggs and even help with the haymaking in high summer without anyone needing to stand over my instruction, taking a genuine, quiet pride in my growing competence at tasks that had once seemed entirely mysterious to me.
I had, too, grown into my own small opinions and my own quiet confidences. I knew, by seven, precisely which of the village boys to avoid when they were in a teasing mood, having learned this lesson thoroughly after an unfortunate incident involving a frog and my Sunday shoes, and precisely which corner of the near meadow yielded the sweetest wild strawberries in June, a secret I guarded jealously even from Alice.
The Whitakers had become, by slow and unremarkable degrees, something I no longer thought of as "the family I was staying with" but simply as family, full stop; a fact I recognized clearly one autumn evening when Emily, now nearly seventeen and being courted, in the careful manner of wartime courtships, by a young man from a neighboring farm named Thomas, sat me down to ask, with evident nervousness, what I thought of him.
"You're asking me?" I said, genuinely startled, for at seven I did not yet fully grasp why my opinion should matter to anyone regarding matters of the heart.
"Well, of course I'm asking you," Emily said, as though this were entirely obvious. "You're my sister, aren't you? Sisters ought to have opinions about these things."
It was the first time anyone had said the word sister aloud between us, though it had been true, in every way that mattered, for years by then, and I felt something warm and settled bloom in my chest at the hearing of it, a confirmation of something I had felt but never quite had words for. I had, after careful consideration, pronounced Thomas satisfactory, on the grounds that he had once helped me retrieve a kite from a particularly stubborn tree without once complaining about the torn state of his trousers afterward, a recommendation Emily accepted with great solemnity, as though it settled the matter entirely.
Samuel, for his part, had grown from the quiet, watchful boy who had carried my suitcase up the stairs on my very first evening into a young man old enough now to be spoken of, in low and worried tones among the farm's neighbors, as likely to be called up himself before the war's end; a fact that filled me, when I overheard such conversations, with a fear I recognized instantly and painfully as the very same fear I had once felt for my own father, and I understood, with the particular clarity children sometimes achieve about matters adults think they are shielded from, that war did not discriminate between the families that had raised you by blood and the families that had simply chosen, out of kindness, to raise you anyway.
There were harder days too, in among the ordinary business of growing up, days when the war reached even into the quiet of the countryside and reminded the whole household that safety, however real, was never entirely absolute. I remember clearly the evening a telegram arrived for the family two farms over, and how the whole village seemed to hold its breath for a week afterward, church bells muted and conversations hushed wherever I went, and how Margaret went to sit with the grieving mother every afternoon that fortnight, taking a basket of bread and eggs and whatever comfort her presence alone could offer, because that, Margaret said simply when I asked why, was what neighbors did for one another in hard times, war or no war. I prayed harder than usual that week for my own father's safety, kneeling beside my bed for far longer than my usual ritual required, and felt, for the first time with real and adult clarity, the precariousness of the promise my mother had made me believe so completely that everyone always found their way home in the end. I understood, watching that grieving family, that the promise did not always hold, and the understanding frightened me more than any bomb ever had, precisely because it could not be outrun or sheltered from, only endured and prayed against.
By the time I turned eight, Alice and I had developed a particular fondness for the village library, a single shelf, in truth, kept in the back room of the vicarage, but a treasure trove nonetheless to two girls hungry for stories beyond the ones we already knew by heart. Reverend Cole, delighted by our enthusiasm, took to setting aside any new book that came his way for our particular attention, and many a wet Sunday afternoon was spent curled together on the vicarage's worn settee, taking turns reading aloud while the rain lashed against the windows outside. It was during one such afternoon that I first discovered a battered atlas among the vicarage's small collection, and spent the better part of an hour tracing, with one careful finger, the whole long distance between London and the village where I now lived, and then, driven by a curiosity I could not quite explain even to myself, the far greater distance still to a place called Wagga Wagga, marked in small print on a map of a country so large it seemed to swallow the whole bottom corner of the page. I thought of Jack Sullivan, wondering whether he had made it home safely to that distant dot on the map, and resolved, not for the last time, that I would try one day to find out.
There came, too, in my ninth year, a stretch of nearly two months in which no letter arrived from Father at all, his unit having been moved, Mother explained in her own increasingly worried letters, to some engagement she was permitted to know almost nothing about, the details swallowed up entirely by wartime censorship. I continued my nightly prayers with a fervency that left Margaret quietly concerned, kneeling for so long some evenings that she would find me still there, eyes squeezed shut, long after I ought to have been asleep, and had taken to carrying the small brass kangaroo in my coat pocket wherever I went that autumn, as though its luck might somehow be made to stretch across the whole width of Europe to wherever my father presently found himself.
It was Arthur, in the end, who found the right words for my worry, sitting with me one evening on the low wall at the edge of the yard while the last of the daylight faded from the hills. "I lost my own brother in the last war," he told me, quietly, a fact I had not known before that moment. "Waited months for word, same as you're waiting now, and when the word finally came, it wasn't the word we hoped for. I'll not lie to you and tell you every story ends the way you want it to, Charlotte, because that wouldn't be fair to you, and your own mother's never lied to you, has she, so I shan't be the first. But I'll tell you this much — waiting doesn't change the outcome one way or the other, whatever it might feel like. All your worrying won't keep your father safer, and it won't make him less safe either. All it does is wear away at you, and you're too fine a girl to let it. Best thing you can do is keep on being exactly who you are and let the waiting take care of itself."
I turned this over for a long while, in my careful way, and found, though it did not entirely ease the fear, that it helped all the same, the way a hand on the shoulder helps even when it cannot lift the actual weight being carried. When the letter finally did arrive, some seven weeks later, brief and heavily censored but unmistakably in Father's own hand, confirming that he remained safe and well, I wept with relief in the middle of the kitchen, and Margaret held me a long while without saying anything at all, understanding that some relief was too large to need any words wrapped around it.
By the time I turned nine, in the war's later years, I had grown into a confident, capable girl who moved through the rhythms of farm life with an ease that made it difficult, at times, for even Margaret to remember I had ever been anything other than a Whitaker child. And yet, for all the roots I had put down in this new soil, for all the genuine love I carried for Arthur's steady patience and Margaret's warm hands and Emily's easy sisterhood and Samuel's quiet watchfulness; I never once forgot, not for a single day across all those passing years, that I had another family too, waiting for me at the far end of a train line, in a city I now remembered only in fragments: a crater behind a garden, a bus that might fit inside it, a mother's voice calling I love you down a lengthening platform.
Every night, without fail, kneeling beside my bed beneath the eaves as Margaret had taught me, I said my prayers, and the shape of those prayers had grown, over the years, into a kind of ritual entirely my own. I prayed for Mother, working long hours through London's dwindling but still dangerous nights. I prayed for Father, wherever the war's tides had carried him that particular season. I prayed for London itself, for its bomb-scarred streets and its stubborn, unbroken spirit. And I prayed, last of all, simply for peace, an abstract enough concept to a child, and yet one I had come, through years of letters and empty chairs and platform partings, to understand with a clarity many adults never fully achieved, which was that peace was not merely the absence of bombs, but the presence, once more, of everyone you loved gathered safely beneath one roof.
I had come to understand, too, by the time I was eight and then nine years old, a truth that seemed, on its surface, almost too large for a child to hold, and yet which I carried without difficulty, the way children often carry truths that would break an adult's heart to examine too closely: that I now had two homes. There was the Whitaker farm, with its lambs and its Sunday ice creams and its warm kitchen and the family who had, without any obligation beyond simple decency and kindness, taken a frightened stranger's child and made her entirely their own. And there was London, waiting somewhere beyond the horizon, holding within it the mother whose voice I still heard in memory calling down the platform, and the father whose photograph I still kept, worn soft at its corners, at the bottom of my little brown suitcase.
Two homes, and within them, two families who loved me, and yet, I knew, lying awake some nights turning the thought over as carefully as I once turned over seashells on that last seaside summer before the war, only one of those homes held the two people who had given me life, who had held me before I could remember being held, who waited, I trusted with the whole unshaken faith of a child who has never once been lied to by her mother, for the day the war would finally end and I could come home to stay.
It was Alice who first pointed out to me, sometime in my ninth year, that I no longer spoke quite like a London girl at all. "You've gone proper Yorkshire on your vowels," she informed me, with the frank honesty of a lifelong friend, during one of our walks home from school. "Your mother must scarcely recognize you, talking the way you do now." I had been startled by the observation, having never noticed the change happening within my own mouth, and spent an anxious evening afterward practicing my old London vowels in the privacy of my room, worried that I had somehow betrayed my own family by growing to sound so entirely of this other place. But when I raised the worry with Margaret, she only laughed, gently, and told me that a voice, like a heart, could hold more than one home within it without any disloyalty at all, and that Mother, when she next visited, would very likely find my new way of speaking rather charming than troubling. Mother, when the visit came, had indeed laughed with delight at my altered vowels, declaring that I sounded, in that moment, like the very best of both my worlds combined, and the worry had eased from my chest as quickly as it had settled there.
I did not resent the waiting, not truly, not by then. I had learned, through years of letters and visits and partings on platforms, that love did not require proximity to remain whole, only faith, and patience, and the stubborn refusal to let distance convince you that you had been forgotten. But I waited all the same, every single day, for the war to end, and when, at last, the day came that it finally did, it arrived not with the terrible sound of sirens, but with the sweetest sound I had ever heard: the ringing, joyful, unrestrained peal of church bells across an English spring morning.