The station, when the train finally drew alongside the platform in a great shuddering exhale of steam, was more crowded than I had expected; filled not only with the ordinary bustle of arriving passengers but with the particular charged atmosphere of a city still absorbing the strange, wonderful, unfamiliar fact of peacetime, families reuniting on every platform, soldiers still in uniform embracing wives and mothers and children who had grown, in some cases, almost unrecognizably in their absence.
I gathered my belongings with hands that had gone suddenly clumsy; the same small brown suitcase, though its contents had changed considerably across five years: Rosie, worn now nearly threadbare from years of comfort; the family photograph, its corners softer still than when I'd left; Emily's pressed flower book; Samuel's carved wooden lamb; and, held tight in my coat pocket rather than packed away, the small brass kangaroo that had traveled with me the whole distance north five years before and would, I had determined, travel with me the whole distance home again.
I stepped down from the carriage onto the crowded platform, and for one long, disorienting moment simply stood there amid the surging crowd, searching every nearby face for one I was no longer entirely certain I would even recognize, my heart pounding with an anxiety I had not fully anticipated.
Then, through a gap in the crowd, I saw her.
Mother stood perhaps thirty feet distant, near the platform's edge, dressed in her good blue coat, scanning the disembarking passengers with an intensity that suggested she had been scanning them, without pause, from the very moment the train first came into view. For a moment neither of us moved, both searching, both uncertain, five years of separation and growth and change standing suddenly and strangely between us like a physical thing.
Then her eyes found me, truly found me, and I watched her face transform; recognition breaking across it like sunrise, followed immediately by an expression I had no word for yet, some combination of joy so large it looked, for one startling instant, almost like pain.
"Charlotte," she breathed, the word barely audible across the platform's noise, and yet I heard it as clearly as if it had been shouted directly into my ear.
And then, before either of us had consciously decided to move, we were running; I dropped my suitcase heedlessly onto the platform, Mother pushing through the crowd with an urgency that sent an elderly gentleman's newspaper scattering, and we met in the middle of the platform with a collision that was half embrace and half simple, desperate need to close the last remaining distance between us.
Mother held me so tightly I could scarcely breathe, murmuring into my hair words that came too fast and too broken by tears to properly form sentences, my darling, my darling girl, look at you, look how you've grown, I can hardly believe, my whole world, my whole world…
I clung back with equal fierceness, my own face pressed into her shoulder, breathing in a smell that some deep, wordless part of me recognized instantly and completely despite five years' absence; my mother's smell, unchanged beneath the unfamiliar new scent of her coat, unmistakably, entirely, the smell of home.
It was several long minutes before either of us found words enough to speak properly, and several minutes more before I, still held tight in my mother's arms, felt a large, gentle hand come to rest against my shoulder from the other side, and turned to find a tall man in a soldier's uniform, recently discharged by the look of the fresh civilian coat folded over one arm, watching me with an expression I recognized, in a rush of memory so sudden it nearly knocked the breath from me, from the worn seaside photograph I had carried in my suitcase across five years and hundreds of miles.
"Daddy," I said, the word emerging almost as a question, uncertain whether five years' distance had left me any right to it.
"Charlotte," Father said, and his voice broke entirely on the single syllable of my name, and then he too was kneeling on the crowded platform, gathering both his wife and his daughter into arms that had carried my photograph through five years of a war I had only ever known through careful, censored letters, and for a long moment the three of us simply stood together in the middle of the platform's crowd and chaos, entirely oblivious to everything around us, holding on as though letting go, even slightly, even for a moment, might somehow undo the whole miracle of finally, finally being together again.
"You've grown into such a fine young lady," Father managed at last, pulling back just far enough to study my face properly, his own face wet with tears he made no effort to hide. "I hardly know how to credit it; the little girl I remember could scarcely reach my belt buckle, and here you stand nearly to my shoulder."
"I fed lambs," I told him, the words tumbling out now in the same great rush they always did when excitement overcame me, exactly as they had on that very first reunion with Mother five years before. "And I learned my letters, and Miss Ashworth says I'm very good at sums, and Emily taught me where the blackberries grow, and Samuel carved me a lamb to remember the farm by, and there was a whole family called the Whitakers who took care of me, and they were ever so kind, and I named a lamb Winston, and…"
"And you shall tell us every single bit of it," Mother said, laughing through her tears, retrieving the dropped suitcase from the platform and taking my hand in one of hers while Father took the other, "the whole of it, every story, but perhaps we might begin the telling on the walk home, hmm? I rather think there's a great deal of catching up to do, and I should like to start it somewhere more comfortable than the middle of a crowded platform."
As we gathered ourselves to leave the platform, Father bent to retrieve the small brown suitcase I had dropped in my rush to reach my mother, and paused, turning it over once in his hands with an expression I could not quite read. "This is the very case, isn't it," he said softly, more to himself than to me. "The one you carried away with you. I remember your mother writing to tell me what she'd packed inside it, the night before you left. I read that letter so many times the paper near wore through." He handed it back to me with a care that seemed, to me, entirely out of proportion to so ordinary an object, until I understood, watching his face, that the case had become to him, across five years of separation, a kind of talisman in its own right, proof that his daughter had gone out into the world with whatever small comforts a mother's love could pack into so little space, and had returned, at the end of it, whole.
The walk home took us past streets I half-remembered and half did not, my parents pausing more than once to point out some landmark that had survived the bombing, the corner shop, rebuilt but recognizable; the church, its sandbagged entrance finally cleared away. When at last we turned onto our own street, I slowed, some old, deep instinct drawing my eyes past the familiar terrace houses toward the low garden fence at the end of the row, and found, to my considerable surprise, that Mr. Pemberton had long since filled in the crater and replanted his cabbages, the garden showing no visible sign at all of the great black wound that had once split it in two.
Mr. Pemberton himself, spotting our small procession from his own garden gate, called out a greeting, and seemed genuinely delighted to learn that the little girl he vaguely remembered from five years before had grown into the composed young lady now standing before him. "Well, I never," he said, shaking his head with evident wonder. "The very image of your mother, if I may say so. Welcome home, young miss. Welcome home indeed."
Our own house, when we finally reached it, seemed to me both smaller and larger than I remembered; smaller in its actual physical dimensions, and yet larger in the sheer weight of memory it held, every room offering up some half-buried recollection as I moved through it. My old bedroom had been kept almost exactly as I'd left it, Mother admitted with some embarrassment, unable quite to bring herself to alter it in all the years of my absence, and I stood in the doorway for a long moment, taking in the small bed, the same wallpaper with its faded pattern of climbing roses, feeling the strange, doubled sensation of a memory both entirely familiar and slightly too small for the girl I had since become.
"We shall want to get you a proper bed, I expect," Mother said, watching my face carefully, "now that you're grown so much taller. Whatever you'd like, my darling, this is your home now, and it ought to feel like yours."
"I should like to keep the roses, actually," I said, surprising myself somewhat with the admission. "I think I should like it to feel the same as before, at least for a while, until I've got properly used to being home again."
Mother's eyes filled at this, and she pulled me close for a long moment, understanding, perhaps better than I myself could yet articulate, the particular comfort of familiar things in a world so recently and thoroughly changed.
That first evening, the three of us sat together at the kitchen table long after supper had been cleared away, my parents listening with rapt attention while I told them, in proper detail now rather than the breathless rush of the station platform, the whole long story of my five years at the Whitaker farm. Father, for his part, filled in the gaps of his own five years with careful, measured words, saying little of the actual fighting but a great deal of the friendships he had made, the letters that had sustained him, and the particular joy of finally being able to say, aloud and without the careful restraint of a censor's blue pencil, exactly how proud he was of the daughter he had watched grow, at such distance, into someone he found he liked every bit as much as he loved.
It was well past my usual bedtime before the conversation finally wound down, and when at last I climbed the stairs to my old room with its familiar roses, I found myself, for the first time in longer than I could properly remember, entirely certain of where I belonged; not choosing between two homes, as I had feared on the train, but simply carrying both of them forward together.
Before I blew out my candle that first night home, I unpacked my small brown case properly, setting each treasure in its place around the familiar room; Rosie propped against the pillow exactly where she had once sat before the war began; the family photograph returned to its old spot on the small bedside table; Emily's pressed flowers and Samuel's carved lamb arranged carefully on the windowsill, a small transplanted piece of northern countryside brought south to keep me company in my London nights. I took the small brass kangaroo last of all, and tucked it beneath my pillow, exactly as I had done on that very first night in a stranger's farmhouse five years before.
Lying in the dark of my own childhood room, listening to the unfamiliar-familiar sounds of London settling into its own version of nighttime quiet; no sirens now, only the ordinary creak of an old house and, faintly, my parents' voices still murmuring downstairs, unwilling, it seemed, to let the day's miracle end simply because the hour had grown late, I found myself saying my nightly prayers with a fullness of gratitude I had never before quite managed to put into words. I thanked God for my mother and my father, safely returned to me at last. I thanked Him too, without any sense of contradiction, for Arthur and Margaret and Emily and Samuel, for the lambs and the letters and the Sunday ice creams, for two Australian soldiers on a long-ago train, for every single kindness that had carried me, frightened and alone, through five years to this exact moment of arrival.
And so I walked out of that station between the two people who had never once, across all those years and all those miles, stopped loving me, out into a London that bore, everywhere I looked, the visible scars of five long years of war, gaps in the terraces, a bombed chapel's roofless silhouette against the June sky, the raw emptiness of cleared rubble where houses had once stood, and yet which felt, walking between them, entirely and unmistakably like home.
I have thought, many times since, about the particular strangeness of that first week home; how a household of three, so long accustomed to being a household of two-and-a-letter, had to learn all over again the ordinary rhythms of living together under one roof. Mother, I think, hardly knew what to do with herself in those first days, so long had she organized her whole life around my absence, and I remember catching her more than once simply standing in the doorway of my room, watching me sleep, as though she still could not quite trust the evidence of her own eyes. Father, for his part, moved through the house those first weeks with the particular careful gentleness of a man relearning a language he had once spoken fluently, uncertain of his own place at a supper table he had not sat at properly in five years, though that uncertainty eased, I am glad to say, rather more quickly than either of us expected, until within a month it seemed to all three of us as though the empty years had simply folded themselves away, leaving behind only the deeper, steadier love that had carried us through them.