The weeks that followed unfolded for me like the slow turning of a picture book, each day revealing some new and unfamiliar page of a life I had not known existed before the war sent me north to find it.
I learned, under Margaret's patient instruction, to gather eggs from the henhouse each morning, reaching gingerly beneath warm, indignant hens for the smooth brown treasures they guarded so fiercely, a lesson I absorbed only after several stinging encounters with Old Boadicea, the henhouse's most senior and most bad-tempered resident, a large, speckled bird Emily had christened, with obvious affection, after the ancient warrior queen. I learned to feed the lambs from a bottle, holding it at just the right angle so the eager creatures would not choke themselves in their hurry, and I learned that lambs, for all their softness, had remarkably strong opinions about the timing of their meals, butting impatiently at my legs if I was even a few minutes late in arriving with their bottle.
Arthur taught me, on slow evenings when the farm work was done, to recognize the different fields by what grew in them; this one wheat, that one barley, the far one left fallow this year to rest, and explained, in his slow, patient way, how a farm moved through its seasons like a great clock, each month bringing its own particular labor.
"Everything's got its time, see," he told me once, as we walked the boundary of the north field together in the fading light, his large hand resting occasionally on my shoulder to steer me around a rabbit hole or a particularly muddy patch. "Plant in spring, tend through summer, harvest in autumn, rest through winter. Can't rush any of it, and can't skip any of it either, or the whole thing comes apart. My own father taught me that, walking this very same field, and his father before him, likely enough."
I remember thinking of London, of the war that seemed to have no particular season at all, no clock it moved by, dropping its bombs with no more regard for the calendar than for the cabbages in Mr. Pemberton's garden, and wondering privately whether the war, too, might someday come to its proper time and simply end, the way winter always gave way to spring, however long and cold it might feel while it lasted.
Emily took it upon herself, with the enthusiasm of an older sister discovering she rather liked having a younger one, to teach me the paths and hollows of the surrounding countryside; the stream at the bottom of the near meadow where minnows darted between smooth stones, cold enough in early autumn to numb bare toes within a minute of wading; the old oak at the field's edge that she swore had stood since before her grandfather's grandfather had farmed the land, its lowest branch worn smooth from generations of children climbing it; the best spots for finding blackberries before the birds got to them, and the precise trick of reaching the largest, ripest berries at the very center of each bramble without shredding one's arms to ribbons in the process. She braided my hair in the mornings when Margaret was busy with the baking, humming to herself as she worked the plaits, and told me stories at night about the village children I would soon meet at school, and generally filled, with unselfconscious warmth, the particular space in my heart that had always wondered, in the vague way only children wonder, what it might be like to have a sister.
Samuel, for his part, said little but did much. It was he who noticed, within the first week, that I was nervous of the farm's large collie, Bess, flinching whenever the dog approached too quickly, and who spent a quiet half hour each evening for a fortnight simply sitting with me near the dog until my fear of her passed entirely, teaching me, patiently and without ever once losing patience, exactly how to hold my hand out flat and still so Bess might approach in her own time rather than being crowded or startled. It was Samuel who walked me the long way round to the village school on my first morning, explaining the route slowly and clearly so I would not get lost finding my own way after, pointing out the particular oak tree and the particular bend in the lane that marked each stage of the journey, and who waited, without being asked, at the school gate each afternoon for the first month until I grew confident enough to make the walk alone. He was, I decided within my first fortnight at the farm, exactly the sort of older brother I had always imagined having, though I had never before known precisely what shape that imagining might take.
The village school itself was a single stone building with two rooms and a coal stove that smoked more than it warmed, particularly when the wind blew from the north, presided over by a Miss Ashworth who had taught three generations of village children and showed no signs of slowing in her fourth, a formidable woman of perhaps sixty with steel-gray hair pulled back in a bun so tight it seemed to me a permanent fixture of her face rather than a hairstyle at all. I was terrified on my first morning, clutching Samuel's hand until the very gate, certain that every village child would stare at my strange London accent and my unfamiliar face, but found, to my surprise, that the local children, many of whom had cousins or friends among the evacuees now scattered through the village, were curious rather than unkind, and within a week I had found myself sitting beside a farmer's daughter named Alice, sharing a slate and a set of sums, and feeling, for the length of the school day at least, almost entirely ordinary.
Alice, it turned out, had an older brother serving with the Royal Navy somewhere in the Atlantic, and the two of us discovered, in the careful way children discover kinship, that we understood something of each other's private worry that the other village-born children, whose fathers mostly farmed at home, could not entirely share. We took to walking to school together each morning once I grew confident of the route, comparing the letters that had arrived that week, trading small treasures, a particularly smooth stone, a ribbon, half a boiled sweet, and inventing elaborate games during the dinner hour that involved, more often than not, some version of soldiers returning triumphant from make-believe battles that always, in our telling, ended happily, the enemy vanquished and every father restored safely home before the closing bell.
Miss Ashworth, for her part, took a particular interest in the evacuee children under her instruction, aware that many of us carried burdens far heavier than our village-born classmates, and made a quiet practice of keeping a tin of barley sugar in her desk drawer for the days when a small, evacuated face looked more troubled than usual. She never asked why on those days; she simply offered the tin, and let the child choose, and returned to the lesson as though nothing at all had passed between us, which I came, in time, to recognize as its own particular and considerable kindness, all the more valuable for being so entirely unspoken.
I learned my letters properly there, forming them with great concentration under Miss Ashworth's watchful eye, and my numbers beyond simple counting, progressing from simple sums to the beginnings of subtraction with a facility that earned me, on several occasions, the rare privilege of being asked to help a slower classmate, an honor I took with tremendous seriousness. I learned, too, perhaps more importantly to a girl of four turning steadily toward five, the particular local wisdom of the countryside: which mushrooms were safe and which were not, a lesson Arthur reinforced at home with considerably more colorful warnings than Miss Ashworth had offered; how to tell the weather from the shape of clouds, a skill Samuel possessed with an accuracy that seemed, to me, nothing short of magical; why one never, ever startled a nesting goose, a lesson I learned rather more painfully than the others, having once come too close to the Pattersons' gander and been chased, shrieking, halfway across the farmyard, an incident that provided Emily with material for teasing for a full month afterward.
But it was the Sunday tradition that became, in time, the anchor around which my whole week turned.
Every Sunday, without fail, the Whitakers rose early and dressed in their good clothes and walked together as a family the mile into the village for church, my hand tucked between Margaret's and Emily's, Arthur and Samuel walking a pace behind, discussing, in the low murmured way of farming men, whatever needed discussing about the coming week's work. The service itself I did not always follow; Reverend Cole's sermons ran long, and the pews were hard, worn shiny by generations of Sunday mornings, and my attention, being four and then five years old, wandered frequently toward the colored light falling through the small stained window above the altar, which I found endlessly fascinating in the way it painted the stone floor in shifting patches of ruby and gold, but I came, in time, to love the singing, the great warm swell of the congregation's voices rising together in the old familiar hymns, and found, without quite understanding why, that it comforted me in something of the same way my mother's arms once had.
After the service came the walk through the village proper, past the baker's, its window fogged with the warmth of the morning's baking, and the smithy, where old Mr. Coombes could sometimes be persuaded to let us watch him shoe a horse if the day's work allowed it, and the little shop that sold, on good weeks, actual ice cream, a small miracle of rationing and goodwill that Arthur insisted on providing for the whole family each and every Sunday, regardless of the state of the farm accounts.
"A man's got to have his Sunday luxuries," he would say, handing me my cone with the same solemn ceremony each week, "or what's the whole rest of the week's work even for?"
I came to treasure these Sundays above all other days; the warm certainty of church, the walk through the village with the whole family together, the sweet cold delight of the ice cream melting a little too quickly in my small hand, dripping occasionally onto my good Sunday coat despite my most careful efforts, an occurrence that never failed to make Emily laugh and Margaret sigh good-naturedly over the resulting stain. And yet, even in the midst of this new and growing happiness, a small ache persisted beneath it, quiet but constant, like a stone in a shoe too small to be unbearable but too present to ever quite forget.
Because as I licked at my ice cream and watched Arthur laugh at some joke of Samuel's, and watched Margaret straighten Emily's collar with the same easy affection she showed me, a small and persistent thought would surface, unbidden, in the back of my mind: I wish Mummy and Daddy could see this. I wish they were here too.
I never said it aloud, not on those Sunday walks. It seemed, somehow, an ungrateful thing to say to a family who had given me so much. But I carried the wish quietly all the same, folded away in the same private place where I kept my memory of the crater behind the garden, and my mother's face at the station, and the sound of my father's laugh from the seaside photograph I still kept, wrapped safe in its handkerchief, at the very bottom of my little brown suitcase.
The seasons themselves became, over that first full year, a kind of education all their own, each one bringing its particular labors and its particular pleasures in a rhythm I came to anticipate with growing familiarity. Autumn had greeted me with the harvest already well underway, the fields around the farm ringing with the shouts of workers and the creak of loaded carts, and I was given, that first October, the small but important job of gleaning, gathering up the loose grain left behind after the main harvest, filling a little basket that Arthur assured me, with evident sincerity, made a genuine difference to the farm's stores through the winter months. I took the task with tremendous seriousness, working alongside Emily until my small back ached and my hands were scratched from the stubble, and felt, carrying my filled basket back to the barn at day's end, a satisfaction unlike any I had known in London.
Winter, when it arrived in earnest, brought its own harsh beauty; frost silvering the hedgerows each morning, the farm pond freezing thick enough, by January, for Samuel to test it cautiously with his boot before pronouncing it safe for a very careful slide. I learned, that first winter, the particular misery of chilblains on fingers unused to such cold, and the particular comfort of a warmed brick wrapped in flannel and tucked at the foot of my bed each night, and the particular joy of the whole family gathered close around the kitchen range on the darkest evenings.
Spring brought lambing season, the event around which the whole farm's calendar truly turned, and I was permitted, once Arthur judged me steady enough for the responsibility, to help with the bottle-feeding of any lamb whose mother could not properly nurse it, a task I took to with a natural gentleness that even Samuel remarked upon. Summer brought haymaking, the hardest and hottest work of the farming year, and though too small yet to swing a proper scythe, I was given my own small rake and set to work turning the cut grass so it might dry evenly in the sun, working alongside a dozen or more neighbors who came each summer to help each farm in turn. I remember those long summer evenings, the whole village it seemed gathered in one field or another, children running between the haycocks while the adults worked and gossiped and occasionally broke into song, as some of the very happiest of my entire childhood, a communal warmth I had never once experienced amid the more solitary rhythms of London life.