I woke up the next morning in a village hall, having slept, exhausted past dreaming, on a camp bed still clutching my kangaroo in one fist and Rosie in the other. I remember little of that first night beyond the strange echoing sound of so many children's breathing in so large a room, and the unfamiliar smell of the hall itself, all beeswax polish and old stone, so different from the coal-smoke smell of my own bedroom at home. But it was the morning that revealed to me the true strangeness of where I had come; for when I was led outside, blinking against the pale light, by a kindly woman with a clipboard, I found myself standing not amid brick terraces and coal smoke, but in a world made almost entirely of green.
Rolling hills rose on every side, gentler than mountains but grander than anything I had known a hill to be, dotted with small white sheep grazing without any apparent concern for the war at all, entirely absorbed in the serious business of eating grass. Stone cottages lined the village street, low and solid, their roofs thick with slate rather than the tarpaper and brick of London, smoke curling from their chimneys into a sky that seemed, to my London-trained eye, remarkably clean and remarkably close, as though I might reach up and touch the low gray clouds if I only stood on my toes. The air smelled of things I had no names for yet; of hay and woodsmoke and something faintly sweet that I would later learn was gorse in bloom on the hillsides.
Most striking of all was the silence. No sirens. No drone of engines. No hurried scramble toward shelters at the first low wail of warning. Only birdsong, unfamiliar in its particular chorus of calls, and the distant bleating of sheep, and I stood quite still in the middle of it all for a long moment, trying to understand a world in which the sky held no danger at all, a concept so foreign to my four years of experience that it took me the better part of that first morning to stop instinctively flinching at every unexpected sound.
"This way, love," the billeting officer said, taking my hand. "The Whitakers are expecting you. Lovely family with whom you'll be very happy there, I shouldn't wonder. Mrs. Whitaker's already got a room made up special."
The Whitaker farm sat a mile or so beyond the village, reached by a lane bordered with hawthorn hedges just beginning to turn with the early edge of autumn. As we approached I saw a low stone farmhouse with smoke curling from its chimney, a barn beyond it, and in the yard between them, a whole family already gathered and waiting, as though they had been watching the lane since dawn, which, I would later learn, they very nearly had.
Arthur Whitaker was the first to step forward. He was a broad, weathered man with a face burned brown by years of sun and wind, and hands so large my whole fist could have disappeared inside one of them.
"You'll be Charlotte, then," he said, crouching down to my level with a gentleness that seemed almost incongruous in such a large man. "We've been looking forward to you coming, and that's the truth of it. Margaret's had your room ready this fortnight past."
Beside him stood Margaret Whitaker, a slight woman with kind gray eyes and flour still dusted on her apron from the morning's baking, who did not wait for introductions but simply took my hand in both of hers, warm and soft and sure.
"Oh, aren't you a dear little thing," she said, in a voice made for lullabies, crouching so her face was level with mine. "Come in out of the cold, love, there's a good fire going and I've a warm bun with your name on it, if you'd like one, and I dare say you must be fair worn out after such a long journey."
Behind them stood two more figures, a girl of perhaps ten or eleven with dark plaits and a wide, welcoming smile, and a boy a little older still, quiet and steady-eyed.
"I'm Emily," the girl said, stepping forward with the easy confidence of someone used to making new arrivals feel welcome. "And that's my brother Samuel. We've got a room all ready for you, and I picked the flowers on the windowsill myself, though Mother says I picked rather too many and there's scarcely room left for anything else on the sill."
Samuel said nothing at first but stepped forward without being asked and lifted my small suitcase, hefting it easily, and gave me a small nod that seemed to say, more clearly than words might have, you're safe here now. He was perhaps thirteen, tall for his age, with a seriousness about him that made him seem, to my four-year-old estimation, very grown-up indeed.
I looked from one face to the next; Arthur's weathered kindness, Margaret's warm and certain welcome, Emily's bright eagerness, Samuel's quiet steadiness; and felt, for the first time since the train had pulled away from the London platform, something loosen in my chest that had been drawn tight for days, a knot I had not even fully realized I was carrying until I felt it begin, ever so slightly, to ease.
"Thank you," I said softly, the same words I had given to Jack and Bill on the train, because I did not yet have other words for the particular gratitude of being welcomed by strangers who meant, immediately and entirely, to become something more.
The farmhouse kitchen was warm as a held hand, a great black range along one wall, its fire crackling steadily, copper pots hanging in gleaming rows above it, and the whole room filled with the smell of baking bread that made my stomach clench with a hunger I had not noticed until that moment, having eaten almost nothing since the sandwich Mother had packed the previous morning, now some twenty-four hours and a hundred and fifty miles behind me. Margaret settled me at the scrubbed wooden table and produced, as promised, a warm bun still steaming from the oven, split and buttered, and watched with evident satisfaction as I ate it in careful, methodical bites, trying very hard to remember my manners despite being nearly faint with hunger.
"There now," Margaret said, drawing up a chair beside me. "That's a bit better, I'll wager. Long journey, was it?"
I told her about the soldiers on the train, about the chocolate and the paper kangaroo, about how Bill had held a little girl's hair back when she was sick, and how Jack had taught me some words in proper Australian. Margaret listened with the particular attentiveness of an adult genuinely interested in a child's account of the world, rather than merely humoring it.
"One of them gave me his lucky badge," I said, and produced the small brass kangaroo from my pocket, holding it out for her inspection with evident pride.
She took it carefully, turning it in the firelight. "What a treasure," she said, handing it back with the same care she'd taken it. "You keep that safe now, love. Things given with kindness like that are worth holding onto, always."
Emily, who had been hovering near the doorway pretending not to listen while listening with her whole self, could contain her curiosity no longer and slid onto the bench beside me. "Would you like to see the lambs?" she asked. "We've three that are still small enough to bottle-feed, and Father says I may show you how, if you'd like, once you've finished your bun."
I looked to Margaret for permission, and she nodded, smiling. "Go on, then. Samuel will keep an eye on the both of you. Supper's not for another hour yet, and the fresh air will do you good after so long cooped up on that train."
That evening, once the lambs had been fed and admired; I named the smallest one, who had a black spot right over one eye, Winston on the spot, which Arthur declared an excellent choice given the circumstances of the times, and supper had been eaten around the crowded farmhouse table, a stew thick with vegetables from the garden and bread so fresh it was nearly too warm to butter properly, followed by a slice of apple tart Margaret had made specially, she confessed, in honor of my arrival, Margaret led me up a narrow staircase to a small room beneath the eaves, where a single bed had been made up with clean linen, and where, just as Emily had promised, a small jar of late-blooming wildflowers sat upon the windowsill, rather more of them than the sill could properly accommodate.
"This is yours now, for as long as you're with us," Margaret said, helping me into my nightgown and tucking me beneath a quilt that smelled faintly of lavender and woodsmoke, the same quilt, she mentioned, that had once covered Emily's own bed as a small child. "You'll find it strange for a night or two, I don't doubt, being somewhere so different from home. But you're safe here, love, and you're welcome, and in time I hope it'll feel like a bit of a home too, even while your real one is waiting for you."
I lay quiet beneath the quilt, Rosie tucked in the crook of one arm, the brass kangaroo held tight in my other hand.
"Will you write to my mummy?" I asked. "To tell her I arrived safely?"
"This very night," she promised, smoothing a strand of hair back from my forehead. "I'll tell her you ate a whole bun and a slice of tart besides and helped feed the lambs and named the smallest one Winston and were the bravest little girl in all of England on your very first day. Would that do?"
I nodded, my eyelids already growing heavy with the accumulated exhaustion of the longest days of my short life.
"Goodnight, sweetheart," Margaret whispered, blowing out the candle. "Sleep well, and welcome home, for however long you need it to be."
And for the first time since I had left the little house behind the crater in London, I slept straight through until morning without once waking to listen, out of old habit, for the sound of sirens that, in this new green country, would never come.
I woke that first proper morning to a sound I did not immediately recognize, a low, rhythmic clanking from somewhere below my window, mixed with the lowing of cattle and the distant bark of the collie, and lay for a moment in the unfamiliar bed trying to place myself, the low sloped ceiling and the small jar of wildflowers taking a long, confused moment to resolve into the memory of the previous evening. Downstairs I found Margaret already hours into her morning's work, the kitchen full of the warm, yeasty smell of the second day's bread, and Arthur already gone out to the fields.
"There's my early riser," Margaret said, though it was in fact well past seven, later than any hour the farm considered proper for rising. "Sleep well, did you?"
"Very well," I admitted, somewhat surprised by the admission myself, given how thoroughly I had expected to lie awake the whole night through, missing my mother.
The tour that followed took the better part of the morning, Margaret leading me through rooms that seemed, to a child raised in a modest London terrace, positively cavernous; the good front parlor, kept for Sundays and visitors; the long farmhouse kitchen that served as the true heart of the house; the dairy, cool and dim and smelling of milk; and finally the yard itself, where I met, in quick succession, more animals than I had encountered in the whole of my four years in London, the two great cart horses, Duke and Prince, placid and enormous; the pig, whom Arthur called, with a straight face that made me laugh despite myself, Lord Nelson; and the small flock of geese that patrolled the yard's edge with an air of self-importance that Margaret warned me, quite seriously, never to underestimate.
"Geese have got tempers on them like you wouldn't credit," she said, steering me carefully around the flock's edge. "Give them a wide berth till you know them better, and even then, mind your ankles." It was advice I would come, in time, to appreciate rather more than I did on that first morning, when the warning seemed more amusing than urgent.
Looking back now, across the whole long distance of years, I find it strange how quickly that first morning's strangeness began, even then, to soften into something else, not yet familiarity, not yet the deep-rooted belonging that would come later, but a kind of cautious welcome, a sense that whatever else the war had taken from me, it had also, in its own roundabout way, delivered me into the hands of people who meant to keep me safe and cared for, exactly as they had promised the billeting officer they would, and exactly as I would learn, across the five years that followed, they meant with their whole hearts.
I think, when I picture that first morning now, most often of the particular way the light fell across the yard as Margaret led me from the dairy to meet the geese, pale and gold and entirely unlike any light I had known in London, filtered through none of the smoke that hung perpetually over our own street, and I remember thinking, quite without the words to properly express it at four years old, that I had woken up inside a different sort of world altogether, one where the sky above me held nothing more dangerous than the occasional bad-tempered goose, and where a stranger's kitchen could smell, within a single day, as familiar and welcoming as if I had always belonged there.
I have often thought, since, about the particular courage it must have taken the Whitakers to open their home to an unknown child, sight unseen, with no more knowledge of me than a name on an official list and an address scrawled by some overworked billeting clerk. I did not think to wonder about it at four years old, being far too occupied with my own fear and my own homesickness to spare much thought for what the arrangement might have cost the family receiving me. But I have wondered, many times in the years since, whether Arthur and Margaret lay awake themselves the night before I arrived, uncertain what manner of frightened, grieving child their door was about to open to, and I have come to admire, more with each passing year of my own life, the particular generosity of people who make room in their homes and their hearts for a stranger's child simply because the times demand it of them, asking nothing in return but the child's eventual safety and, if fortune allows it, her love.