The morning it happened began, in every visible respect, exactly like any other spring morning on the Whitaker farm. I woke to the usual crowing of the rooster, dressed in the gray early light, and made my way down to the kitchen expecting nothing more remarkable than porridge and the day's chores, my mind occupied with nothing weightier than whether Winston, now grown into a rather large and opinionated sheep, might finally consent to be sheared without his customary theatrical protest.
I had reached the bottom of the stairs before I registered that something was different. Margaret stood by the window with her hand pressed to her mouth, and Arthur was at the wireless in the corner, turning the dial with unusual urgency, static crackling and hissing before settling into the clear, measured tones of a news announcer, and there was a stillness in the kitchen that I had learned, over my years at the farm, to associate with news of great importance, whether good or terrible.
"What's happened?" I asked, suddenly afraid, the old fear rising instinctively in my chest the way it always did at unexpected silences.
It was Margaret who turned to me first, and I saw, with a confusion that quickly gave way to a wild, disbelieving hope, that her eyes were bright with tears that were not, this time, tears of grief.
"Germany's surrendered," she said, her voice trembling with an emotion too large to contain steadily. "The war in Europe is over, love. It's over."
For a moment I simply stood in the doorway, unable to fully comprehend the size of what I had just been told. The war had become the only backdrop my conscious memory had ever known, the great, looming, ever-present fact that had shaped every letter, every partial reunion, every prayer whispered beside my bed for the past five years; was, quite simply, finished. I thought, in that first stunned moment, of the crater behind the garden, of the station platform, of two Australian soldiers folding paper kangaroos on a rattling train, of five Christmases spent wondering whether the coming year might finally be the one that brought my family whole again and found I could not quite make my mind hold the whole enormous shape of what the announcement meant.
Then, from somewhere down in the village, faint at first and then swelling with unmistakable joy, came the sound of church bells ringing; not the single, mournful toll that called worshippers to Sunday service, but a great, riotous, tumbling peal of every bell the church possessed, rung by hands too excited to observe any particular rhythm, simply glorying in the noise itself.
"Come on, then," Arthur said, switching off the wireless and reaching for his coat with a haste I had never before seen in him. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I mean to see this for myself."
We walked the mile into the village together as a family for what felt, to me, like the thousandth time and yet entirely unlike any of the times before it. Flags had already begun appearing in windows along the lane, small paper Union Jacks, hastily produced from wherever families had kept them stored these five long years, waiting for exactly this morning. Neighbors stood in their gateways calling news to one another, laughing, some crying, a few already breaking into spontaneous, disorganized singing.
By the time we reached the village green, a proper crowd had gathered, growing by the minute as farm families streamed in from every surrounding lane, and the atmosphere had the giddy, disbelieving quality of a dream too good to be entirely trusted. Reverend Cole stood on the church steps, his sermon voice abandoned entirely in favor of simple, repeated exclamations of thanksgiving, his arms raised toward the sky. Someone had produced a fiddle from somewhere, and someone else a squeezebox, and within the hour what had begun as a gathering had become, unmistakably, a celebration.
I stood in the middle of it all, holding tight to Emily's hand on one side and Margaret's on the other, watching grown men I had known for years as steady, serious farmers dance with an abandon I had never witnessed in them before, watching Arthur laugh with his head thrown back at some joke of a neighbor's, watching Samuel, home safe and unharmed, having been spared the call-up by the war's ending before his own turn arrived, swing a delighted village girl in a circle in time to the fiddle's reel. Miss Ashworth had dismissed the school entirely for the day, declaring that no lesson she could possibly teach would rival what the day itself had to teach us, and had joined the celebration on the green with as much unguarded joy as any of her pupils.
And in the midst of all that joy, all that noise, all that long-deferred relief finally given voice, one single, quiet thought rose in my chest with a clarity that outshone every other feeling in the crowded green.
I'm going home.
I found a quiet moment, sometime in the middle of that long celebratory afternoon, to slip away from the noise of the green and walk alone to the small churchyard behind the chapel, where I sat for a while on the low stone wall beneath the ancient yew tree that Reverend Cole was fond of claiming predated the church itself. From there I could still hear the fiddle music and the laughter drifting across the intervening gardens, muffled now to a pleasant hum, and I found, in that brief solitude, room to feel the fullness of everything the day had brought without the crowd's boisterous joy pressing quite so insistently against my own more complicated feelings.
I thought of the five years that had passed since the crater first opened behind my London garden; years that had taken me from a frightened four-year-old clutching a rag doll to a confident nine-year-old who could feed lambs and read a field's crops and recite her catechism without a single stumble. I thought of Jack Sullivan's paper kangaroo, folded so carefully on a rattling train, and wondered whether he too, wherever he was, might be hearing bells ring out that same afternoon. I thought of my mother, somewhere in London at that very hour, and hoped with my whole heart that the same bells were ringing there too, that she was not, at this moment of the war's ending, standing alone.
Alice found me there some while later, having noticed my absence from the green, and settled onto the wall beside me without needing to ask what troubled me, understanding, in the particular way of a friend who had shared five years of the same uncertain waiting, exactly what large and complicated feelings a day like this one could stir.
"You'll be going home, then," Alice said, not quite a question.
"I think so. Soon, I expect."
"I shall miss you something terrible," she said, with the blunt honesty of a nine-year-old unwilling to dress up her feelings in anything softer than the plain truth. "You're my best friend, and there's no one else in the village half so good at inventing games during dinner hour."
"I shall miss you too," I said, and found, saying it aloud, that the missing had already begun, even before the actual leaving, a strange doubling of grief and joy I was beginning to understand, that day of all days, was simply what it felt like to have two homes worth loving equally.
It was some weeks later that I received a letter from Father with rather more detail than his wartime correspondence had ever previously allowed, describing his own experience of that same momentous day, and I would treasure the account for the whole rest of my life as a rare window into his private heart.
My darling Charlotte,
I must tell you how I heard the news myself, for I think you will like the telling of it. We had been given no particular warning that the announcement was imminent, and I was, at the moment word reached our unit, engaged in the entirely unglamorous business of cleaning my boots, which had suffered rather badly in recent rains. A runner came through the camp calling out that Germany had surrendered, and for a moment none of us quite believed him, so many false rumors having circulated in recent weeks that we had all grown rather weary of hoping.
But then the wireless was found and switched on, and the announcement confirmed in the Prime Minister's own voice, and I confess to you, my darling girl, that I sat down rather suddenly on an upturned crate and found I could not immediately trust my own legs to hold me. I thought, in that first moment, not of parades or celebrations, but simply and entirely of you and your mother, of the two of you waiting for me across whatever distance still separated us.
The men around me cheered and embraced one another, but I found myself, for a good quarter hour, simply sitting quietly with my own thoughts, turning over five years of memory, every letter, every photograph looked at by whatever light I could find. I do not think I have ever in my life felt anything quite like the particular fullness of that quiet quarter hour, my darling, and I wanted you to know of it, because I think you, of anyone, will understand exactly the shape of what I felt.
I shall see you very soon now, I am quite certain of it, and I find I can hardly credit that after five long years, the waiting is very nearly over.
With all my love, Daddy
I read this letter so many times in the weeks that followed that I came, in time, to know it entirely by heart, and would recite portions of it to myself on the train journey south some weeks later, drawing from my father's own account of that quiet quarter hour a strange and steadying comfort.
The thought did not arrive as sudden joy, not at first, but as something more complicated, a slow unfolding, layer by layer, of everything the war's end would actually mean. It meant no more sirens over London. It meant my father, wherever precisely in Europe the fighting had carried him, would soon be released from duty and could, at long last, come home. It meant, most immediately and most overwhelmingly of all, that I myself would soon be leaving the only home I properly remembered, to return to a city I recalled now only in fragments.
That evening, once the village celebrations had finally begun to wind down and we walked home together beneath a sky finally, blessedly, free of any fear of what might fill it after dark, I found myself walking a little apart from the others, deep in thought, and it was Margaret who noticed and fell into step beside me.
"You're quiet, love," she said. "Big day, isn't it. Big feelings to match."
"I am glad," I said carefully, working to find words large enough for what I felt. "I am so glad the war is over, and that Daddy can come home, and Mummy won't have to work such long, dangerous hours anymore. But..."
"But you'll be leaving us," Margaret finished gently, when my voice trailed off, unable to complete the thought myself.
I nodded, my eyes suddenly stinging.
Margaret stopped walking and knelt down in the lane, taking both my hands in hers, the same gesture she had used on that very first evening five years before, when I had arrived frightened and alone in a strange kitchen.
"Listen to me, love," she said. "You will always, always be welcome here, war or no war, for as long as any of us draw breath. This will always be a home to you, even after you've gone back to London to be with your own mother and father, where you belong. Do you understand me? Going home to them doesn't mean losing us. It only means you'll have two homes instead of one, and two families who love you instead of just the one you were born to."
"Two homes," I repeated softly.
"Two homes. And I'll tell you something else, since we're being honest tonight of all nights. Arthur and I love you every bit as much as if you'd been born to us. That won't change one bit for you going home. If anything, it only grows, the longer we've had the joy of you."
I threw my arms around her neck then, right there in the lane, beneath a sky finally free of bombers, and cried; not entirely from sadness, and not entirely from joy, but from the particular, complicated fullness of a heart that has grown, against all the terrible circumstances that first brought it there, to hold more love than it had ever imagined possible, and must now learn to carry all of it forward together.
The days that followed Victory Day settled, somewhat strangely, back into the ordinary rhythms of farm life, though nothing about them felt quite ordinary any longer. The lambs still wanted feeding and the eggs still wanted gathering, and Miss Ashworth reopened the school the following Monday as though nothing at all had happened, though she permitted, for that first week at least, rather more time than usual to be spent discussing what the peace might mean for each of us. Alice's brother, I remember, wrote home within the fortnight to say he expected to be discharged before the year was out, and the whole of Alice's family walked about the village for days afterward with the particular loose-limbed relief of people who had been braced for bad news for so long that good news left them almost unsteady on their feet.
I found myself, in those strange in-between weeks, watching the post van's arrival with an entirely new species of anticipation, no longer dreading a fortnight's silence, but waiting instead for the letter that would tell me precisely when and how I was to go home, a letter that seemed, the longer it delayed, to grow larger and more consequential with every passing day. Margaret, sensing my restlessness, kept me busier than ever with the ordinary work of the farm, observing once, with her particular dry kindness, that a girl with too much time to wait in generally found trouble to fill it with instead, and I suspect she was not entirely wrong, for I had begun, by the second week, to pester poor Arthur with questions about train schedules he had no more knowledge of than I did myself.