The first visit came in late October, some six weeks after my arrival at the farm, and I knew it was coming a full week in advance, because Margaret had told me so, and had marked the date on the kitchen calendar with a small red circle that I checked, without fail, every single morning, watching the days tick past toward it with an anticipation so fierce it was very nearly unbearable, counting down the remaining days aloud at breakfast each morning until Arthur declared, with mock exasperation, that he could set his own calendar by my announcements.
When the day itself finally came, I could not sit still through breakfast, could not concentrate on my morning chores, dropping two eggs in my distraction and earning a gentle scolding from Margaret that did nothing whatsoever to dampen my excitement, and by the time Arthur hitched the cart to fetch Mother from the station, I had positioned myself at the end of the farm lane a full hour before the cart was even due to return, standing on the low stone wall so that I might see it coming the very moment it appeared around the bend.
When the cart finally did appear, with Mother sitting beside Arthur on the bench seat, I did not wait for it to properly stop. I ran, arms pumping, coat flying open behind me, calling "Mummy! Mummy!" at the top of my small lungs, and she was down from the cart and running to meet me before Arthur had even brought the horse to a full halt.
We met in the middle of the lane and she swept me entirely off my feet, spinning me once in a great circle of pure joy, both of us laughing and crying in the same breath, the way people do when a feeling is too large to hold in only one shape.
"Let me look at you," she said, setting me down at last and holding me at arm's length, studying my face as though searching for evidence of every day we had spent apart. "You've grown, I do believe. And look at this color in your cheeks; the country air agrees with you tremendously."
"I feed the lambs," I announced, as though this explained the color in my cheeks entirely, "and I collect eggs, and Emily taught me where the blackberries grow, and Samuel taught me not to be afraid of Bess, and Miss Ashworth says I'm coming along very well with my letters, and there's a lamb called Winston who's got a black spot over his eye, and Old Boadicea pecked me twice this week but I got the better of her in the end, and…"
I had a whole autumn's worth of news to deliver, and delivered it in a great tumbling rush the entire walk back up the lane, Mother laughing and asking questions and drinking in every word as though each one were precious beyond measure, which, to a mother who had spent six weeks with an empty chair at her supper table, they very much were.
The visits that followed came every two or three months thereafter, whenever wartime train schedules and Mother's exhausting work rota allowed it, and each one followed a similar, treasured pattern.
One such visit, in the deep cold of my second winter at the farm, remained in my memory long afterward as different from all the rest. Mother arrived thinner than usual, her face drawn with an exhaustion she tried and largely failed to hide, having come straight from three consecutive nights of heavy raids near the docks with scarcely any sleep between them. Margaret, seeing this the moment Mother stepped down from the cart, said nothing about it in front of me, but quietly arranged for Arthur to take me out to see the new litter of barn kittens for the better part of the afternoon, so that Mother might rest properly by the kitchen fire without a small daughter's watchful eyes upon her.
"Your mother's had a hard few weeks of it," Margaret told me, when I asked why Mummy had gone so quiet and pale. "Sometimes even brave grown-ups need a bit of looking after, same as anyone. Best thing you can do for her is let her rest a while and give her all your love when she wakes."
I took this instruction with unusual seriousness, and when Mother woke from her nap that evening to find me curled quietly beside her on the settee rather than off playing, simply waiting, she wept, not from sorrow this time, but from the sheer overwhelming relief of being cared for, however small the gesture, after weeks spent doing nothing but caring for others. It was, she told Margaret privately before she left that Sunday, the first time in a month she had felt properly like a person again rather than merely a set of hands doing whatever the war demanded of them.
Together, on these visits, Mother and I walked through the village hand in hand, she greeting the Whitakers and the shopkeepers and Miss Ashworth with the warm, grateful courtesy of a woman deeply conscious of everything these strangers had done for her only child. We took afternoon tea in the farmhouse kitchen, Margaret always producing something special for the occasion, a proper sponge cake, perhaps, made with whatever precious sugar ration could be spared, or scones with the last of the summer's jam, served on the good China that came out, Emily once confided to me, only for visitors of particular importance.
We read Father's letters together, Mother's voice carrying his words in a way that made me feel, for the space of the reading at least, as though he sat right there in the room with us. We laughed together over small things; Bess's undignified enthusiasm for chasing rabbits she never caught, the particular indignation of the henhouse's most senior hen, a story Emily told about the vicar's cat getting stuck up the church steeple.
One December visit fell close enough to Christmas that Margaret insisted Mother stay an extra day, ration coupons or no ration coupons, and the whole household turned the occasion into a proper celebration, a small tree cut from the near thicket and decorated with paper chains Emily and I had spent a fortnight making, a goose Arthur had been fattening since autumn, and carols sung around the kitchen table late into the evening, Mother's voice blending with the Whitakers' as though she had always belonged among them. I fell asleep that night between Mother and Margaret both, quite unable to decide which side of the bed I preferred, and woke the next morning to find that someone; I never did discover who, though I had my suspicions about Samuel; had left a small, wrapped parcel at the foot of my bed containing a pair of hand-knitted mittens in my favorite shade of plum.
But it was the Sunday evenings I came, in time, to dread above all others, for every visit, however joyful, ended the same way: with the walk back down to the village station, and the wait upon the platform, and the whistle that announced the London train, and the terrible moment when Mother had to climb aboard and I had to watch her go.
"Don't cry, my darling," she would say each time, though her own eyes were rarely dry either, kneeling on the cold platform stones heedless of her good coat. "I'll write the moment I'm home, and I'll come again just as soon as I possibly can, and the time between now and then will pass more quickly than you think."
"It never does," I told her once, with the blunt honesty of a child too young yet to have learned the comfort of a polite lie. "It always feels like forever."
She had knelt down then on the platform, heedless of the crowd around us, and taken my face in both her hands. "I know it does. I feel it too, exactly the same way. But forever always ends, my love. That's the secret of it. However long it feels, it always, always ends, and we always find each other again at the finish of it."
The train's whistle sounded, and Mother rose, and boarded, and found her window, and I stood on the platform and waved until the train had rounded the bend and vanished entirely from sight, exactly as I had done on that very first terrible day at the London station, except that now, standing beside me on the platform, Margaret's hand rested warm and steady on my shoulder, and I understood, in the particular wisdom that grief and love together teach a child faster than any other lesson, that goodbye, however painful, was never truly the same as being alone.
There was one visit, in my third summer at the farm, that stood apart from all the others in my memory, for Mother brought unexpected news that changed, however briefly, the whole shape of our careful arrangement. Her factory had granted her a full week's leave, her first in over two years of continuous work, and she meant to spend every single day of it right there at the farm, if the Whitakers would have her.
"Have you? We'd be glad of nothing more," Margaret had declared, already bustling about to make up the good spare room properly, and the week that followed became, in my memory, something like a small preview of the reunited family life I so often imagined in my private thoughts.
Mother rose each morning alongside the rest of the household, insisting on helping with whatever chores needed doing despite Margaret's protests, and by the second day had been folded so thoroughly into the farm's rhythms that a passing neighbor, encountering her elbow-deep in the morning's egg-collecting, mistook her for a Whitaker cousin come to visit. She learned to milk a cow, badly at first and then with growing competence, much to Samuel's quiet amusement, and accompanied me on the walk to school two mornings running, meeting Miss Ashworth and Alice and hearing, firsthand rather than through the careful filter of a letter, the particular texture of my daily life.
It was on the third evening of that visit, walking together along the stream at the bottom of the near meadow while the light went long and gold across the water, that Mother said something I would remember for the whole rest of my life.
"I used to think," she said quietly, watching me skip a stone across the water with a skill I had clearly not possessed when I left London, "that sending you away was the hardest thing I would ever do, and in many ways it still is. But watching you here, seeing how well you've grown, how loved you are by this family; I find myself grateful in a way I did not expect to feel, alongside all the missing of you."
I had not fully understood, at seven years old, the complicated weight of what she was telling me. But I understood enough to take her hand and say, simply, "I love you the same amount, wherever I am," which made her laugh through sudden tears and pull me close for a long moment.
That week's leave ended, as all such visits eventually did, with the familiar walk to the station and the familiar parting on the platform, but I found, that particular time, that the goodbye carried less sting than usual, cushioned by the full week of ordinary togetherness that had preceded it.
Not every promised visit came to pass. The worst disappointment came in my fourth winter, when a telegram arrived instead of a mother, explaining in the clipped, economical language such messages required that a fresh wave of bombing had disrupted the rail lines out of London entirely, and that Mother's visit would need to be postponed indefinitely.
I took the news hard, retreating to my room and refusing, for the better part of an afternoon, to be coaxed down for supper, until it was Emily, rather than Margaret, who finally succeeded in drawing me out. "Best thing to do with a disappointment like this," she said, settling herself uninvited on the edge of my bed, "is to write her a proper long letter telling her how much you're missing her, and then come down and help me with the mending, because Mother's got a whole basket of socks waiting and I could use the company."
The visit, when it finally did take place some six weeks later than planned, felt all the sweeter for the long wait. "I'm sorry, my darling," Mother had said, holding me close on the platform, "sorrier than I know how to properly say. But I want you to know I thought of you every single day of that delay, and counted every hour until the lines were mended."
"I know," I had said, and found, saying it, that I truly did know, with the same unshaken certainty I had carried since that very first goodbye on the London platform, that my mother's love did not diminish for any distance or delay the war might place between us.
I have thought often, in the years since, about the particular arithmetic of those visits; how a handful of weekends spread across five years could possibly have sustained a bond as deep as the one my mother and I shared, when the Whitakers had me in their care for every single ordinary day in between. I do not think I fully understood it as a child, but I understand it now, having raised children of my own: that love is not measured only in hours accumulated, but in the quality of attention given within whatever hours are available. My mother gave me, in each of those brief visits, the whole of herself, undivided and entire, and I think that undivided attention, however infrequent, did more to hold our bond together than any greater quantity of more distracted time might have done. She never once, in all those visits, seemed to be thinking of anything but me, and a child knows the difference, I believe, between a parent's full presence and a parent's mere proximity, even if she cannot yet put the distinction into words.