The arrangements for my return to London took the better part of three weeks to settle; trains still ran on wartime schedules for some months yet, and priority was given first to returning soldiers, so that it was not until early June, with the hawthorn hedges along the farm lane in full white bloom, that the letter finally arrived confirming my passage south.
The final days at the farm passed, for me, in a strange suspended quality, half celebration and half farewell, each ordinary task taking on the weight of a "last time," the last time gathering eggs before breakfast, the last time walking to the village school, the last Sunday walk to church and the last Sunday ice cream, savored with a deliberate slowness that made Arthur laugh and remark that I'd make the poor cone melt entirely before I got round to eating it.
Emily cried more than anyone, in the unguarded, generous way of an older sister who had genuinely come to think of me as her own, and spent the final week compiling, with great care, a small book of pressed wildflowers from the fields I had come to know so well, labeling each one carefully in her neat hand, harebell, from the near meadow; gorse, from the hillside path; forget-me-not, from beside the stream, so that I might carry some piece of the countryside with me back to the city.
Samuel said little, as was his way, but on the last evening he presented me with a small carved wooden lamb, whittled, I would later learn from Margaret, over the course of many quiet evenings that spring, evidently begun the moment the war's end had made my departure a certainty rather than merely a hope.
"So, you don't forget the farm," he said simply, pressing it into my hands, and then, because even his steadiness had its limits on such an evening, added gruffly, "You're a good kid, Charlotte. You always were, from that very first day, sitting so brave and quiet in the cart, though I don't suppose you remember feeling brave about it at all."
Arthur, for his part, spent the final morning walking the boundaries of the farm with me one last time, the way he had on so many evenings across the past five years, though this time he spoke less of crops and seasons and more of the particular pride he had come to feel in watching a frightened evacuee become, under his roof, a genuinely capable and good-hearted young girl.
"You came to us a stranger's daughter," he said, as we stood at the edge of the north field where he had first taught me to read the different crops, the wheat now standing green and knee-high in the June sun, "and you're leaving us as good as our own. That's not nothing, that. That's the whole of it, really. I've watched a good many things grow on this land, Charlotte, but I don't know as I've ever been prouder of anything than I am of you."
Margaret's farewell, when it finally came at the station itself, was the hardest of all, a long, wordless embrace on the platform that said more than any of the careful speeches either of us might have prepared, until at last she pulled back, held my face in both her hands exactly as she had on that very first night five years before, and said simply, "Write to us. Often. And come back and visit, whenever you're able. This will always, always be waiting for you."
The train south carried me through countryside that seemed, in the early June sunshine, almost unbearably beautiful, the same green hills and hedgerows that had once seemed so foreign to a frightened four-year-old now familiar and beloved, sliding past the window in a blur of half-remembered comfort even as they carried me steadily away from everything I had come to know as home.
I thought, watching the fields slide by, of the very first journey I had made along this same line, five years old and terrified, comforted by two strangers in soldiers' uniforms who had asked nothing of me in return for their kindness. I wondered, as I had wondered many times over the years, what had become of Jack Sullivan and Bill Harris, whether they had survived whatever the war had asked of them afterward, and resolved, somewhere over the long slow miles of that journey, that I would try to write to them one day, care of the Australian army records office.
I sat this time not with strangers but with a young mother from a neighboring farm returning to visit family in the south, who chattered pleasantly enough about the changes the peace would bring, but I found myself, for much of the journey, simply watching the countryside pass and turning over, with the particular gravity children reserve for their largest thoughts, the strange, unsettled feeling of traveling toward a home I could barely remember, the vague and fragmented images of my earliest childhood struggling against the vivid, detailed memories of five whole years spent among green hills and stone cottages.
As the hours passed and the fields gradually gave way to the denser, grayer texture of approaching London, that unsettled feeling grew sharper. I remembered London, in truth, only in fragments by now; the crater behind the garden, blurred at its edges by five years of distance; my mother's face at the station, though whether I truly remembered it or had simply reconstructed it from the many times I'd studied the seaside photograph, I could no longer entirely say.
And now, looking out the window as the countryside finally gave way entirely to the outskirts of the city, I saw something new and unfamiliar layered atop those old fragments: the visible scars the war had left behind. Whole streets stood with gaps in their terraces where houses had simply vanished, replaced by rubble slowly being cleared, or by the raw, weed-choked emptiness of a bomb site left to nature's own patient reclamation, wildflowers already pushing up bravely through the broken brick and mortar. A church spire stood roofless against the afternoon sky, its windows empty of glass, and I found myself thinking, with a pang, of Reverend Cole's own church, whole and unbroken. An entire block near the rail yards had been reduced to little more than foundations, over which children; ordinary children, playing ordinary games, entirely undisturbed by the destruction around them — chased a ball between the ruins as though it were the most natural playground in the world.
I pressed my face to the glass, taking it all in with a solemnity beyond my years, and felt the unsettled feeling in my chest sharpen into something closer to fear.
Will it still feel like home? I wondered, watching a bombed-out chapel slide past the window, its stone walls standing but its roof entirely gone, open now to the sky in a way that seemed, somehow, unbearably sad. Will London even remember me, after everything that's happened to it? Will I even remember how to be a London girl again, after five years of being a farm girl instead?
I thought of the farm I had left only that morning, the lambs, the eggs, the Sunday ice creams, Margaret's warm kitchen, Emily's easy laughter, Samuel's steady presence, and felt, for one disloyal, guilty moment, the powerful urge to ask the guard to simply turn the train around, to carry me back north to the only home whose every corner I could still perfectly picture in my mind's eye.
But then, beneath that fear, a steadier thought rose to meet it, my mother's voice, remembered faintly but truly, from a hundred letters read and reread across five long years: wherever you are, my darling, you will always be exactly where your father and I can find you.
I had believed that promise as a frightened four-year-old on a departing train, and I found, turning it over now as the London skyline finally came properly into view, that I believed it still. Whatever London had become in the war's long years, whatever scars it wore now on its bombed and battered streets, my mother would be waiting somewhere within it, exactly as she had promised, and that certainty, more than any particular memory of the crater or the garden or the little house I could barely picture anymore, was the truest thing I carried with me as the train began, at last, to slow toward the station.
In those final minutes I found myself taking a small mental inventory of everything I had become across the five years since I had last traveled this line in the opposite direction. That frightened four-year-old had known nothing of lambing season, or of reading a field's crops, or of the particular satisfaction of a basket filled with gleaned grain. She had certainly known nothing of the particular ache of loving two families at once, of carrying two homes inside a single heart without either one crowding out the other. I wondered whether my parents would recognize the whole of who I had become, or only the small remaining shape of the daughter they remembered.
The young mother beside me, noticing my thoughtful silence as the train's whistle sounded its approach to the station, patted my knee kindly. "Nervous, are you, love? It's a big thing, coming home after so long away."
"A little," I admitted. "But mostly I think I'm glad. I've missed them dreadfully, even though I've been happy too. Is that a strange thing to feel, both at once?"
"Not strange at all," she said, with the easy wisdom of someone who had clearly weathered partings and reunions of her own across the war's long years. "I'd say it's rather the most honest thing a person can feel, coming home from somewhere they've also come to love. Means you've been fortunate twice over, doesn't it, rather than unfortunate at all."
I considered this as the train began its final, shuddering approach to the platform, steam hissing white against the June sky, and found that I agreed entirely, the woman's words settling something in my chest that had been unsettled the whole length of the journey.
I thought, in those very last minutes, of the morning I had packed my case for this final journey, a task that had proven, in its own quiet way, every bit as complicated as the packing of my very first case five years before, though for entirely different reasons. Where that first packing had been a matter of a mother choosing, with careful love, what small comforts might see a frightened child through an unknown journey, this final packing had been a matter of my own choosing, nine years old now and entirely capable of my own decisions, weighing what pieces of my five northern years I could not bear to leave behind.
I had packed Rosie, of course, though the doll had grown so worn and threadbare over the years that Margaret had more than once offered, gently, to help mend her, an offer I had always declined, preferring the doll's battered, well-loved state to any tidier repair. I had packed the family photograph, its corners now permanently soft from years of handling. I had packed Emily's book of pressed flowers, finished only the week before and still faintly fragrant of the meadow it had been gathered from, and Samuel's carved wooden lamb, wrapped carefully in one of my old stockings to protect it from the journey's jostling. I had packed, too, a small collection of items I had not thought to bring on that first journey north but had accumulated across the years since — a smooth stone from the stream at the bottom of the near meadow, worn perfectly flat by years of water; a single dried harebell, pressed between the pages of my storybook; a small scrap of paper on which Miss Ashworth had written, in her own careful hand, a final assessment of my five years of schooling, praising my diligence and my kindness in equal measure, a document I treasured rather more than its modest appearance might have suggested.
The case, when I had finally closed it, weighed considerably more than it had on that first journey, and I had remarked on this to Margaret, who had smiled and observed that this seemed only right, given how much more I myself now carried within me than the frightened four-year-old who had first arrived with so very little. "A person collects things as they grow," Margaret had said, helping me fasten the case's two brass clasps, the same clasps that had once secured a mother's careful packing on a September morning five years gone. "Some of it fits in a suitcase, and some of it doesn't fit anywhere at all except inside your own heart, and that's the heaviest luggage of all, though it never once weighs you down the way the case does."
I thought of this now, watching the London platform slide into view beyond the train's window, and found that Margaret's words held truer than ever in this final moment of arrival; that whatever the small brown case presently held, the greater portion of what I carried home with me that June afternoon could not be weighed or measured or fastened with brass clasps at all, but lived instead in the very shape of who I had become across five years of love freely given by strangers who had, in the end, proven to be strangers no longer.
I remember, too, a small conversation I had with the young mother beside me somewhere in those final miles, in which she asked, with evident curiosity, what I thought I should miss most about the countryside once I had settled properly back into London life. I considered the question with the same careful seriousness I had once given to the matter of buses and bomb craters, and answered, after a long pause, that I thought I should miss the quiet most of all, not the absence of noise, exactly, for a farm is rarely silent, but the particular quality of a world in which the sky held nothing to fear. She nodded at this, slowly, and said she thought a great many children of my generation might say something rather similar, if anyone thought to ask them, and I remember feeling, at her words, a small and unexpected kinship with all the other evacuated children scattered across trains just like this one that same June afternoon, each of us carrying our own small version of the very same complicated homecoming.