The train rattled northward through a countryside I had never seen before, fields and hedgerows unspooling past the window in long green ribbons, farmhouses appearing and vanishing with a suddenness that fascinated me even through my grief, and for a good while I simply pressed my forehead to the cool glass and let the tears come, quiet and steady, the way rain falls on a day that cannot decide whether to storm.
The carriage was full of children in just the state I was in; some crying openly, their sobs echoing oddly in the confined space of the compartment, some staring blankly at nothing with the particular stunned expression of those who have not yet fully absorbed what has happened to them, a few of the very smallest already asleep against the shoulders of strangers, worn past the point of fear. A harried young teacher moved up and down the aisle trying to soothe the loudest of the crying, offering a biscuit here, a kind word there, but there were simply too many children and not enough hands, and after a while the noise settled into a kind of steady, miserable hum, punctuated by hiccupping sobs and the occasional wail of a child who had only just realized, all over again, exactly what was happening.
I held Rosie tight and said nothing to anyone. I was four years old, and I understood, in the vague way very young children understand large things, that something enormous had happened to my life, though I could not have named it beyond the simple, aching fact that my mother was not there, and would not be there for a very long time. It was somewhere past the second hour that I discovered the handkerchief Mother had hidden in my case, unpacking my things out of nervous habit to check they had all survived the crush of the station. I wept anew at the small blue forget-me-not, understanding without being told that she had placed it there in secret, precisely so I would find it exactly when I needed it.
It was not long after that two soldiers came through the carriage, ducking their heads beneath the luggage racks, their uniforms marked with the badges of the Australian forces stationed in England before deployment to whatever theater of the war awaited them next. They were young men, tanned even in the gray English light, with the easy, loping walk of men used to wide-open country, and they moved down the swaying carriage the way older brothers might, checking on this child and that, offering a steadying hand here, a kind word there.
The taller of the two, with a wide easy grin and hair the color of wheat, crouched down beside my seat, resting one forearm on his knee in a posture of unhurried patience, as though he had nowhere else in the world he needed to be.
"Well now," he said, in an accent I had never heard the like of, rounding out the vowels in a way that struck me, even in my misery, as rather musical, "and who might you be, sitting here all on your lonesome, looking like the world's ended?"
I looked up at him with wet, wary eyes and said nothing.
"I'm Jack," he said, undeterred by my silence. "Private Jack Sullivan, at your service, formerly of Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, and presently of nowhere in particular, which is rather the trouble with soldiering, if you want my honest opinion on the matter. And this fine gentleman here is Corporal Bill Harris, though don't let the corporal bit fool you; he's soft as a lamb underneath all that stripe."
The second soldier, broader and quieter, with steady dark eyes and the sort of face that seemed built for patience, gave me a small nod, settling himself onto the arm of the seat across the aisle. "Evening, miss. That's a fine-looking doll you've got there. What's her name?"
"Rosie," I whispered, the first word I had spoken since the station, my voice small and cracked from crying.
"Rosie," Bill repeated, as though it was the most sensible name he'd ever heard. "Good name for a doll. My sister back home had a doll called Rosie too, though hers had lost an arm somewhere along the way and my mother was forever threatening to throw the poor thing out, and my sister was forever hiding her under the bed to save her."
"Do you live very far away?" I asked, curiosity beginning, despite everything, to get the better of my grief.
"About as far as you can get," Jack said, settling into the empty seat across the aisle without waiting to be invited, the way easy, friendly people do. "All the way on the other side of the world, in a place called Australia. Bet you've never heard of it."
"I have," I said, with the particular indignation of a four-year-old whose knowledge had been underestimated. "There's kangaroos there. And koalas. And it's very hot and there's a desert called the Outback."
Jack let out a delighted laugh, loud enough that several nearby children looked up from their own private miseries. "Too right there are! And too right about the desert too. You're a clever one, aren't you. Tell you what — I'll wager you've never seen a real kangaroo up close, though, not even in a picture book."
I shook my head, and Jack reached into his coat pocket and produced, with the flourish of a magician revealing a card trick, a small, folded square of newspaper, which he began, with surprising deftness for such large hands, to fold and crease and tuck, his tongue poking slightly from the corner of his mouth in concentration, until a rough but recognizable paper kangaroo sat balanced on his palm, ears pricked, tail curled just so.
"How did you do that?" I asked, my tears momentarily forgotten entirely.
"Trade secret," he said solemnly, presenting it to me with a small bow, as though bestowing a great treasure. "But I might teach you, if you ask nicely, seeing as you already know so much about my homeland."
For the first time since the station, I smiled, small and tentative, but real.
The hours that followed carried us through the long afternoon and into the dimming evening, and Jack and Bill made it their particular mission to see that I did not spend the whole journey in tears. Jack shared chocolate from some seemingly bottomless pocket and shared it not only with me but with the children nearest me, until a little cluster of us had gathered close, drawn by the chocolate and the stories in equal measure. He told us about the red dust of the outback, so fine it got into everything, your boots, your bedroll, your teeth, and how a man could go a week without seeing another living soul out there but for the sheep and the crows. He told us about a kookaburra's laugh, which he attempted to imitate with such enthusiasm that half the carriage dissolved into giggles despite themselves, the sound so strange and unlike anything an English bird might produce that several children demanded he do it again, and then again, until his voice grew hoarse with the effort of it. He told us about droving cattle across country so vast that it took three days to cross a single station, about a horse he'd once owned called Bluey who could open any gate latch ever invented, about his mother's kitchen back home with its wood stove and its smell of fresh bread.
Bill, meanwhile, moved quietly among the younger children, tucking a coat more snugly around one small shoulder, retrieving a dropped mitten from beneath a seat, murmuring reassurance to a boy of perhaps six who had begun, in the manner of small boys trying to be brave, to cry without wanting anyone to notice he was crying, pretending instead that something had simply gotten into his eye. When a very small girl near the front of the carriage grew sick from the swaying of the train, it was Bill who fetched water from the guard's van and held her hair back without a word of complaint, cleaning up after with the same brisk, unbothered efficiency and never once making her feel foolish for the trouble she'd caused.
By the time the light outside the windows had gone fully to dusk, purple shadows lengthening across the passing fields, something had shifted in the carriage. The crying had not stopped entirely; grief does not work so neatly, but it had softened, eased by chocolate and paper animals and the steady, unhurried kindness of two young men who had troubles enough of their own waiting for them at the end of their own journey, and who gave freely of their comfort anyway.
I had learned, by then, three words of what Jack called "proper Australian," had watched him fold four more newspaper animals, a wallaby and something he insisted was a wombat though it looked rather more like a lumpy hedgehog, and had fallen half-asleep against Bill's steady shoulder somewhere around the sixth hour, lulled by the rhythm of the train and the low murmur of the two of them singing, very softly, a song about a swagman and a billabong that I did not understand but found soothing all the same.
I did not hear it, half-asleep as I was, but Bill told me, years later, when I finally succeeded in tracing him through the Australian records office, that he had turned to Jack somewhere in that quiet stretch and remarked that his friend had a way with children. "My mum's got six of us," Jack had said with a shrug, glancing fondly at my sleeping face. "You learn a thing or two, being the eldest of that lot. Poor little mites. None of this is any of their doing, and here they are, torn away from everything they know same as us, only they're a good deal younger and haven't got a rifle to keep their hands busy." Bill said nothing to this, only nodded, and for a while the two of them sat in the particular companionable silence of soldiers who understood one another well enough not to need constant conversation.
It was full dark by the time the train began to slow toward the small country station where I was to disembark. The teacher moved down the aisle, calling names from her clipboard, and I, roused from my doze, gathered Rosie and my little collection of paper animals with sudden, sharp anxiety, my small hands trembling slightly as I tried to fit everything back into my case.
Jack helped me down from my seat, and Bill retrieved my suitcase from the rack overhead, checking with evident care that both brass clasps were properly fastened.
"This is your stop, is it?" Jack asked, glancing at the tag still pinned to my coat.
I nodded, suddenly unable to speak again, the fear of the unknown pressing down on my chest like a physical weight.
Jack crouched before me one last time, the easy grin gone soft now, replaced by something more careful, more serious than anything he'd shown me across the whole long journey. He reached into his breast pocket and drew out a small brass badge, shaped like a leaping kangaroo, worn smooth from long carrying, the metal warm from having sat close against his chest for who knew how many months.
"Now, this here," he said, pressing it into my palm and folding my fingers over it, "is a very important thing. It's my own lucky badge, the one my mum gave me before I shipped out. And I want you to have it now, because you're going to need the luck more than I will these next few months, going off to live with strangers in a strange country, and me, well, I've got old Bill here to watch my back, don't I."
"But it's yours," I whispered, staring down at the small brass shape in my palm.
"Was mine. Now it's yours. You keep it safe, little miss. It'll bring you luck until you see your mum again, and it will not be long now, you mark me, wars don't last forever, whatever they might feel like from the inside of one."
Bill knelt beside his friend and gave my shoulder a small, steady squeeze. "You'll be just fine. You've got more courage than you know, riding all this way on your own without so much as a proper cry until we came along. Your mum would be very proud, and whoever's taking you in tonight is a lucky family indeed."
I closed my fist tight around the little kangaroo, feeling its cool weight settle against my palm like a promise, and for a moment forgot to be afraid at all.
"Thank you," I said softly to both of them, and it seemed the largest and most important thing I had ever said.
The teacher called my name again, more urgently this time, and I allowed myself to be guided toward the carriage door, glancing back just once to see Jack and Bill standing together in the dim carriage light, both of them waving, both of them smiling in the particular way of grown men trying very hard not to let a child see how much a goodbye can cost, even a goodbye to a child they had known for scarcely half a day.
I stepped down onto that dark, unfamiliar platform, into air that smelled of woodsmoke and damp earth and something green and unfamiliar, entirely unlike the smoke and soot of London, clutching my suitcase in one hand and my brass kangaroo in the other, and did not cry, though I wanted to, because Jack had told me I had courage, and courage, I decided, standing there in the dark unfamiliar countryside with the train pulling slowly away behind me, was simply the thing you found inside yourself when there was nothing else left to hold onto.
I have carried that small brass kangaroo with me through the whole of my life since, through my own wedding day, tucked into the toe of my shoe for luck; through the births of my own children; through every house I have ever lived in. I never did find Bill Harris until I was well into my thirties, and by then he was an old man himself, farming somewhere outside Melbourne, and our correspondence, when it finally began, was necessarily brief and grew briefer still as the years wore on. But he told me, in that first letter, that he had thought of the little girl with the rag doll many times over the years, and had wondered, as I had wondered about him, whether the war had been kind to her in the end. I wrote back to tell him that it had, that the badge his friend had given me had done exactly the work Jack promised it would, carrying me safely all the way through to the other side of a war neither of us, on that dark platform, could have known the shape of.