Many years later, in a house not far from the very street where the crater had once opened behind my childhood garden, I sat by a window in the soft gold light of a late afternoon and opened, with the careful, practiced reverence of long habit, a small wooden keepsake box that has traveled with me through every home I have ever lived in since.
Inside lay the small collected evidence of a childhood shaped, and in the end blessed, by a war I was too young to properly understand even as it changed the whole course of my life: the evacuation tag, its ink long faded but my name still faintly legible; the small brass kangaroo, its edges worn smoother still by decades of my own handling; dozens of letters tied in careful bundles with faded ribbon, my mother's rounded hand and my father's careful, sparing script; the family photograph from the seaside, its corners softened almost to velvet now; Emily's small book of pressed wildflowers; Samuel's small carved lamb, its wood darkened now with age; and, folded at the very bottom, the embroidered handkerchief my mother tucked secretly into my suitcase all those years before.
I wrote, in later years, to try to trace Jack Sullivan, but the records of wartime postings were imperfect things, and I never learned whether he made it safely home to his mother's farm outside Wagga Wagga. I think of him still, some years, and hope that wherever he ended up, some measure of the luck he gave away that day found its own way back to him.
I hold the little kangaroo in my weathered palm now, and let my mind travel back across the whole long arc of the life that badge has witnessed; the crater behind the garden that first frightened my mother into action; the goodbye on a London platform; the kindness of two Australian strangers who made an unbearable journey bearable; the Whitaker family, who opened both their home and their hearts to a frightened evacuee and made me, in every way that truly mattered, one of their own; the long, unbearable wait for a war to end; and finally, unbelievably, the platform reunion that gave me back both the parents I had never stopped loving and the certainty that love, properly tended even across the greatest distances, does not diminish but only grows.
I think of the years that followed; of growing up in a rebuilding London, of the letters I continued exchanging with the Whitakers for the whole of my life, of the treasured visits I made back to the farm across the decades, watching Emily marry and raise children of her own, watching Samuel take over the farm from an aging Arthur, watching Margaret grow old and gray and no less warmly welcoming on each visit than she was on that very first night. I think of my own wedding day, and how I insisted Margaret be seated in the front pew alongside my mother, for I could not imagine the day complete without both women who had mothered me through the years the war had stolen.
I think, too, of my granddaughter, who asked me once whether I had been frightened, leaving my mother behind at four years old. "Yes," I told her honestly. "But being frightened and being brave were never really opposites, I came to learn. Being brave simply meant being frightened, and going on regardless, because the people who loved me needed me to, and because I came, in time, to trust that love would always find its way through, however far apart it was stretched."
I have come to understand, across the long span of my life, that the war took a great deal from a great many people; took entire years of childhood innocence from a whole generation of small, evacuated children. And yet I have come to understand, too, something that feels, on the good days, almost like grace: that the very same war which tore me from one home revealed to me a second one I would never otherwise have known and showed me that love multiplies the more it is given away.
Outside my window, the light is fading toward evening, and somewhere down the street I can hear children's laughter drifting up from a garden, ordinary children, playing ordinary games, in a London long since healed over its wartime scars.
I close my hand around the small brass kangaroo one final time and smile the particular smile of someone who has lived a long, full life and found it, on the whole, very good indeed.
"Home isn't simply the place where you're born," I say softly to no one in particular. "It's every place where love welcomes you, hope sustains you, and kindness helps you find your way back."
THE END