It was a really pleasant evening in the end, although I found myself looking rather too often at Trudi’s long sleeves, and doing my usual obsessive balance sheet game. For every Nazi bastard, every Suleiman, every fucking Nigel Forbes, I knew a Butt, a Woodruff, a swathe of Welsh coppers, and in the end, the Nazis and cousin fucking Suleiman were dead, and Forbes was banged away with other scum.

“Darling?”

“Sorry, love. Miles away. Just counting blessings. Gwen, what does your, um, Andy do?”

“Oh, he’s studying to be a Navy officer”

I had to laugh at that, for it was yet another coincidence.

“We have some very good friends, Gwen, and not laughing at you, but one of them, their boy, grown man now, he was certain that was his thing”

“He not follow through?”

I ignored the little snort from my wife and her naughty mind.

“No. That was when he was living in the UK, so it would have been the Brit navy. Got out here, realised the smaller scope, and by that time he was into electronics”

“That’s a big thing in the Navy, Andy says”

“Yup, and that was what Dal thought. Ended up staying at college, though. Teaches now”

LC piped up again.

“Dal climbs on rocks, but he’s not as good as Dad”

Winny perked up at that comment.

“We had a factory in the valley, making climbing equipment”

“I know. My walking axe is a Stubai”

Another snort from my wife, but this time she had a hand up.

“Are you going to tell them about crampons and grass, or shall I?”

It was, indeed, a good evening.

We had a superb time a couple of days later, where we taught LC to snorkel on the little ‘underwater trail’, and penguins were duly adored. Gwen and her family were frequent companions through the rest of our holiday, especially as we explored the beaches, and our final evening in Espy involved a joint family meal using the electric barbies by our pool. The Horvaths even saw us off at the airport, Gwen embarrassing the hell out of our boy in kissing his cheek as he was about to enter Security.

We never promised you that adulthood would be simple, son.

As usual, one of our friends was waiting at Perth airport, this time Chad, and of course Geeta had stocked our fridge with a quantity of essentials. Just as predictably, Ish was straight onto his laptop to send a few emails and, no doubt, arrange a Skype or whatever call with his lady love. I didn’t care; I had enough blackmail material in my camera to cover any eventuality or need.

I couldn’t help thinking of Trudi Horvath, though. So similar, in so many ways, to our girl, but at least LC’s new life had come with a language she could already speak. That simply reinforced my adoration of my wife, and there was a moment when some very, very old voices started to mutter. No matter how much she denied it, I had given up on her, I had stopped digging. If not for Enfys, Alys, Lexie…

“Darling?”

“Yes, love?”

“You look, I don’t know, lost?”

Blessings, Rhodes. Count them, and don’t piss on other people’s parades.

“Sorry, love. Just thinking about Trudi Horvath, you know…”

“I know, darling. All too well. When Carolyn asked about axes, I was ready to throw up. I… Ish, sweetheart? Are you okay?”

The boy was carrying his laptop, looking worried.

“It’s Clara, Mum. I told her about Gwen”

Oh shit, I thought, but he was still going.

“Her Oma, ey? I think that Nana Debbie knew her two doctors”

I couldn’t help my “Bloody hell!”, but he was smiling.

“Clara’s sent me some video links, old telly from England. I think Gwen’s family might want to see them”

“Ah. And you have…?”

He was blushing, yet again, the poor lad.

“Yeah, I have her addy. What it is… There’s a couple of links, and I think we should watch them first. And, well, Clara says we should speak to her Nana Debbie, so, well, she’s there now”

So much for our quiet evening in.

“Set it up, then, son”

We managed to squeeze four of us onto the settee by settling LC on her mother’s lap, and after a little bit of faffing around, we had a reasonably good picture of ‘Nana Debbie’, Clara and a couple of other girls. The older woman, as ever, was straight to the point.

“Clara says you’ve found a friend of my doctors, Mike. How?”

I waved at the boy.

“We were out at the coast on a holiday for Carolyn’s birthday. Met another family there, two kids, sort of reversed arrangement to ours, little boy and older girl”

The two extra girls exchanged rather knowing looks, so I shook my head. Girl’s due to get wed soon, but their holiday wasn’t for that but her Gran’s eightieth. Seems she was born in forty-one”

I turned to our lad.

“Ish, could you please grab some beers from the fridge? Bad taste in my mouth”

Debbie grunted.

“I think I can see where this is going, Mike”

“If that involves tattoos on arms, yeah”

Her mouth pursed, but all she had with her was tea.

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s a bit of a story. When… Transition, Mike. Lots of different aspects to it, but the one that everyone wants to know about is surgery. That was Mr Hemmings. His brother was Dr Hemmings”

“Ah; the old ‘Mister Surgeon’ thing?”

“Exactly. Dr Hemmings was one of my mental assessors. They… Mam and Dad, yes? Not my mother and father, but my parents as they always should have been. Mam had cancer”

One of the girls squeezed her shoulder, and she lifted the hand to kiss it before turning back to us.

“I was paying for my op, Mike, money left me by my father, oddly. Mam got… It was a brain tumour, so I said to Mr Hemmings that he could have the money, just cure her, I’d go without, and he just said, ‘No, on the house’, he’d do any actual surgery for the NHS. But… Too far gone, too deep”

She paused again, looking round the room.

“Neil is a diamond, Mike. Did he tell you about our little trip?”

“No, not yet”

“Well, Neil and I went to the temple, and we set his wife free, and remembered others we had lost, but Neil, bless his soul, brought friends, and they played for us. Chrissy Morgan, aye? And the Woodruffs, and their nephew Mark. But, well, there’s more”

She stared past us for a few seconds before she found more words.

“I know which camp that will have been, Mike, because Mam and Dad were posted near it—she was an Army nurse, he was a squaddy. I tried to work out why the Hemmings were being so kind, and Mam and Dad, they said it was atonement. That place hadn’t just happened, it had been done by people, and we were people, so we all had to atone. What happened to this grandmother?”

“Trudi? She says she was shipped back to Britain with other children, survivors. Then the government was eager to keep Australia white, so she was one of a load of orphans shipped out for adoption. She can’t really remember her parents, but she---”

I lifted a hand behind LC’s head and made pointing gestures.

“She has memories of the camp. Doesn’t like dogs.

“I like dogs, Dad”

“I know you do, love. Anyway, painful subject. Thes bits of telly?”

“Yes. You’ll know about Stewie’s lost friend, Melanie?”

Maz answered for both of us, with a sharp nod., and Debbie continued.

“It was a ‘coming up tonight’ type thing on the telly, Mike. Repeat of an old programme with some tweaks, in memory of a war hero who’d just died. I saw the trailer, and the Hemmings were at his funeral. When I watched it, there was a panel discussion, and one of Stewie’s old mates was on it. Small world stuff; our builder was another one of his old mates. There are other reasons we recorded the programme, and you’ll work those out when you see it. Here’s my take on this: please don’t out me to this Trudi, but feel free to say how generous he was, how both were., and if she wants, I will let you have their practice address. Now, Clara needs to study, and the two behind me are on laundry duty. I… I’m going to ride out to the wetlands and do some sitting and thinking. Thank you for this, Mike. Mixed memories, but still some good ones, more than enough to outweigh the bad”

She simply cut the link, and I guessed it was to avoid letting us see her in tears. I sat for a few seconds, stupidly wondering why the screen had frozen, until Ish started pressing keys.

“You all ready?”

Maz and I nodded together, and Ish sorted out the file, after setting up a Bluetooth speaker. The footage was a little grainy, the first and shortest part being a BBC News item about the funeral of the ‘war hero’ in question, with a full-on British Legion and actual serving military send off.

“Darling?”

“Yes?”

“That name is familiar. Gerald Barker”

“Same here, love. Hang on… Ish? Second bit?”

“Right… Okay. Running”

There was some waffle about repeating an old programme to mark Barker’s passing, but the original had been tweaked with the addition of later interviews and talking heads.

“I know that pub, love… Right!”

I reached out to pause the video, and found myself grinning at the family.

“Canning Vans canal boats, love! That’s the boat hire company I saw near Tring, and that is the yard that was next to our campsite when we stopped at York. Old Man Barker had gone, they said, and his daughter was running the place. Sally? Susie?”

I set the thing running again, and there was Old Man Barker and his daughter, Susie, and I immediately understood Debbie’s meaning. The later footage, with her husband, contrasted sharply with the original episodes, as the woman was clearly far more relaxed in her skin with the passing years. It was only by chance that I spotted where the thrust of the programme was taking us, pausing it again to settle a slightly bored little girl into her bed along with her bear.

Back on the settee, we worked through the rest of the recording, and it was awful. Not badly made or poorly researched, but brutal in its revelations. How the fuck did Stewie manage?

The third recording was almost as bad, for it was a VE Day special that had more interviews, once more with Barker and the two doctors, over footage of the liberation of that hellhole and more modern colour footage of its remains. Ish was wobbling partway through, but I asked him to stay with us.

“People try to claim that was all a lie, son. This… This keeps the memory alive. Might help stop a repeat”

Once we had finished, I drafted a covering note asking Gwen to run the videos past her parents before showing her grandmother. I wanted those memories kept alive, but understood there would always be people who neither wanted nor need them refreshing.

I just wish we’d known all of this before we had left York; an Old Man would have got some flowers.