The Present. Charlotte Phillips

      ‘No you’re not. I’ll bring it down. You can make the coffee.’

      In the kitchen, Lucy unpacked the box carefully. A collection of papers. Some old black-and-white photographs. She picked one up. How small it was. A young woman with her hair tied up in a scarf sitting on a fence, smiling and shielding her eyes against the sun.

      ‘Look,’ she said, moving close to Jack. She was suddenly aware of how tall he was as he leaned in to check the photo out. ‘That’s Gran, right?’

      ‘It’s definitely her,’ he agreed. ‘The exact same grin. Where is she, some kind of farm?’

      There were chickens pecking at the foot of the fence, tufts of grass.

      ‘I haven’t a clue.’

      She turned the photo over.

      ‘Cheshunt 1944,’ she read aloud.

      ‘Hertfordshire,’ Jack said. ‘She must have been living in Hertfordshire.’

      ‘She’s lived here in Canterbury for as long as I can remember. Her whole married life in this house. My mum was born in the living room, right through there.’ She nodded through the open kitchen door and down the hallway. ‘And I’m sure Gran grew up around here. She’s one of those people who’ve lived in the same area their whole life.’

      She could absolutely see the appeal of that.

      She flipped slowly through the papers in the box. Old letters, a few postcards. And then a folded piece of yellowing typewritten paper. She picked it out and unfolded it carefully, and in an instant she understood. The farm picture, Gran in overalls with her hair tied up, chickens all over the place. Women’s Land Army, it said at the top in capital letters. It was addressed to Olive Bratton, at an address in Canterbury that Lucy didn’t recognise, but which she supposed must have been Gran’s childhood home.

      ‘I have pleasure in enclosing your full Land Army uniform,’ she read aloud. ‘Then there’s a list of stuff … dungarees, breeches, gumboots.’ She stared down at it in amazement. ‘Jack, she was a Land Girl in the Second World War. How did I never know this?’