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My grandmother, known to us all as Mutti, caught one of the last trains out of Gotenhafen before the Russians came in 1945 She carried in tow, in order of age, some of my uncles and aunts: Jens, eight years old, clever and restless, though behind in school; Inga, a tough kid, it seemed, who didn’t need much worrying over; Suse, a baby girl, her darling and the comfort of her bed; and Andreas, who was still being potty-trained Inga is my mother The train was so full they had to be hoisted in through a window Mutti stood on her feet the whole 20-hour journey, her legs swelling under her like grilling sausages By the time the train reached Berlin, she couldn’t walk and had to be hauled from the station in a handcart My grandfather, Kaha, stayed behind to do his job: he was a naval engineer, working at the shipyard He guessed that bad times were coming and sent his family as far from the advancing front as he could It was not the last time his family would be separated, nor the last long journey they would make   Kaha died ten years ago, and Jens, a retired lawyer living in Rome, did the duty of the oldest child and sorted through the family papers, which he sent me They ‘should have been different,’ he told me last summer, unhappily but with a certain satisfaction He meant in part my grandfather’s expressions of love: they struck him as cold, perhaps, or self-centred And he may have traced to the paterfamilias some of the cracks that spread out and inwards in any large family over time – along geographical lines, as much any other He had settled in Rome, married to a French woman; my mother had ventured still further afield Her trips ‘home’ – to that trim post-war cottage built on a stretch of wooded shoreline running into Denmark, where our family eventually settled after Gotenhafen have always been fraught with the anxieties and pleasures of the prodigal returned ‘Homecoming’ is a word with a fracture written