With Laura Norton about to return to Emmerdale as Kerry Wyatt, her character has a lot of catching up to do.
Laura has been on maternity leave, so we last saw Kerry (apart from a brief glimpse on a video call) in October 2022. She left Emmerdale to go and work on a cruise ship after discovering her partner Al Chapman (Michael Wildman) – who she hoped to marry after proposing to him via the medium of rap – had been having a secret affair with Chas Dingle (Lucy Pargeter) and was planning a future with her.
When Kerry left the village there was a lot going on – particularly in the life of her daughter, Chloe Harris (Jessie Elland). Chloe was just coming to terms with Kerry’s bombshell that she was her real mother – meaning that Chloe and Amy (Natalie Ann Jamieson) were sisters.
But Chloe had also recently discovered she was expecting Mackenzie Boyd (Lawrence Robb)’s baby.
It seemed a strange thing for Kerry to desert Chloe at such a time to go half way around the world on a cruise ship, and fans have been wondering about it ever since.
While Chloe has been away, things have been eventful. Baby Reuben was born and was soon dealing with a life-threatening illness. Chloe, trying to make a life for herself with her baby and Mackenzie, found out that he was still in love with Charity Dingle (Emma Atkins).
Then, in a fateful car crash, Chloe was seriously injured and very nearly died. In the wake of this she realised that Mackenzie would always put Charity before her and decided to leave him and take Reuben.
Enlisting the help of her father, Damon ‘Harry’ Harris (Robert Beck) to keep Mackenzie away resulted in the gangster kidnapping Mack and keeping him tied up for days before a show-down with Charity Dingle ended up with Harry being shot and killed.
And has Chloe been able to rely on the support of her mum through any of this? Well… no.
Upon her return, Laura addressed this by saying she thought Kerry had kept in touch with Chloe while she was away.
‘She’s been in touch, there’s been FaceTime – she knows all about that,’ she said.
Laura thought that Kerry would put all of her maternal efforts into Amy now she was back in the village but Chloe was no longer around.
‘I think Kerry is fiercely protective of her children, even though she doesn’t quite step up to the mark of being a mum sometimes, from her perspective, when it counts,’ she suggested.
‘She’ll defend them to the bitter end. That’s usually when she ends up making worse decisions when she’s sticking up for her family and her kids. But she’ll just be desperate to have it out with them and to say her piece because she’s devastated.
‘Now that Chloe’s not here and everything that’s gone on, and she wasn’t there to sort of help at the time. I think this is probably her way of making up for that. So there’ll be some eruptions somewhere along the line.’
Amy is ‘wounded,’ Laura explained, by the fact that Kerry was absent through all the trauma that Chloe went through.
‘She feels like Kerry should have come back a lot sooner,’ she told us. ‘There’s been way too much going on for all of them, for Kerry to just have stayed on the ship. Trouble seems to follow Kerry around so I think she’s just cautious and wounded.’
