Five Children on the Western Front

by Kate Saunders

  ‘You could put him in your basket if you take the things out,’ Ernie said.

  ‘Good idea.’ The Lamb grabbed Anthea’s basket and took out the Thermos flask, the lunch remains and the box of soap. ‘We can cover him with the napkin.’

  ‘How very undignified,’ the Psammead said. ‘It had better not be damp.’

  ‘Let me give you a hand, chum.’ Ernie bent down and picked up the Psammead as if he’d been doing it for years. ‘In you go.’

  The bell rang again. Ernie ran back to the bench to pick up his sketchbook and his magazine.

  ‘Look,’ the Lamb said. ‘You’re reading the New Citizen! I’m not bragging or anything, but our father’s the editor.’

  ‘Never!’ Ernie was impressed. ‘Your dad’s C. J. Pemberton? I’ve just been reading his leading article about the Defence of the Realm Act!’

  Anthea quickly checked the linen napkin for dampness. ‘This isn’t the usual sort of introduction, but these aren’t the usual circumstances – yes, we’re the Pemberton family. I’m Anthea and this is Jane, Hilary, Edith—’

  ‘But everyone calls me the Lamb,’ the Lamb put in.

  ‘How do you do,’ Ernie said. ‘No time for handshaking. I’ll see you out – let me carry him, Miss Pemberton.’ He took the napkin from Anthea and carefully draped it over the hump of Psammead in the basket.

  ‘He thinks Anthea is very pretty,’ they heard the Psammead announce.

  This time, both Ernie and Anthea turned bright red.

  ‘Do stop embarrassing us, at least for a few minutes,’ Anthea said, half laughing and half groaning (and secretly rather pleased, Edie thought). ‘For goodness sake, keep your mouth shut!’

  ‘Come on; I know a short cut,’ Ernie said. The gallery was a very long way from the main entrance, but he led them confidently through a door and down a long, dusty staircase that opened onto the darkening street.

  It was strange to be out in the busy world again. The street was filled with hurrying Christmas shoppers, horse-drawn cabs and sputtering motor cars, and a barrel organ was playing ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’.

  ‘Well,’ Ernie said.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Anthea said.

  They gazed at each other, until the Lamb said,

  ‘You’ve been a brick.’

  ‘Just a minute—’ Ernie gave the basket back to Anthea, and reached into his khaki tunic for his sketchbook. ‘Before you came in, I was making a drawing of one of those Akkadian stones – look at this!’ He held out the drawing, tilting it towards the nearest street light. ‘These are lines of slaves, and the scholars think they’re bowing to some sort of king or deity. Doesn’t he remind you of someone?’

  It was only a few pencil strokes but there was no mistaking the long limbs and squat body.

  ‘It’s just like him!’ Edie said. ‘Is that what you saw, Psammead – a picture of one of your family?’

  ‘He shouted out a word,’ the Lamb said. ‘En – what was it?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ the Psammead said sulkily. ‘If you don’t want me to talk, you shouldn’t ask me questions.’

  Ernie was excited. ‘Was it Enheduanna?’

  ‘It might have been. Don’t ask me. That dreadful woman said I had no heart!’ The napkin heaved above the agitated sand fairy. ‘Complete nonsense, when I have two of them!’

  ‘I just wish I could show him to the gentleman I’m visiting,’ Ernie said. ‘He’s a professor, a leading authority on the Akkadians – his name’s J. R. Knight, and I went to his lectures at the Stockwell Working Men’s Institute.’

  ‘Jimmy!’ Jane cried out. ‘That’s our Professor! We’re visiting him too!’

  Six

  A VERY OLD QUARREL

  AS SOON AS THEY REALISED they were all going to the same place, Ernie took the basket back from Anthea. ‘I’ll carry his nibs.’

  They all walked around the corner to Old Nurse’s house. On the way, the Lamb asked Ernie if he had seen any action, and was impressed that he’d been in the famous retreat from the Battle of Mons.

  ‘Our big brother Cyril’s a soldier,’ the Lamb said. ‘He joined the army because he wanted to go out to India – but then the war happened, and his regiment went to France instead.’

  ‘Oh, the front’s not so bad when they’re not blowing you up,’ Ernie said. ‘The only injury I’ve had so far was blistered feet from my boots sliding all over the French roads.’ He was more interested in talking about how he had become fascinated by ancient civilisations, and how the Professor had helped him.

  ‘I was born in the East End, where my dad was a docker – the dockers unload all the cargo from the big ships. I went to a council school where we didn’t learn much about any kind of history. When I was fourteen I got work in the docks, and then I joined the army as soon as I was old enough. But I went to every library I could get myself into, and I found the Prof’s book about the Sumerians. We started talking when I went to his lectures, and he got me a reader’s ticket for the library at the British Museum – that’s where I spend most of my leaves. He’ll be thrilled to meet your sand fairy.’

  ‘He has met the Psammead before,’ Jane said. ‘But he always thought he was dreaming.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m not dreaming now,’ Ernie said, reddening again as he glanced at Anthea. ‘I’d give a year’s pay to know what your furry pal’s doing on that carving.’

  ‘Slave!’ quavered the voice of the Psammead. ‘You are jolting my conveyance!’

  ‘Beg pardon,’ Ernie said.

  ‘Will you stop calling him a slave?’ The Lamb was getting seriously annoyed by the Psammead’s lack of respect for the King’s uniform. ‘Sorry, I don’t know why he’s in such a bate.’

  ‘He’s tired,’ Edie said, as usual flying to the creature’s defence. ‘This has been a very long day for him – he spends most of his time asleep.’

  On the doorstep of Old Nurse’s house they lifted the Psammead out of the basket, and Ernie buttoned him into the front of his khaki tunic to hide him; they all laughed softly at the sight of his cross little head sticking out of the collar.

  ‘2646388,’ the Psammead said, ‘this green stuff is very scratchy.’

  ‘You’re right there, chum,’ Ernie said, ‘but the army doesn’t give us nice silk vests.’

  Ernie rang the bell. Ivy the maid opened the door, then Old Nurse came hobbling up from the basement and there was a tumult of hugging and kissing. The Lamb and Edie were Old Nurse’s pets, and she hardly noticed Ernie, or the fact that they’d all arrived together.

  ‘Can this be my little Lamb? How you’ve grown – nearly as tall as me! And here’s my Edie, quite the young lady! Go on up, Mr Haywood.’

  Ernie took off his cap and held it over the Psammead. ‘Thanks, Mrs Taylor.’ He ran upstairs, past the dusty alcoves where the boys had pretended to be statues all those years ago.

  The house was no longer quiet. Old Nurse now let her rooms to medical students, and two rival gramophones were playing upstairs in a storm of thumps and shouts.

  ‘My last two students, Mr Carter and Mr Scott, went off to France with the Medical Corps,’ Old Nurse told them. ‘Those two young hooligans are Mr Holland and Mr Muldoon – and the idea of them ever being proper doctors makes my blood run cold.’

  ‘That’s what you always say, and they always seem to turn out all right,’ Ivy said.

  ‘Would you mind if we run up to see the Professor?’ Anthea asked quickly. ‘Just to say hello?’

  ‘Course not, dear – I’ve done a good meat tea, seeing you won’t get home till past supper time. I’ll ring the bell when it’s ready, just like I used to.’

  On the landing upstairs a lanky young man with red hair was dancing the two-step with a skeleton. Edie squeaked and grabbed Anthea’s arm.

  The young man bowed. ‘Allow me to introduce my bony friend, Maud.’

  ‘Muldoon, don’t be an ass,’ a voice said from an open doorway.

  ‘You mustn’t
mind dear old Maud.’ Mr Muldoon sat the skeleton on the windowsill and dropped a feathered hat on her bare white skull. ‘She’s had a drop too many.’

  The Lamb thought it would be terrific to own a genuine skeleton, but Edie hated its hollow eyes and long claws of hands, and Anthea had to drag her past it.

  ‘Honestly, it’s not a person. Think of it as a leftover, like hair clippings or toenails,’ Jane said, and would have liked to take a closer look. She often wished she was a boy, so that her parents would listen when she said she wanted to study medicine instead of just saying that women can’t be doctors.

  In the Professor’s large and heroically untidy room Ernie had already unveiled the Psammead. He sat sulkily in the middle of the desk, looking very strange among the heaps of papers and teetering piles of books.

  ‘Come in quickly and shut the door,’ he snapped. ‘I’m sick and tired of being hidden away.’

  ‘My dears – once again you’ve managed to turn my entire life’s work upside down!’ Jimmy gazed at the Psammead, his eyes wild with astonishment. ‘You sent me a postcard to say you were coming – but it hardly prepared me for this!’

  Anthea kissed his cheek and quickly brought him up to date. When the four Bigguns had stayed at Old Nurse’s back in 1905, the Professor had got mixed up with their Psammead adventures, but now he looked enchanted to find that his ‘dream’ had been only too real.

  ‘You’re not seeing things,’ Jane said. ‘He’s back, and he seems to be stuck here. We thought you might be able to help him.’

  ‘That would be an honour,’ Jimmy said. ‘Look at the carved perfection of his fur! His beautiful dignity! His timeless wisdom!’

  The Psammead looked a shade less sulky. ‘You strike me as a highly intelligent man. I now see why they brought me here.’

  ‘And you think he saw something in the Akkadian gallery?’

  ‘Definitely.’ Edie flopped into a soft chair, which felt delicious after a day of hefting a stout sand fairy around. ‘Whatever it was, it gave him such a shock that he broke his carrier.’

  ‘Look at this, sir.’ Ernie showed him his sketch. ‘You said nobody knew what this figure was – but couldn’t it be him? Or one of him?’

  ‘Great heavens!’ Jimmy rummaged in the heaps and drifts of paper that surrounded his desk and pulled out a folder of photographs – very dull photographs of old stones in the British Museum. ‘The likeness is incredible – well spotted, Haywood.’

  Ernie was very much at home in the Professor’s room. He hung up his cap, lit the gas ring under the kettle and spooned tea into the dented silver teapot. ‘Well?’ he asked the Psammead. ‘Did you spot one of your relations?’

  ‘No. My last relation was eaten by a Triceratops.’

  ‘So that’s you, is it?’

  ‘I suppose it might be.’ The Psammead now seemed very shifty indeed. ‘You can’t expect me to remember – it was two and a half thousand years BC.’

  Edie firmly turned the squat, furry body round to face her. ‘We’ve been really nice to you all day – but you’ve been horrid. We know you’re hiding something, so jolly well spill the beans.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ the Lamb said.

  ‘I don’t have any beans.’

  ‘Come off it! You know perfectly well what she meant.’

  ‘If you don’t tell us what you saw,’ Edie said, ‘I won’t come to see you after school.’ Her voice wobbled a little; she hated to think of staying away from the Psammead.

  But the blackmail worked; he huffed a couple of times and swelled out his body, and then he collapsed sulkily. ‘Oh, all right. It was the carved head of Enheduanna – a very good likeness, in a rough sort of way.’

  ‘What?’ Ernie gasped. ‘You – you knew her?’

  ‘We didn’t get on.’

  ‘Oh, how I envy you!’ Jimmy cried out, his eyes alight and his hair all over the place. ‘Of all the women in history, that’s the woman I wish I could marry!’ Seeing their startled faces the Professor blushed a little. ‘She was the daughter of the great King Sargon of Akkad, and a high priestess – which in that ancient civilisation was as important as being the Archbishop of Canterbury. And she was the world’s first known published poet!’

  ‘Oh, you mean those “Sumerian Temple Hymns” of hers,’ the Psammead said coldly. ‘They weren’t that good. My poems were far better, but they haven’t survived because one of my slaves dropped them in the sea.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘So you had slaves,’ the Lamb said. ‘You never mentioned that before. No wonder you’re so good at giving orders.’

  ‘I was a desert god and my slaves worshipped me. A few of them died in horrible circumstances, but life was more dangerous in those days.’ The Psammead shrugged crossly. ‘When that woman became high priestess she had the cheek to tell me I was being cruel to them, and she made a law to set them all free.’

  ‘That sounds nice of her,’ Jane said.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t – she didn’t even pay me for them! I must admit I was furious with her. I cast a spell on her brother and made him dismiss her from the temple.’

  ‘Good grief – she did lose her job as high priestess!’ Jimmy was thunderstruck. ‘That was during the reign of her brother, King Rimush – but there’s nothing in the records about a sand fairy.’

  ‘The spell wore off.’ The Psammead’s voice was small and tight and hard. ‘She got her job back and swore to banish me from the Empire. That stupid Empire has been DUST for thousands of years, but her CURSE lives on, so I’ve been in exile ever since.’

  ‘A curse! Are you saying Enheduanna was a sorceress?’

  ‘No, but she must have had some good connections. Anyway, I think you’ll all agree that I’ve been treated most unfairly.’

  ‘Hmm, I don’t know about that,’ the Lamb said. ‘By the sound of it you behaved like an absolute cad.’

  ‘My dear Lamb, everyone kills a few slaves!’

  ‘Oh, Psammead!’ Anthea shook her head. ‘How many did you kill?’

  ‘I don’t know. A few thousand. Numbers don’t matter.’

  ‘Of course they do! Every one of them was someone’s child,’ Anthea said.

  ‘But he’s sorry now,’ Edie said eagerly. ‘Aren’t you?’ She was very shocked that her beloved Psammead had killed so many people, but it had all happened in ancient history, and she was sure he’d changed.

  The Psammead shrugged again. ‘Sorry-ish, I suppose. If I had my time again I might give them more days off.’

  ‘You’re not sorry at all!’ This was so outrageous that the Lamb was half laughing. ‘We’ve spent the whole day lugging you about while you complain – and you’re the worst kind of bounder!’

  ‘There are certain things that gods do. If you must know, that carving of me in the museum was one of a series.’

  ‘I KNEW it!’ Jimmy leaped to his feet. ‘Those stones in Stuttgart and Berlin – if I could have just five minutes with Dr Kliebermann … his work at Berlin University. Oh, WHY must we be at war with Germany, of all places? I can’t get at him now until somebody wins. Never mind the tea, Haywood – this calls for something stronger.’

  Edie stroked the Psammead’s head; she would have loved to sweep him into her arms, but he was still a stiff little boulder of crossness. ‘What are you doing in the other carvings?’

  ‘Committing more murders,’ the Lamb suggested. ‘Like a furry Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘I am not a criminal!’

  There was a sharp rap on the door, as if someone had banged it with a stick, Edie thought.

  ‘Wait a minute – where can we hide him?’ Anthea looked around. It was all right for Jimmy to see the Psammead, but they couldn’t risk him being seen by strangers who might scream, or call the police. ‘I know, the waste-paper basket.’

  The door suddenly flew open on a great gust of cold wind. Anthea shrieked and threw her arms around Edie and the Lamb; Jane grabbed the Professor’s hand.

  In the door
way stood the skeleton, still wearing her lopsided hat; she raised her bony arm and pointed at the Psammead. The wind grew stronger and shadows began to gather and swirl around the skeleton until they took the faint form of an angry woman with long, streaming hair.

  Like a clap of thunder, a voice cried: ‘REPENT!’

  And then the wind died, the door closed, and the Psammead keeled over in a dead faint.

  Seven

  A BREAKTHROUGH

  JANE WAS THE FIRST TO RECOVER. She ran out to the landing and saw that the skeleton was still sitting where Mr Muldoon had left her.

  ‘Honestly, Edie, it’s just a normal skeleton now.’

  ‘The Psammead!’ sobbed Edie. ‘He’s dead!’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Jane gave his stomach a prod with her finger.

  ‘Ow!’ snapped the Psammead. ‘Leave me alone!’

  The Lamb was recovering from the cold terror he’d felt when the vision appeared. ‘Wait till Cyril and Bobs hear about this – won’t they be sick they missed it?’

  Ernie took a bottle of whisky from one of the drawers and poured shots for himself and Jimmy. ‘Crikey, let me know if you’re going to do that again.’

  ‘That repulsive vision was nothing to do with me,’ the Psammead said.

  ‘Rot,’ Jane said. ‘It was everything to do with you. Don’t you see what this means? It’s precisely the sign you’ve been waiting for.’

  The sand fairy did not look grateful. ‘What sign? She didn’t tell me anything useful about how to win my power back.’

  ‘Yes she did,’ the Lamb said. ‘Unless you don’t know the meaning of “repent”.’

  ‘It means being sorry,’ Edie put in helpfully.

  ‘I saw her – Enheduanna, the High Priestess!’ Jimmy whispered. ‘Just for a moment, in all her majestic beauty!’

  ‘You’ve got funny taste in girls,’ the Lamb said.

  Everyone except Edie and the Psammead laughed at this, snapping the tension in the atmosphere. Then the bell rang for tea and Anthea got out her handkerchief and began dabbing at Edie’s face, so Old Nurse wouldn’t notice she’d been crying.