Five Children on the Western Front

by Kate Saunders

  ‘Crikey,’ the Lamb said, ‘he’s – singing!’

  They had never heard the Psammead singing before; his voice was sandy and musty and not tuneful, but the words were clear:

  ‘There’s a long, long trail a-winding

  Into the land of my dreams,

  Where the nightingales are singing

  And a white moon beams.’

  ‘I didn’t know he knew any songs – let alone a modern one,’ Edie said.

  The blazer twitched and moved. Edie gasped and made a dive for it – but not in time to stop the Psammead from suddenly scuttling away from them through the long dry grass.

  The Lamb and Edie watched, frozen with shock, as the small brown figure – looking very strange indeed – moved determinedly away from them towards the next group of people. The sand fairy didn’t move very often or very far, but he was now propelling his squat body with his long arms and legs like an enormous spider, and he could move surprisingly quickly.

  ‘Come on – before anyone sees him.’ The Lamb scrambled to his feet and dashed after him. Edie followed, so appalled by the sight of her beloved Psammead running away that she forgot to be careful about her new silk dress and accidentally put her foot through the hem.

  A few yards away a grandly dressed pair of ladies on folding picnic chairs were sipping tea. To the huge relief of Edie and the Lamb they didn’t move a hair when the Psammead ran over their feet.

  ‘They can’t see him,’ panted the Lamb.

  ‘He must be sleepwalking!’ Edie gasped. ‘He’s never done this before.’

  The Psammead was invisible but they were not. A couple of people looked cross as the two dishevelled children pelted across the meadow towards a small cluster of trees. Edie didn’t care; it turned her cold to think of the Psammead waking up without her and calling for her in vain.

  They chased him into the wood, and out again into a stubbly hayfield belonging to the farm next to the school. For a moment they thought they’d lost him, until the Lamb breathlessly pointed to a brown figure vanishing through a gap in the hedge and they dashed after him.

  There was another field on the other side of the hedge. The Psammead suddenly slowed down, and the Lamb and Edie were able to catch up with him.

  ‘I don’t believe it – he’s still asleep,’ the Lamb said. ‘He’s moving but his eyes are folded in and he’s snoring!’

  Their faces were scarlet and shiny with sweat. Edie looked at her hands; she’d fallen over a couple of times and her palms were dirty but perfectly dry – the sun had baked the mud to dust. As soon as she got her breath back, she bent down to pick up the Psammead.

  ‘What? Hmm?’ His telescope eyes drooped with sleep. ‘Where am I? Put me back in my sand!’

  ‘I’d love to, but your sand bath’s not here,’ the Lamb said. ‘You chose to make one of your surprise appearances at the sports-day picnic.’

  ‘Picnic?’

  ‘I can’t hear the band,’ Edie said suddenly. ‘And something’s different – I don’t think this is the same field we were in a minute ago.’

  They looked around; this was definitely a different field. A long, straight road ran beside the field, lined with tall trees. There was a tramp-tramp-tramp sound of dozens of pairs of boots coming along the road. Through a gap in the hedge they saw soldiers marching past with heavy packs on their backs.

  ‘My hat, he’s done it again!’ the Lamb said. ‘We’ve been snatched away right from under our own noses!’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Not in Kent, that’s for sure.’

  As if to underline this, a tremendous explosion nearly knocked them off their feet.

  ‘Stop squeezing me,’ the Psammead said. ‘I was having such an agreeable dream, until you two ruined it.’

  ‘We did not!’ The Lamb was indignant. ‘This is nothing to do with us – you just turned up in our basket!’

  ‘If I did, I suppose there must have been a reason,’ the Psammead said. ‘Perhaps you have been called as witnesses. All right, I’ll let you tag along, provided you keep quiet.’

  ‘I don’t think we have any choice,’ Edie said. ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘It’s obviously a bit of the Western Front. Put me down, please.’

  ‘You won’t leave without us, will you?’

  ‘Of course not – put me down!’

  Reluctantly, Edie placed the sand fairy on the ground. He immediately hurried away from them to join the column of marching soldiers on the road. The small, brown creature shuffled along calmly, dodging the heavy boots. The Lamb and Edie followed him, hemmed in by the hot, grimy, silent men. When they came to a crossroads the Psammead dropped out of the marching column, and the soldiers (who couldn’t see or hear them) tramped on towards the sound of gunfire.

  ‘There’s something I have to look at,’ the Psammead said. ‘Come along – I haven’t a clue where we’re going, but on this journey there’s only one possible way to go.’

  The two children gave each other helpless looks; this was the most unsettling place the Psammead had so far taken them, because it was the strangest – they were definitely here, but at one remove from reality, as if watching through glass.

  ‘I hope we get back to the picnic soon.’ Edie thought wistfully of the band, sunshine, music, cake.

  It was a very long journey; the Lamb said later that it seemed to last for days. They walked and walked without getting tired, as if moving weightlessly through a dream. And most of it was horrible beyond anything they could have imagined – but they watched it in the same distant way that they watched silent, black-and-white films at the cinema.

  They walked through landscapes that were nothing but vast oceans of black mud, where bombs sent up great fountains of earth. They walked past charred ruins and dead horses. Sometimes the sun shone, sometimes it rained, and the sky changed from blue to white to grey, always flashing and flickering with gunfire. They walked through wastelands of rusted barbed wire.

  And the strangest thing of all was that they kept coming across the same line of marching soldiers – sometimes just glimpsed from the end of a trench, sometimes right in the middle of them. And everywhere they went more and more soldiers came to join them, until the line stretched as far as the eye could see. The Psammead would walk with the soldiers for a while, and then hop away on a detour, only to rejoin them.

  They weren’t moving through real time or space; this was obvious when the Psammead suddenly turned a corner and they found themselves on a crowded London street. Before they had time to clear their heads he was walking away from them into a fashionable tea shop, where officers and ladies were eating cakes and sandwiches.

  ‘Cyril!’ Edie cried out. ‘But what’s he doing here? Why isn’t he at sports day?’

  At a small table in the quietest corner Cyril sat with a girl in a grey dress. They were holding hands.

  ‘Oh, lor,’ the Lamb groaned softly. ‘Isn’t this awful enough without another love scene?’

  Edie moved closer. The girl had a sweet, fair face, thick brown hair and pretty blue eyes. ‘This must be Mabel – oh, I do wish I could meet her properly! She looks just like Harper.’

  ‘I’ll wait outside, thanks.’ The Lamb turned round and tried to walk out of the tea shop, but it kept swinging him back to where he’d started.

  ‘It’s no use,’ Edie said. ‘It’s just like when we saw Anthea and Ernie. You might as well give in.’

  ‘But it’s so amazingly embarrassing—’

  ‘Shut up, I think it’s lovely.’

  ‘It’s always rotten to go back,’ Cyril was saying. ‘This time it’s going to be a hundred times worse because of meeting you. I’ve never really allowed myself to think about the future. There didn’t seem any point while the war’s on. Now I find that I want one – a future, that is.’

  ‘We have to hope for it,’ Mabel said. ‘There has to be something left to hope for. It really can’t last forever, and then everybody will have to th
ink of something else to do.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what I’ll do after the war. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a famous explorer and have a waterfall named after me.’ Cyril smiled and squeezed her hand. ‘But this war’s a much bigger adventure.’

  And then Edie and the Lamb were suddenly back on the busy street, following the Psammead through a crowd of well-dressed people – who gradually changed into the column of marching soldiers.

  ‘I’m glad that’s over,’ the Lamb said. ‘Let’s never tell Cyril we saw him being romantic – it’d make him sick as a cat.’

  ‘Oh, stop going on about it,’ Edie said. ‘You’ll fall in love yourself one day.’

  ‘I will not! And don’t you dare let Winterbum hear you saying stuff like that.’

  They were on a country road now. The Psammead moved away to a nearby hedge – and when they followed him through the hedge they were suddenly lashed with a wet, freezing gust of wind and found themselves bumping and sliding down the sides of a gigantic hole in an ocean of black mud. At the bottom of the hole, in two feet of brown water, a small group of soldiers huddled together while machine guns hammered and bombs screeched around them.

  ‘We’re in a shell hole – a huge one – and someone’s big guns are going like crazy – but none of it can hurt us,’ the Lamb said stoutly. ‘We mustn’t be scared.’

  ‘Aren’t you scared?’

  ‘No – yes—’

  ‘Where’s the Psammead?’

  It was hard to see anything clearly in the gloom of the muddy shell hole, until they heard a loud hissing noise above them, like a rocket on bonfire night, and for a few seconds the whole landscape was bathed in lurid, dazzling light, and Edie saw the Psammead squatting on the shoulder of one of the soldiers.

  ‘It’s Cyril – but we just left him in a tea shop!’ The Lamb had to shout above the noise. He and Edie clung to each other; they were both terrified to see him in the middle of such danger, with the shells crashing around them, sometimes so close that black soil rained down on their heads.

  ‘We’ll wait here till dark,’ Cyril told the other soldiers, ‘and try to make a dash for it when the barrage lets up – everyone all right?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the other men said.

  ‘Who’s here?’

  ‘Benson, Robbins, Fleetwood and the two Smiths, sir,’ one of the men said.

  ‘Good-oh,’ Cyril said. ‘Did anyone see what happened to the others?’

  They all shook their heads.

  ‘I’ve got a tin of toffees and it still seems quite dry. Let’s all have one now to keep us going,’ Cyril said.

  And then they were walking behind the Psammead again, along a narrow, leafy lane, and there was Cyril, without his helmet and raincoat, looking perfectly brisk and cheerful.

  ‘So what we saw just now must be something that happened in the past,’ Edie said. There was no gunfire now. They were in a very ordinary green field, and though they were surrounded by soldiers, none of them were carrying rifles; they seemed relaxed and unhurried, strolling in twos and threes. ‘Perhaps this is the end of the war.’

  ‘Keep up!’ the Psammead called over his shoulder. ‘I think we’re nearly there!’

  ‘Nearly where?’ the Lamb asked. ‘Isn’t it time to go home yet?’

  ‘Through the gate, that’s where everybody’s going.’

  Edie was about to say there was no gate, and nobody seemed to be going anywhere, when the Psammead scuttled through a tall wooden gate set in a thick hedge. The Lamb and Edie ran through it after him, and found themselves in a landscape of gentle green hills. Though the Psammead had said ‘everybody’ was going there, it was deserted.

  ‘At last!’ The Psammead let out a deep sigh and collapsed in a snoring heap on the grass.

  The two children stood staring down at him, wondering what they were meant to do next. Everything was very quiet, and looming in front of them was a grand stone arch with writing carved into it.

  The Lamb read the words out loud: ‘NOW HEAVEN IS BY THE YOUNG INVADED.’

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ Edie murmured. ‘It looks like the green meadow the Psammead’s always on about, but the white flowers aren’t white flowers at all, they’re crosses – thousands of white crosses.’

  Nineteen

  RAGTIME

  THE GROUND BENEATH THEIR feet was firm again, and they were back in the field next to the Lamb’s school. They could hear the brass band, blackbirds quarrelling in a nearby tree, and the summery sounds of sports day and the picnic.

  The Psammead was curled around one of Edie’s dusty feet. He sat up suddenly. ‘Ugh! What am I doing here?’

  And then he vanished.

  Pale and shaking, Edie and the Lamb let out long, long sighs of relief.

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ the Lamb said, ‘but I was never so glad to see the back of anyone in my entire life – remind me not to get caught up in one of his crackpot dreams again.’

  ‘It was just a dream, wasn’t it?’ Edie shook her head to clear away the fogginess.

  ‘Of course it was – or we wouldn’t have seen Squirrel, would we?’

  ‘Did we really? The pictures in my mind are turning sort of – misty.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  ‘I can’t quite remember – what did we see?’

  ‘I’m not sure, the pieces are breaking up.’

  ‘My dress!’ Edie’s head had cleared enough to see the great rip in her skirt; the white silk was grey with dust and there was a large hole in one of her stockings.

  ‘Oh, lor,’ the Lamb said, smiling grimly, ‘I’ve just noticed what we look like – we’re a couple of scarecrows!’

  His white shirt and trousers were grubby and grass-stained. Their hands and faces were covered with smears and smudges.

  ‘We can’t go back to the picnic like this!’ Edie moaned. ‘Mother will have fifty fits!’

  ‘Here,’ the Lamb said and fished his handkerchief out of his pocket. ‘It’s not clean, but it’s not as dirty as the rest of me.’

  They tried to wipe off the worst of the dirt, but one grubby handkerchief didn’t make much difference.

  ‘Nothing else for it,’ the Lamb said. ‘It looks like you and I are about to face some pretty stiff music – and it won’t be the Gondoliers.’

  *

  ‘We all did our best to stick up for you,’ Jane said later, when they were back at the house, and gathered in Anthea’s bedroom. ‘We guessed it was Psammead-related. Sorry you had to get into hot water.’

  The hot water was considerable. Mother was very cross, and very shocked that they’d managed to get so dirty in such a short time, and almost insisted on taking them home early. Luckily, Father thought it was funny and gave them his big handkerchief soaked with water to clean their faces properly.

  ‘Don’t worry about the dress, anyway,’ Anthea said. ‘I can easily repair it, and that white silk washes nicely.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ the Lamb said gloomily. ‘We’ve both been fined a month’s pocket money. It’s all right for Edie because she’s just had a birthday, but I’m penniless.’

  ‘I’ll make that up to you,’ Cyril said.

  ‘Good stuff!’ The Lamb’s mood immediately lifted and he took a bite from the slice of cake Jane had brought upstairs.

  ‘For the last time,’ the Psammead said, ‘I did NOT attend your picnic, nor did I hitch a ride in your basket.’ He was sitting on Anthea’s bed, radiating dignity. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I was simply having a beautiful dream.’

  ‘Beautiful?’ Edie cried. ‘Most of it was horrid!’

  ‘Which bits?’

  ‘I don’t know – the mud – the explosions—’

  ‘The entire thing was clearly some sort of shared hallucination,’ Robert said. ‘You can’t really have seen old Squirrel – back in the real world he was in the tea tent.’

  ‘Now heaven is by the young invaded,’ Cyril said quietly, repeating the words that t
he Lamb and Edie had read on the stone arch. ‘Well, that’s true enough. Old people don’t seem to be dying anymore – and young people don’t seem to be doing anything else.’

  They were all silent.

  ‘That was the rotten thing about today,’ Robert said, ‘finding out how many of the boys have gone west. And the masters too – Monsieur Durand bought it at Verdun. Remember how we used to rag him during French lessons?’

  ‘Lord, yes,’ Cyril said. ‘Poor old thing, he wasn’t such a bad oeuf.’

  ‘I took that writing on the arch as an awful warning,’ the Psammead sniffed. ‘I’m not sure I want to go to heaven if it’s been invaded by the young and it’s all bad manners and RAGTIME music.’

  This was so amazingly heartless that they all burst out laughing.

  ‘Good old Psammead!’ Cyril said.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Robert said, ‘let’s have some ragtime right now – the parents and servants are out, and if we bring the Psammead downstairs he can wind up the gramophone and change the records.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ the Psammead said. ‘I’ll perform that menial task just this once, to honour the fact that you’re all together again.’ He was trying to sound cross, but his furry lips twitched happily; the ancient sand fairy secretly loved working the gramophone, even if he didn’t approve of the music they played on it.

  Edie stopped worrying about her muddled memories of the dream journey; reality was a lot more fun. The six of them ran downstairs laughing and shoving; Cyril slid down the banisters, magnificent in his uniform. They all helped push back the furniture and roll up the rugs to clear the sitting-room floor for dancing. The Psammead took his place beside the shining wooden gramophone, and they laughed even harder at the scornful way he read out the names of the records.

  ‘“Shaking the Shimmy”, “K-K-K-Katy”, “Ragging the Baby to Sleep” – really, your music mystifies me! And as for the words – I just wish I could speak to my court poet, poor Mapeth.’

  ‘You wished,’ Edie said. ‘Does that mean we’re going to see Mapeth now?’

  ‘No,’ the Psammead snapped. ‘I don’t decide the wishes anymore.’