Five Children on the Western Front

by Kate Saunders

  ‘No,’ Edie said, ‘I don’t want to look – please let’s go home!’

  Jane gently put her hand on Edie’s arm. ‘It’s Cyril.’

  ‘You must look at him!’ The Psammead began to tremble in her arms.

  Edie had known in the pit of her stomach that it was Cyril. Feeling strangely breathless, as if the world had suddenly stopped, she went to the side of the bed to gaze at his still face.

  ‘It’s bad,’ Lilian whispered to Robert.

  The Psammead jumped out of Edie’s arms onto the bed and squatted on the pillow beside Cyril’s head. ‘Here I am.’

  Cyril’s eyes opened and his lips twitched into a smile. ‘Hello, old boy,’ he whispered. ‘I knew you’d come.’

  The nun carried on reading her book, noticing nothing.

  ‘We’re here too, Squirrel,’ Edie said. ‘Me and the Lamb, and Jane and Bobs and Lilian. Can you see us?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cyril said. ‘Good of you to visit.’

  The Lamb asked, ‘What happened?’

  ‘I caught the end of a shell,’ Cyril whispered. ‘It’s made a bit of a mess of me.’

  The nun shifted in her chair and turned a page.

  ‘I’m awfully glad you’re here. Can you stay with me?’

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ the Psammead said and gently stroked Cyril’s cheek with his paw. ‘I’ll never leave you now.’

  The Lamb and Edie caught each other’s faces, pale and dumb with dread.

  ‘Do they know at home how much I love them?’ Cyril asked.

  ‘Most certainly,’ the Psammead replied.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Cyril said. ‘To the next adventure.’

  His eyes closed. The deep silence in the room stretched on and on.

  The nun glanced up and shut her book. She felt for Cyril’s pulse, then made the sign of the cross over him and covered his head with the sheet.

  The Psammead’s eyes quivered on their stalks, and for the very first time in thousands of years, two large tears formed. For a moment his tears hung like diamonds in the air, and then dropped onto his furry stomach.

  ‘Oh!’ he let out a gasp of surprise. ‘So this is it – the tears the universe has been waiting for all these years—’

  There was a sizzling sound, a little like bacon frying in a hot pan. The Psammead let out a moan – and suddenly nothing was left of him except a heap of soft, golden sand that ran through Edie’s fingers when she tried to grab it.

  *

  They were back in the gravel pit at the White House, as if they’d never been away, staring at each other in breathless silence.

  And then they heard the creak-creak-creak of Mrs Trent’s bicycle in the lane.

  ENGLISH VISITORS ESCAPE ROCKSLIDE

  A party of sightseers narrowly escaped serious injury last week, when a pair of ancient desert rocks, known locally as ‘Osman’ and ‘Tulap’, suddenly collapsed. ‘There was a tremendous rumbling sound,’ Dr Banks, an archaeologist leading the tour, said, ‘and suddenly the two majestic pillars were reduced to rubble. The natives here are saying that the “lovers” are together at last.’

  The Cairo Courier, January 1919

  MARRIAGES

  On the 25th at St Mary’s Church, Bloomsbury, Miss Anthea Pemberton, daughter of Mr and Mrs Charles Pemberton, to Mr Ernest Haywood.

  The Times, January 1919

  EPILOGUE

  LONDON, 1930

  ‘BUT – WHY MUMMY?’ Polly asked again. ‘Why today? Why do I suddenly have to miss a whole day at the farm?’

  Anthea turned to look at her daughter. ‘Darling, I do wish you wouldn’t stop dead in the middle of the pavement every time you make one of your speeches. Can’t you walk and talk at the same time?’

  Polly started walking again. ‘This might be the only nice weather we have for ages.’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t be,’ Anthea said. ‘And you won’t notice one day out of two whole weeks.’

  ‘I will, actually – me and the Savages have been making plans for ages.’ The ‘Savages’ was Polly’s father’s nickname for her cousins, the four rowdy sons of Uncle Bobs and Aunt Lilian. They lived on a large chicken farm in Suffolk, where they ran wild from morning to night, and blind Uncle Bobs terrified the neighbours by driving their motor van across the fields. Visiting them was the biggest treat of the holidays, even nicer than going to the White House to visit Granny and Grandpa. It was very annoying that her mother had suddenly put the visit back another day, and dragged her across London to visit the wrinkled old professor, who never could remember how many years had passed, and often mixed her up with Auntie Edie.

  ‘He wouldn’t have telephoned if it wasn’t important,’ Anthea said. ‘He said he’d seen something.’

  In the olden days the Professor had lived in lodgings in Bloomsbury, but now he had a house in a posh Kensington square; before Polly was born, he’d written a book with Polly’s father about ancient history, which had been surprisingly successful. Polly’s father had spent his share of the money on their red-brick house beside Hampstead Heath. Polly’s best friend, Joanie, lived two doors down, in another red-brick house. Joanie’s mother, Mrs Arkwright, had once been Miss Mabel Harper; now she was interested in ‘modern’ education, and kept a small school where the children ran barefoot and made mud pies (Polly would have loved to go to this school, but her father said, ‘Over my dead body’).

  Ivy opened the door of the Professor’s house. Once upon a time she had been the maid at Old Nurse’s, but Old Nurse had died years ago and Ivy had moved to Kensington to live with the Professor as his housekeeper. ‘Miss Anthea, dear – bless you for coming so quickly!’

  Anthea kissed her. ‘How is he? Do you think he’s ill?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s ill, exactly – but something’s upset him.’ Ivy smiled at Polly. ‘He’ll be ever so glad to see you. How’s that bonny baby brother of yours?’

  ‘We decided to leave him at home,’ Anthea said, smiling. ‘He’s an absolute angel, but he’s always breaking things. Those little fat fingers of his get everywhere.’

  ‘He broke two pairs of Daddy’s specs in one week,’ Polly said.

  ‘Little love,’ Ivy said. ‘He looks just like your Uncle Hilary.’ She began to lead them along the hall and up the stairs. ‘The Professor’s waiting for you – I’ve never seen him so agitated.’ She knocked on a door and loudly said, ‘Mrs Haywood’s here, dear.’

  Polly didn’t come here often; the Professor’s study was rather grandly furnished, and so stuffed with books and crammed with ancient things that she felt she couldn’t breathe. She was always nervous about knocking something over, and the Professor’s immense age scared her a little; his wrinkled old body looked as though he was about to fall apart at the seams.

  Anthea kissed his fragile cheek. ‘Hello, Jimmy.’

  ‘My dear Anthea – and you’ve brought little Edie!’

  ‘No, darling, little Edie’s an old married lady these days – and the author of several rather florid romantic novels. This is my daughter, Polly.’

  ‘Oh – yes – the baby.’

  ‘I’m nine,’ Polly reminded him. ‘Nearly ten.’

  ‘Oh – yes—’

  Anthea pulled a chair up to the desk and sat down near him. ‘Now, what is all this?’

  The Professor gazed at her and seemed to wake up a little. ‘As I told you over the telephone, I saw you! You visited me from the year 1905. You and Robert and Jane – and Cyril—’ he pointed with a shaking hand at the rug in front of his desk. ‘Standing just there!’

  ‘1905?’ Anthea had turned pale. ‘Good gracious, I think I remember – the Psammead gave us one quick wish before tea, and here we were.’

  Polly was startled; why was her mother suddenly talking about her old stories?

  ‘I wasn’t prepared,’ the Professor said. ‘And it made me dreadfully sad to see you all, so young and fresh and full of hope! Cyril, with his life before him – and then his death – and all the sorrow cam
e back to me, as if it happened yesterday!’

  ‘I wish I’d seen him too,’ Anthea said.

  ‘He did die, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice had the sighing note people made when they talked about the Great War. ‘It’s awful that we go on getting older, and the dear old Squirrel never does. But he’s still with us in a way, when we’re all together. And he’s still such a part of all our fun – you mustn’t think his life was wasted. It was a lovely life, and I know he’d prefer to be remembered in a cheerful sort of way. He’s still our cheerer-upper, and he always will be.’

  Cyril was the uncle Polly had never known; half the girls at her school had a mantelpiece picture of a dead uncle in uniform. Her eyes strayed around the ranks of photographs that crowded every surface. Here were her mother and uncles and aunts as round-faced children. There were newer pictures of Anthea and Aunt Edie in their wedding dresses, one of Anthea’s paintings, Uncle Bobs and Aunt Lilian and their tribe of boys, Aunt Jane in a group of lady doctors, and Uncle Hilary (formerly the Lamb) in his white barrister’s wig. Aunt Jane was a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital on Gray’s Inn Road. She wasn’t married, and lived with her ginger cat, Tibbles, in a little top-floor flat with a gas ring on the landing, which Polly thought must be heavenly. Uncle Hilary wasn’t married either; he said he was still waiting for the girl who could best him in an argument.

  ‘Cyril made the Psammead weep, and through those tears the disgraced god was forgiven,’ the Professor said.

  ‘We were glad to know the old Squirrel wasn’t alone on his last journey,’ Anthea said softly.

  Polly was getting more and more bewildered by her mother’s behaviour. When she was little, she’d loved the stories about the Psammead, but there was something very odd about the way she was talking about him now. ‘That funny little creature – when I remember all the adventures, it’s a way of remembering Cyril, and keeping something of him alive.’ She caught her daughter’s eye. ‘Polly, go and ask Ivy to bring up some tea.’

  Afterwards, when they left the Professor’s house, Anthea was distracted and silent – but Polly had to ask the question that had been bubbling inside her.

  ‘Mummy,’ she said.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘You were talking about your stories.’

  ‘Stories?’

  ‘About the ancient sand fairy who lived in a tin bath.’ She was excited, and a little scared. ‘He was real, wasn’t he?’

  Anthea was startled for a moment – and then she smiled. ‘Of course he was real. I never said he was anything else.’

  Polly knew she was telling the truth, and her heart jumped with excitement. ‘Could you tell me the one about the wings?’

  ‘I thought you were too old and serious for stories about magic.’

  ‘And the one where you wished everybody could be amazingly beautiful.’ Polly sighed, dazzled by all the possibilities. ‘Oh, why can’t the magic come back?’

  ‘But it’s never been away,’ Anthea said. ‘Once it comes into a family, the magic stays forever.’

  ‘How does it stay? Where is it?’

  Anthea laughed. ‘In the stories, of course – and the special place they have in our hearts.’

  ‘Tell me the one about the Psammead in the pet shop.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  And they both ran across the road, to where the pavement was full of sunlight.

  AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR

  I FIRST MET THE PSAMMEAD in the late 1960s, when I was eight or nine, in my Puffin Classics edition of E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It. But the snooty sand fairy was already a lot older than that. He emerged from his gravel pit in 1902, when Five Children and It was first published. In 1904 he made a guest appearance in the sequel The Phoenix and the Carpet, and in 1906 the five children – Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane and the Lamb – met him one last time in The Story of the Amulet.

  In my story there is another child, Edie, born after the original adventures, and the original children are teenagers and young adults. I’ve taken all sorts of liberties, but did my best to honour the spirit of those three books and the brilliant woman who wrote them.

  Edith Nesbit (born in 1858) was the mother of all modern writers for children. She could do ‘realistic’ books, such as The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children. But it was her hilarious, imaginative, magical stories that have had the biggest influence on the writers who came afterwards – for instance, there would be no Narnia as we know it if C. S. Lewis hadn’t loved Nesbit’s books when he was a little boy.

  When I read about the five children when I was a child, I saw them as eternal children, frozen for all time in a golden Edwardian summer, like the figures painted on Keats’s Grecian urn – ‘Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave/ Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare.’ But what if they walked off the urn and grew up?

  The sixtieth anniversary of the First World War fell in 1974, when I was fourteen (this makes me feel as old as the Psammead), and you couldn’t turn on the television or open a newspaper without being bombarded with images of this terrible international tragedy. All old people remembered the First World War in those days, and they talked about it to their children and grandchildren because it was so important Never to Forget.

  My grandmother (born in 1897) told wonderful stories about being a teenager during the war – often funny, such as the one about Auntie Muriel being chased down the lane by a Zeppelin, but mostly very sad, about the boys she knew disappearing one by one. I remember going to see her while she was in a nursing home, and she was sharing a room with an ancient lady named Miss Ball. Granny told me that Miss Ball had been a nurse at Gallipoli, and that she still cried to remember the sick and wounded men she’d been forced to leave behind when they were evacuated. She wanted me to shake Miss Ball’s frail hand, so that I wouldn’t forget meeting her, and of course I never have – it was an honour.

  Bookish nerd that I was, it didn’t take me long to work out that two of E. Nesbit’s fictional boys were of exactly the right ages to end up being killed in the trenches – and it was like turning round a telescope to look through the other end. Nesbit was writing at the start of the twentieth century, and her vision of the distant future, as described in The Story of the Amulet, was a rather boring socialist utopia. But the chapter of The Amulet that most haunted me was the one I have adapted for the prologue of this book, in which the children visit the Professor in the near future – their own future. He knew and I knew, as Nesbit and her children could not, what that future might contain.

  When I was young, I saw the First World War from the point of view of the young people who did the fighting. Nowadays I’m old enough to see it through the eyes of the poor parents who lost their boys. In 2012, my darling son Felix died when he was just nineteen, and it’s the worst sorrow there is; I couldn’t help thinking of all the sad mothers and fathers when I wrote about Cyril, Robert, Harper, Muldoon and the others.

  Don’t let’s forget any of them.

  Kate Saunders

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  YOUNG CYRIL’S FAVOURITE BOOK, With Rod and Gun through Bechuanaland really existed, though I haven’t been able to find the author; my father’s best friend saw it on the shelf of his very posh mother-in-law and thought it was the funniest title he had ever seen. Thanks, Dad and Bob.

  Thanks to my Granny, Marjorie Saunders, who told me how her father used to hang up his long pants instead of a Christmas stocking.

  Thanks to Mr Chris Carter for ‘Windytops’, which was his teenage nickname for his half-timberish family home.

  Thanks to my dear friends Eleanor, Jenny and Francesca who let me write them into a novel about the First World War when we were at school; they are still my heroines.

  Thanks to Amanda Craig for persuading me to save a character’s life at a crucial stage.

  Thanks to Alice Swan, my brilliant editor.

  Thanks to my family, Bill, Louisa, Etta, Ewan, Ed, Char
lotte, Tom, George, Elsa, Claudia and Max.

  And thanks to all of you.

  About the Author

  Kate Saunders has written lots of books for adults and children. She lives in London.

  By the Same Author

  The Curse of the Chocolate Phoenix

  The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop

  Magicalamity

  The Belfry Witches

  The Belfry Witches Fly Again

  Cat and the Stinkwater War

  The Little Secret

  Copyright

  First published in 2014

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  All rights reserved

  © Kate Saunders, 2014

  Cover: Design by Faber. Illustration by Mick Wiggins

  The right of James Hamilton-Paterson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–31096–8