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