FIVE CHILDREN ON THE WESTERN FRONT by Kate Saunders, reviewed by Pauline Francis

I know that Kate Saunders is a huge fan of E. Nesbit’s classic Five Children and It so – in addition to the fact that her novel won the 2014 Costa prize and has been short-listed for this year’s Guardian Fiction Prize – I wanted to see how she would weave these two books together, especially since I didn’t enjoy the original.

The Prologue begins in1905, when the Psammead (an ancient sand fairy) takes Cyril, Robert, Anthea and Jane twenty five years into the future (1930) to meet their old friend, the Professor. It’s only when they’ve left that Anthea wishes that she’d looked at his photographs more clearly. She remarks: “I didn’t see any grown-up men who looked a bit like you boys – I wonder why not.”

She doesn’t know that the Professor is crying after they’ve left – and so am I!

This story is wonderfully done. The Psammead re-appears just as the First World War is breaking out. By this time, Edith, aged nine, has been born and she is our link to the original story.  

“Everything interesting happened before I was born,” Edith sighs when she sees the Psammead for the first time. She’d heard the wonderful stories of magic and flying adventures from her older siblings. And what about this marvellous sentence? Edith again: she could almost smell the wave of magic that had suddenly swept into her life and the bigguns almost forgot they were grown up.

How the reader wishes those children hadn’t had to grow up. The tone of the novel slowly darkens as Cyril is sent to France, thinking that the war will soon be over; followed the next year by Bobs and then Anthea as a nurse at the front. The war goes on and on, as does the Psammead’s stay with the family.

The tour de force of this novel is the back-story that is given to the creature – “I’m a senior sand-fairy, not an animal!” he protests. A complicated and humorous investigation by the children in the British Library reveals that this grumpy sand fairy was once a desert god who had killed thousands of people. He snaps, ‘I don’t know how many of them died. Numbers aren’t important.’ Who will forget the vision of the skeleton, pointing with its bony arm at the Psammead, crying, “REPENT.”

This is a marvellous device, weaving the Psammead’s predicament with the terrible war, which comes to the reader through letters, home leave and occasional flying visits, with the Psammead, to the Western Front. Before the poignant ending, Cyril asks the sand-fairy, ‘Since when have you cared about dying?’

In this brilliant anti-war novel, there is no attempt to imitate E. Nesbit – just pages full of humour and pathos, peopled by characters who are individuals that we care about, and whom we desperately hope will survive the war.

It is the Psammead in the end who sums up war. “Wars never change. It’s basically two sides trying to kill each other.”

The Epilogue, set in 1930, in which we meet Anthea’s daughter, assures us that “once magic is with us, it never disappears.”

Do I need to tell you that I’m now reading Five Children and It?

Pauline Francis www.pf@paulinefrancis.co.uk

                                    

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Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders reviewed by Julia Jones

“ 'We wish we could go to the future,' Cyril said, 'But somewhere quite near, please.' ” At the beginning of Kate Saunders's heart-wrenching final adventure of Edith Nesbit's Psammead, the four older children – Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane – are still living innocently in 1905. The Psammead is the ancient sand-fairy who has been granting them wishes, with varying degrees of success, since they first dug him up in the classic story Five Children and It (1902). Nesbit's children encountered him again in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and once more in The Story of the Amulet (1906). The Amulet is a time travel story and includes scenes set in a benign Utopian future which reflects the author's own Fabian aspirations. The real future for those young Edwardians would be cruelly different. In the prologue to Saunders's Five Children on the Western Front the Psammead sends the children forward from 1905 to 1930 to visit their friend, the professor. While they are there Anthea looks at some photographs – but what they show is not the same as the photographs they glimpsed during The Story of the Amulet. “ 'I saw a couple of pictures of ladies who looked a bit like Mother and might have been me or Jane but I didn't see any grown up men who looked a bit like you boys. I wonder why not.'

Far away in 1930 in his empty room, the old professor was crying."

And so was I! The current spate of World War 1 remembrances is hard on the emotions and one or twice I've been ashamed to find myself suffering something close to compassion fatigue. I approached Five Children on the Western Front with slight trepidation – was it just going to be a clever idea brought out at an opportune moment? I read it in the happiest of circumstances (lazing in the sunshine down a river on a boat) and was completely unprepared to find myself sobbing helplessly over the final pages. With my head I had guessed what would happen; in my heart I was overwhelmed. I opened that last chapter again just now to check the sequence of events and, dammit, I'm needing to wipe my eyes and blow my nose before I can carry on writing.

How has Kate Saunders managed this? Her novel is far richer and deeper than Nesbit's and, for my taste, funnier as well. This isn't intended to be dismissive of the Founding Mother – Edith Nesbit has a stature and originality that the rest of us will only ever dream of – but rereading her Five Children and It did make me aware of the limitations of the string-of-adventures format. Five Children on the Western Front has several story-lines, a plot, a wider range of tones and characters and the scope to be part of something that is bigger than itself. It's certainly a book which hits that magic, inter-generational space where both adults and children can read with full engagement.

Five Children on the Western Front belongs less to the children than to the Psammead. The sand-fairy is in trouble, deservedly so. “By the sound of it you behaved like an absolute cad,” says the Lamb. “My dear Lamb everyone kills a few slaves.” He is comic, he is nasty and can be seen as the prototype of all fallen emperors. There's a brief chapter where the action fast-forwards to 1938 and he's discovered chatting amiably with Kaiser Bill, with whom he feels much in common.

When the Psammead arrives back in Nesbit's Kentish gravel pit in October 1914, just as Cyril, the oldest boy, is leaving for the war, he's been stripped of his powers. He's confused, vulnerable and furious “A stiff little boulder of crossness” as Saunders memorably describes him. He has been sent down to repent and it's lucky for him that Saunders has added a sixth child, nine-year-old Edie, to the original five. She's the only one who has time to stroke and care for him as her older brothers and sisters cope with the army, university, school and (for the older girls) their first attempts to challenge their parents' pre-war expectations. They are busy and are occasionally exasperated with Sammy's obdurate selfishness and his refusal to acknowledge his past crimes. Edie, however, sees “bewilderment in his eyes and lurking terror”. Her love is constant and undemanding and gives him his best chance to learn the lessons of the universe.

The Psammead does learn and tears are the true response. I've relished all Kate Saunders's books since the day she bought her Belfry Witches series to our children's village primary school but this is The One. Five Children on the Western Front will be published by Faber in October and I want to press it on every reading household. There is an Author's Afterword which reminds us, poignantly, that constant love and premature loss are not confined to 1914-1918. Some of us will still suffer “the worst sorrow there is.”

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