Five Children on the Western Front

Product Information

This time, it is Edie and the Lamb who discover the family's old acquaintance, the Psammead, who has lost all of its magic abilities and is trapped in 1914. That idea, of the contrast between the eternal child of Edwardian fiction and the modern horrors of WWI; that the very generation of children whose images are so emblematic of childhood whimsy were to become the officers and nurses of the trenches - that's definitely a promising intersection. But that just meant that the wishes were awkward little scenes where Edie and the Lamb spied on their siblings, often during intensely private or personal moments, and it was unclear how the Psammead learnt from these. Saunders effortlessly continues the original Psammead story with hers – a tale of a grumpy sand fairy trying to find its way home, and of five children dealing with the consequences of the war.

The language was very jolly-hockeysticks -- lots of "rathers" and "good-ohs", and everything was old: old bean, old dear, old boy. However, Mick Wiggins’ humblingly warm cover and the prospect of meeting the psammead again was too much so I picked it up. It gives a picture of war and of attitudes of the time but in a way that children will relate to and find interesting.Indeed I imagined early on when the children met a brief resistance in trying to tell their older siblings about the Psammead that it was going to be a case of the older ones not being able to see or believe in the sand fairy any more.

I finally read it the other day and I needn't have worried, Kate Saunders picks up the story and flawlessly drops it down 9 years later. Saunders begins her novel with a 1905 prologue in which the Psammead transports Cyril, Robert, Anthea, Jane and the Lamb 25 years into the future. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. The children have now grown up: Cyril is off to fight, whilst Anthea is at art college, Robert is a Cambridge scholar, Jane is at school, and even the Lamb is now the grown-up age of 11. The family had just moved from London to the countryside in Kent and it is there that the children discover a Psammead (Sammy-ad) or sand fairy living in their gravel pit.This book illustrates wonderfully how hard the war was, not just on the soldiers, but on the families (and Sand Fairies! Fast forward to October 1914, when Cyril is a lieutenant about to depart for France and Anthea is sketching nudes at art school.