There were once four children who
spent their summer holidays in a white house, happily
situated between a sandpit and a chalkpit. One
day they had the good fortune to find in the sandpit
a strange creature. Its eyes were on long horns
like snail’s eyes, and it could move them in
and out like telescopes. It had ears like a bat’s
ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s
and covered with thick soft fur and it had
hands and feet like a monkey’s. It told
the children whose names were Cyril, Robert,
Anthea, and Jane that it was a Psammead
or sand-fairy. (Psammead is pronounced Sammy-ad.)
It was old, old, old, and its birthday was almost
at the very beginning of everything. And it had
been buried in the sand for thousands of years.
But it still kept its fairylikeness, and part of this
fairylikeness was its power to give people whatever
they wished for. You know fairies have always
been able to do this. Cyril, Robert, Anthea,
and Jane now found their wishes come true; but, somehow,
they never could think of just the right things to
wish for, and their wishes sometimes turned out very
oddly indeed. In the end their unwise wishings
landed them in what Robert called ’a very tight
place indeed’, and the Psammead consented to
help them out of it in return for their promise never
never to ask it to grant them any more wishes, and
never to tell anyone about it, because it did not want
to be bothered to give wishes to anyone ever any more.
At the moment of parting Jane said politely
‘I wish we were going to see you again some
day.’
And the Psammead, touched by this
friendly thought, granted the wish. The book
about all this is called Five Children and It, and
it ends up in a most tiresome way by saying
’The children did see the
Psammead again, but it was not in the sandpit; it
was but I must say no more ’
The reason that nothing more could
be said was that I had not then been able to find
out exactly when and where the children met the Psammead
again. Of course I knew they would meet it, because
it was a beast of its word, and when it said a thing
would happen, that thing happened without fail.
How different from the people who tell us about what
weather it is going to be on Thursday next, in London,
the South Coast, and Channel!
The summer holidays during which the
Psammead had been found and the wishes given had been
wonderful holidays in the country, and the children
had the highest hopes of just such another holiday
for the next summer. The winter holidays were
beguiled by the wonderful happenings of The Phoenix
and the Carpet, and the loss of these two treasures
would have left the children in despair, but for the
splendid hope of their next holiday in the country.
The world, they felt, and indeed had some reason to
feel, was full of wonderful things and they
were really the sort of people that wonderful things
happen to. So they looked forward to the summer
holiday; but when it came everything was different,
and very, very horrid. Father had to go out to
Manchuria to telegraph news about the war to the tiresome
paper he wrote for the Daily Bellower,
or something like that, was its name. And Mother,
poor dear Mother, was away in Madeira, because she
had been very ill. And The Lamb I mean
the baby was with her. And Aunt Emma,
who was Mother’s sister, had suddenly married
Uncle Reginald, who was Father’s brother, and
they had gone to China, which is much too far off
for you to expect to be asked to spend the holidays
in, however fond your aunt and uncle may be of you.
So the children were left in the care of old Nurse,
who lived in Fitzroy Street, near the British Museum,
and though she was always very kind to them, and indeed
spoiled them far more than would be good for the most
grown-up of us, the four children felt perfectly wretched,
and when the cab had driven off with Father and all
his boxes and guns and the sheepskin, with blankets
and the aluminium mess-kit inside it, the stoutest
heart quailed, and the girls broke down altogether,
and sobbed in each other’s arms, while the boys
each looked out of one of the long gloomy windows
of the parlour, and tried to pretend that no boy would
be such a muff as to cry.
I hope you notice that they were not
cowardly enough to cry till their Father had gone;
they knew he had quite enough to upset him without
that. But when he was gone everyone felt as if
it had been trying not to cry all its life, and that
it must cry now, if it died for it. So they cried.
Tea with shrimps and watercress cheered
them a little. The watercress was arranged in
a hedge round a fat glass salt-cellar, a tasteful device
they had never seen before. But it was not a cheerful
meal.
After tea Anthea went up to the room
that had been Father’s, and when she saw how
dreadfully he wasn’t there, and remembered how
every minute was taking him further and further from
her, and nearer and nearer to the guns of the Russians,
she cried a little more. Then she thought of
Mother, ill and alone, and perhaps at that very moment
wanting a little girl to put eau-de-cologne
on her head, and make her sudden cups of tea, and
she cried more than ever. And then she remembered
what Mother had said, the night before she went away,
about Anthea being the eldest girl, and about trying
to make the others happy, and things like that.
So she stopped crying, and thought instead. And
when she had thought as long as she could bear she
washed her face and combed her hair, and went down
to the others, trying her best to look as though crying
were an exercise she had never even heard of.
She found the parlour in deepest gloom,
hardly relieved at all by the efforts of Robert, who,
to make the time pass, was pulling Jane’s hair not
hard, but just enough to tease.
‘Look here,’ said Anthea.
‘Let’s have a palaver.’ This
word dated from the awful day when Cyril had carelessly
wished that there were Red Indians in England and
there had been. The word brought back memories
of last summer holidays and everyone groaned; they
thought of the white house with the beautiful tangled
garden late roses, asters, marigold, sweet
mignonette, and feathery asparagus of the
wilderness which someone had once meant to make into
an orchard, but which was now, as Father said, ’five
acres of thistles haunted by the ghosts of baby cherry-trees’.
They thought of the view across the valley, where the
lime-kilns looked like Aladdin’s palaces in the
sunshine, and they thought of their own sandpit, with
its fringe of yellowy grasses and pale-stringy-stalked
wild flowers, and the little holes in the cliff that
were the little sand-martíns’ little front
doors. And they thought of the free fresh air
smelling of thyme and sweetbriar, and the scent of
the wood-smoke from the cottages in the lane and
they looked round old Nurse’s stuffy parlour,
and Jane said
‘Oh, how different it all is!’
It was. Old Nurse had been in
the habit of letting lodgings, till Father gave her
the children to take care of. And her rooms were
furnished ’for letting’. Now it is
a very odd thing that no one ever seems to furnish
a room ‘for letting’ in a bit the same
way as one would furnish it for living in. This
room had heavy dark red stuff curtains the
colour that blood would not make a stain on with
coarse lace curtains inside. The carpet was yellow,
and violet, with bits of grey and brown oilcloth in
odd places. The fireplace had shavings and tinsel
in it. There was a very varnished mahogany chiffonier,
or sideboard, with a lock that wouldn’t act.
There were hard chairs far too many of them with
crochet antimacassars slipping off their seats, all
of which sloped the wrong way. The table wore
a cloth of a cruel green colour with a yellow chain-stitch
pattern round it. Over the fireplace was a looking-glass
that made you look much uglier than you really were,
however plain you might be to begin with. Then
there was a mantelboard with maroon plush and wool
fringe that did not match the plush; a dreary clock
like a black marble tomb it was silent
as the grave too, for it had long since forgotten
how to tick. And there were painted glass vases
that never had any flowers in, and a painted tambourine
that no one ever played, and painted brackets with
nothing on them.
’And maple-framed
engravings of the Queen, the Houses of
Parliament, the Plains of Heaven, and
of a blunt-nosed
woodman’s flat return.’
There were two books last
December’s Bradshaw, and an odd volume of Plumridge’s
Commentary on Thessalonians. There were but
I cannot dwell longer on this painful picture.
It was indeed, as Jane said, very different.
‘Let’s have a palaver,’ said Anthea
again.
‘What about?’ said Cyril, yawning.
‘There’s nothing to have
anything about,’ said Robert kicking the
leg of the table miserably.
‘I don’t want to play,’ said Jane,
and her tone was grumpy.
Anthea tried very hard not to be cross. She succeeded.
‘Look here,’ she said,
’don’t think I want to be preachy or a
beast in any way, but I want to what Father calls
define the situation. Do you agree?’
‘Fire ahead,’ said Cyril without enthusiasm.
’Well then. We all know
the reason we’re staying here is because Nurse
couldn’t leave her house on account of the poor
learned gentleman on the top-floor. And there
was no one else Father could entrust to take care
of us and you know it’s taken a lot
of money, Mother’s going to Madeira to be made
well.’
Jane sniffed miserably.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Anthea
in a hurry, ’but don’t let’s think
about how horrid it all is. I mean we can’t
go to things that cost a lot, but we must do something.
And I know there are heaps of things you can see in
London without paying for them, and I thought we’d
go and see them. We are all quite old now, and
we haven’t got The Lamb ’
Jane sniffed harder than before.
’I mean no one can say “No”
because of him, dear pet. And I thought we must
get Nurse to see how quite old we are, and let us go
out by ourselves, or else we shall never have any
sort of a time at all. And I vote we see everything
there is, and let’s begin by asking Nurse to
give us some bits of bread and we’ll go to St
James’s Park. There are ducks there, I
know, we can feed them. Only we must make Nurse
let us go by ourselves.’
‘Hurrah for liberty!’ said Robert, ‘but
she won’t.’
‘Yes she will,’ said Jane
unexpectedly. ’I thought about that this
morning, and I asked Father, and he said yes; and what’s
more he told old Nurse we might, only he said we must
always say where we wanted to go, and if it was right
she would let us.’
‘Three cheers for thoughtful
Jane,’ cried Cyril, now roused at last from
his yawning despair. ‘I say, let’s
go now.’
So they went, old Nurse only begging
them to be careful of crossings, and to ask a policeman
to assist in the more difficult cases. But they
were used to crossings, for they had lived in Camden
Town and knew the Kentish Town Road where the trams
rush up and down like mad at all hours of the day
and night, and seem as though, if anything, they would
rather run over you than not.
They had promised to be home by dark,
but it was July, so dark would be very late indeed,
and long past bedtime.
They started to walk to St James’s
Park, and all their pockets were stuffed with bits
of bread and the crusts of toast, to feed the ducks
with. They started, I repeat, but they never got
there.
Between Fitzroy Street and St James’s
Park there are a great many streets, and, if you go
the right way you will pass a great many shops that
you cannot possibly help stopping to look at.
The children stopped to look at several with gold-lace
and beads and pictures and jewellery and dresses,
and hats, and oysters and lobsters in their windows,
and their sorrow did not seem nearly so impossible
to bear as it had done in the best parlour at N, Fitzroy Street.
Presently, by some wonderful chance
turn of Robert’s (who had been voted Captain
because the girls thought it would be good for him and
indeed he thought so himself and of course
Cyril couldn’t vote against him because it would
have looked like a mean jealousy), they came into the
little interesting criss-crossy streets that held the
most interesting shops of all the shops
where live things were sold. There was one shop
window entirely filled with cages, and all sorts of
beautiful birds in them. The children were delighted
till they remembered how they had once wished for
wings themselves, and had had them and then
they felt how desperately unhappy anything with wings
must be if it is shut up in a cage and not allowed
to fly.
‘It must be fairly beastly to
be a bird in a cage,’ said Cyril. ’Come
on!’
They went on, and Cyril tried to think
out a scheme for making his fortune as a gold-digger
at Klondyke, and then buying all the caged birds in
the world and setting them free. Then they came
to a shop that sold cats, but the cats were in cages,
and the children could not help wishing someone would
buy all the cats and put them on hearthrugs, which
are the proper places for cats. And there was
the dog-shop, and that was not a happy thing to look
at either, because all the dogs were chained or caged,
and all the dogs, big and little, looked at the four
children with sad wistful eyes and wagged beseeching
tails as if they were trying to say, ’Buy me!
buy me! buy me! and let me go for a walk with you;
oh, do buy me, and buy my poor brothers too!
Do! do! do!’ They almost said, ‘Do! do!
do!’ plain to the ear, as they whined; all but
one big Irish terrier, and he growled when Jane patted
him.
‘Grrrrr,’ he seemed to
say, as he looked at them from the back corner of
his eye ’you won’t buy
me. Nobody will ever I shall
die chained up and I don’t know that
I care how soon it is, either!’
I don’t know that the children
would have understood all this, only once they had
been in a besieged castle, so they knew how hateful
it is to be kept in when you want to get out.
Of course they could not buy any of
the dogs. They did, indeed, ask the price of
the very, very smallest, and it was sixty-five pounds but
that was because it was a Japanese toy spaniel like
the Queen once had her portrait painted with, when
she was only Princess of Wales. But the children
thought, if the smallest was all that money, the biggest
would run into thousands so they went on.
And they did not stop at any more
cat or dog or bird shops, but passed them by, and
at last they came to a shop that seemed as though it
only sold creatures that did not much mind where they
were such as goldfish and white mice, and
sea-anémones and other aquarium beasts, and lizards
and toads, and hedgehogs and tortoises, and tame rabbits
and guinea-pigs. And there they stopped for a
long time, and fed the guinea-pigs with bits of bread
through the cage-bars, and wondered whether it would
be possible to keep a sandy-coloured double-lop in
the basement of the house in Fitzroy Street.
‘I don’t suppose old Nurse
would mind very much,’ said Jane. ’Rabbits
are most awfully tame sometimes. I expect it would
know her voice and follow her all about.’
‘She’d tumble over it
twenty times a day,’ said Cyril; ‘now a
snake ’
’There aren’t any snakes,
said Robert hastily, ’and besides, I never could
cotton to snakes somehow I wonder why.’
‘Worms are as bad,’ said
Anthea, ’and eels and slugs I think
it’s because we don’t like things that
haven’t got legs.’
‘Father says snakes have got
legs hidden away inside of them,’ said Robert.
’Yes and he says
we’ve got tails hidden away inside us but
it doesn’t either of it come to anything really,’
said Anthea. ’I hate things that haven’t
any legs.’
‘It’s worse when they
have too many,’ said Jane with a shudder, ’think
of centipedes!’
They stood there on the pavement,
a cause of some inconvenience to the passersby, and
thus beguiled the time with conversation. Cyril
was leaning his elbow on the top of a hutch that had
seemed empty when they had inspected the whole edifice
of hutches one by one, and he was trying to reawaken
the interest of a hedgehog that had curled itself into
a ball earlier in the interview, when a small, soft
voice just below his elbow said, quietly, plainly
and quite unmistakably not in any squeak
or whine that had to be translated but in
downright common English
‘Buy me do please buy
me!’
Cyril started as though he had been
pinched, and jumped a yard away from the hutch.
‘Come back oh, come
back!’ said the voice, rather louder but still
softly; ’stoop down and pretend to be tying up
your bootlace I see it’s undone,
as usual.’
Cyril mechanically obeyed. He
knelt on one knee on the dry, hot dusty pavement,
peered into the darkness of the hutch and found himself
face to face with the Psammead!
It seemed much thinner than when he
had last seen it. It was dusty and dirty, and
its fur was untidy and ragged. It had hunched
itself up into a miserable lump, and its long snail’s
eyes were drawn in quite tight so that they hardly
showed at all.
‘Listen,’ said the Psammead,
in a voice that sounded as though it would begin to
cry in a minute, ’I don’t think the creature
who keeps this shop will ask a very high price for
me. I’ve bitten him more than once, and
I’ve made myself look as common as I can.
He’s never had a glance from my beautiful, beautiful
eyes. Tell the others I’m here but
tell them to look at some of those low, common beasts
while I’m talking to you. The creature
inside mustn’t think you care much about me,
or he’ll put a price upon me far, far beyond
your means. I remember in the dear old days last
summer you never had much money. Oh I
never thought I should be so glad to see you I
never did.’ It sniffed, and shot out its
long snail’s eyes expressly to drop a tear well
away from its fur. ’Tell the others I’m
here, and then I’ll tell you exactly what to
do about buying me.’ Cyril tied his bootlace
into a hard knot, stood up and addressed the others
in firm tones
‘Look here,’ he said,
‘I’m not kidding and I appeal
to your honour,’ an appeal which in this family
was never made in vain. ’Don’t look
at that hutch look at the white rat.
Now you are not to look at that hutch whatever I say.’
He stood in front of it to prevent mistakes.
’Now get yourselves ready for
a great surprise. In that hutch there’s
an old friend of ours don’t look! Yes;
it’s the Psammead, the good old Psammead! it
wants us to buy it. It says you’re not to
look at it. Look at the white rat and count your
money! On your honour don’t look!’
The others responded nobly. They
looked at the white rat till they quite stared him
out of countenance, so that he went and sat up on his
hind legs in a far corner and hid his eyes with his
front paws, and pretended he was washing his face.
Cyril stooped again, busying himself
with the other bootlace and listened for the Psammead’s
further instructions.
‘Go in,’ said the Psammead,
’and ask the price of lots of other things.
Then say, “What do you want for that monkey that’s
lost its tail the mangy old thing in the
third hutch from the end.” Oh don’t
mind my feelings call me a mangy monkey I’ve
tried hard enough to look like one! I don’t
think he’ll put a high price on me I’ve
bitten him eleven times since I came here the day
before yesterday. If he names a bigger price
than you can afford, say you wish you had the money.’
’But you can’t give us
wishes. I’ve promised never to have another
wish from you,’ said the bewildered Cyril.
‘Don’t be a silly little
idiot,’ said the Sand-fairy in trembling but
affectionate tones, ’but find out how much money
you’ve got between you, and do exactly what
I tell you.’
Cyril, pointing a stiff and unmeaning
finger at the white rat, so as to pretend that its
charms alone employed his tongue, explained matters
to the others, while the Psammead hunched itself,
and bunched itself, and did its very best to make
itself look uninteresting. Then the four children
filed into the shop.
‘How much do you want for that white rat?’
asked Cyril.
‘Eightpence,’ was the answer.
‘And the guinea-pigs?’
‘Eighteenpence to five bob, according to the
breed.’
‘And the lizards?’
‘Ninepence each.’
‘And toads?’
‘Fourpence. Now look here,’
said the greasy owner of all this caged life with
a sudden ferocity which made the whole party back hurriedly
on to the wainscoting of hutches with which the shop
was lined. ’Lookee here. I ain’t
agoin’ to have you a comin’ in here a turnin’
the whole place outer winder, an’ prizing every
animile in the stock just for your larks, so don’t
think it! If you’re a buyer, be a buyer but
I never had a customer yet as wanted to buy mice,
and lizards, and toads, and guineas all at once.
So hout you goes.’
‘Oh! wait a minute,’ said
the wretched Cyril, feeling how foolishly yet well-meaningly
he had carried out the Psammead’s instructions.
’Just tell me one thing. What do you want
for the mangy old monkey in the third hutch from the
end?’
The shopman only saw in this a new insult.
‘Mangy young monkey yourself,’
said he; ’get along with your blooming cheek.
Hout you goes!’
‘Oh! don’t be so cross,’
said Jane, losing her head altogether, ’don’t
you see he really does want to know that!’
’Ho! does ‘e indeed,’
sneered the merchant. Then he scratched his ear
suspiciously, for he was a sharp business man, and
he knew the ring of truth when he heard it. His
hand was bandaged, and three minutes before he would
have been glad to sell the ‘mangy old monkey’
for ten shillings. Now ’Ho!
’e does, does ‘e,’ he said, ’then
two pun ten’s my price. He’s not
got his fellow that monkey ain’t, nor yet his
match, not this side of the equator, which he comes
from. And the only one ever seen in London.
Ought to be in the Zoo. Two pun ten, down on the
nail, or hout you goes!’
The children looked at each other twenty-three
shillings and fivepence was all they had in the world,
and it would have been merely three and fivepence,
but for the sovereign which Father had given to them
’between them’ at parting. ‘We’ve
only twenty-three shillings and fivepence,’
said Cyril, rattling the money in his pocket.
‘Twenty-three farthings and
somebody’s own cheek,’ said the dealer,
for he did not believe that Cyril had so much money.
There was a miserable pause.
Then Anthea remembered, and said
‘Oh! I wish I had two pounds ten.’
‘So do I, Miss, I’m sure,’
said the man with bitter politeness; ’I wish
you ‘ad, I’m sure!’
Anthea’s hand was on the counter,
something seemed to slide under it. She lifted
it. There lay five bright half sovereigns.
‘Why, I have got it after
all,’ she said; ’here’s the money,
now let’s have the Sammy,... the monkey I mean.’
The dealer looked hard at the money,
but he made haste to put it in his pocket.
‘I only hope you come by it
honest,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders.
He scratched his ear again.
‘Well!’ he said, ’I
suppose I must let you have it, but it’s worth
thribble the money, so it is ’
He slowly led the way out to the hutch opened
the door gingerly, and made a sudden fierce grab at
the Psammead, which the Psammead acknowledged in one
last long lingering bite.
‘Here, take the brute,’
said the shopman, squeezing the Psammead so tight
that he nearly choked it. ‘It’s bit
me to the marrow, it have.’
The man’s eyes opened as Anthea held out her
arms.
‘Don’t blame me if it
tears your face off its bones,’ he said, and
the Psammead made a leap from his dirty horny hands,
and Anthea caught it in hers, which were not very
clean, certainly, but at any rate were soft and pink,
and held it kindly and closely.
‘But you can’t take it
home like that,’ Cyril said, ’we shall
have a crowd after us,’ and indeed two errand
boys and a policeman had already collected.
’I can’t give you nothink
only a paper-bag, like what we put the tortoises in,’
said the man grudgingly.
So the whole party went into the shop,
and the shopman’s eyes nearly came out of his
head when, having given Anthea the largest paper-bag
he could find, he saw her hold it open, and the Psammead
carefully creep into it. ‘Well!’
he said, ’if that there don’t beat cockfighting!
But p’raps you’ve met the brute afore.’
‘Yes,’ said Cyril affably, ‘he’s
an old friend of ours.’
‘If I’d a known that,’
the man rejoined, ’you shouldn’t a had
him under twice the money. ‘Owever,’
he added, as the children disappeared, ’I ain’t
done so bad, seeing as I only give five bob for the
beast. But then there’s the bites to take
into account!’
The children trembling in agitation
and excitement, carried home the Psammead, trembling
in its paper-bag.
When they got it home, Anthea nursed
it, and stroked it, and would have cried over it,
if she hadn’t remembered how it hated to be wet.
When it recovered enough to speak, it said
’Get me sand; silver sand from
the oil and colour shop. And get me plenty.’
They got the sand, and they put it
and the Psammead in the round bath together, and it
rubbed itself, and rolled itself, and shook itself
and scraped itself, and scratched itself, and preened
itself, till it felt clean and comfy, and then it
scrabbled a hasty hole in the sand, and went to sleep
in it.
The children hid the bath under the
girls’ bed, and had supper. Old Nurse had
got them a lovely supper of bread and butter and fried
onions. She was full of kind and delicate thoughts.
When Anthea woke the next morning,
the Psammead was snuggling down between her shoulder
and Jane’s.
‘You have saved my life,’
it said. ’I know that man would have thrown
cold water on me sooner or later, and then I should
have died. I saw him wash out a guinea-pig’s
hutch yesterday morning. I’m still frightfully
sleepy, I think I’ll go back to sand for another
nap. Wake the boys and this dormouse of a Jane,
and when you’ve had your breakfasts we’ll
have a talk.’
‘Don’t you want any breakfast?’
asked Anthea.
‘I daresay I shall pick a bit
presently,’ it said; ’but sand is all I
care about it’s meat and drink to
me, and coals and fire and wife and children.’
With these words it clambered down by the bedclothes
and scrambled back into the bath, where they heard
it scratching itself out of sight.
‘Well!’ said Anthea, ’anyhow
our holidays won’t be dull now. We’ve
found the Psammead again.’
‘No,’ said Jane, beginning
to put on her stockings. ’We shan’t
be dull but it’ll be only like having
a pet dog now it can’t give us wishes.’
‘Oh, don’t be so discontented,’
said Anthea. ’If it can’t do anything
else it can tell us about Mégathériums and things.’