Five Children on the Western Front

by Kate Saunders

  ‘We won’t,’ Jane said quickly. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you off this time, because your dog has cheered my patient up no end.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ they all said.

  ‘And we’re sorry about the noise,’ the Lamb added.

  The doctor smiled. ‘I won’t tell you off about that either. I happen to think laughter is rather a nice noise, as noises go.’

  *

  ‘It was all I could do not to shout at her,’ the Psammead said. ‘A dog, indeed! Such gormless creatures.’

  ‘Do stop going on about it.’ The Lamb lay on his back, chewing a thick piece of liquorice. ‘I’m jolly glad you didn’t shout at Doctor Garrett Anderson – she turned out to be an A1 brick. And you’re spoiling the first halfway decent day we’ve had all year.’

  ‘Her mother was very famous,’ said Jane. ‘She was the first woman in Britain to qualify as a physician.’

  It was a Saturday afternoon, a month after their visit to Ernie, and so warm and sunny that the Lamb and Edie had taken the Psammead on an outing to the gravel pit at the bottom of the garden. He sat in a comfortable hollow, basking in the summery heat.

  ‘Yes, it’s very pleasant to feel the warm air on my fur, and it reminds me of a lovely dream I had last night, about a green field all covered with white flowers. I wonder if that peaceful place – wherever it is – could be the place where I’m going?’

  ‘I hope you never leave.’ Edie’s lap was filled with daisies, as she was trying to make a daisy chain for the Psammead. ‘It’s so lovely having you here – I can hardly bear to think of life without you.’

  ‘But he’ll have to leave eventually, however long his repentance takes,’ the Lamb said. ‘He can’t carry on living in the attic after we’re all dead.’

  ‘Why not? I’ve already thought about this. When we’re all dead, our children can take over looking after him. We can leave him in our wills.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ the Psammead said huffily, ‘I’m not a clock or a vase – or a family pet.’

  The Lamb sat up. ‘That’s exactly your trouble, Edie – you treat him like a pet.’

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘You brush his fur and stroke him and try to knit him tiny scarves, forgetting he was once a tyrannical desert god with the power to turn lovers into stone.’

  ‘Please,’ the Psammead said, pursing his mouth, ‘stop going on about that wretched couple!’

  ‘Osman and Tulap,’ Edie said; she’d been very moved by the story of the tragic lovers. ‘Why were you so mean to them?’

  ‘Runaway slaves can’t go round falling in love with temple maidens, and that’s that!’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ the Lamb said.

  ‘It’s completely unsuitable, that’s why – Tulap was high-born and Osman was common.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Edie said. ‘You can’t tell people not to fall in love. I know we’ve argued about this a lot, but I still say you were cruel to them.’

  ‘And I keep telling you – everyone was cruel in those days.’

  ‘They only wanted to be together.’

  ‘Well, they’re together now, aren’t they? Albeit as rather crumbly pillars of stone.’ The Psammead’s eyes zoomed round to the Lamb. ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘You,’ the Lamb said, ‘because you’re so frightful. Squirrel says you’ve got an armour-plated conscience.’

  Edie sighed romantically. ‘Oh, I w—’

  ‘Careful!’ cried the Psammead. ‘I can’t control random wishes!’

  ‘—WISH I could see those lovers!’

  The earth fell away underneath them. Edie shrieked and made a grab at the Psammead.

  ‘Edie, you CLOT!’ yelled the Lamb. He braced himself for the heat and flies of the Psammead’s desert home, thousands of years in the past.

  When the wind died down, however, there was no desert heat. The sheer ordinariness of the place they had come to hit them like a slap. Wherever they were, it looked nothing at all like an ancient civilisation, and everything like a park in modern London.

  They were on the top of a grassy hill with a fine view of the city. Below them they could see a bandstand and a bowling green. There were nannies pushing prams, little children feeding ducks beside the pond, and couples strolling arm in arm.

  ‘This is nice.’ Edie was very relieved to see that her impulsive wish hadn’t carried them off to anywhere too strange.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ the Lamb said. ‘When I was a baby and we lived in Camden Town. I’m pretty sure this is Hampstead Heath.’

  ‘Wherever it is,’ the Psammead said, ‘it’s an awful lot nicer than those dangerous ancient days. Let’s be grateful for small mercies.’

  Someone was coming up the steep path on their left – a soldier in a blue uniform, making a great effort to move quickly on a pair of crutches.

  ‘Ernie!’ the Lamb and Edie cried together.

  Ernie was red-faced and breathless; they heard him gasping as he swung past them.

  ‘Ernie – wait for me!’ a voice called from the bottom of the path.

  It was Anthea, also out of breath, pushing an empty wheelchair.

  ‘Ah – the lovers,’ the Psammead said. ‘Your wish has been granted.’

  ‘What – Ernie and Panther?’ the Lamb was disgusted. ‘They’re not lovers!’

  Unlike the Lamb, Edie didn’t think the word ‘lover’ was an insult. ‘Gosh, how romantic!’

  The Lamb made being-sick noises.

  ‘Shut up. We know Ernie thinks Anthea’s pretty – so why shouldn’t they fall in love?’

  ‘Of course these two are in love,’ the Psammead said. ‘These are the lovers the universe has chosen to show me.’

  ‘But they’re nothing like Osman and Tulap,’ Edie said, watching Anthea as she puffed up the steep path with the wheelchair. ‘Nobody’s going to turn them to stone. This is the modern world, and things like that don’t happen.’

  ‘I’ll just ask you one question,’ the Psammead said. ‘What would your mother say if she were here?’

  ‘She’d be – pleased.’ Edie was suddenly doubtful, remembering how stiff and odd their mother had been when they told her about the hospital visit.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ the Lamb said. ‘If this is still the same Saturday, I heard Anthea telling Mother she was going sketching this afternoon, with two girls from her old art class.’

  The two children were silent; there was something horribly uncomfortable about knowing that Anthea had lied to Mother so coolly.

  Edie and the Lamb were standing near a wooden bench, where Ernie collapsed with a groan. ‘Made it!’

  Anthea caught up with him and collapsed beside him. They both laughed breathlessly.

  ‘You only had to do a few yards,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to go at it full-tilt.’

  ‘I go at everything full-tilt,’ Ernie said. ‘As I daresay you’ve noticed.’

  ‘Look here, Psammead,’ the Lamb said, ‘we shouldn’t be eavesdropping – this makes me feel like the lowest kind of sneak.’

  ‘Me too,’ Edie said. ‘Can you take us home now?’

  ‘No, we’ll just have to wait it out.’

  ‘Then we mustn’t listen to them. Let’s walk away.’

  ‘Stop!’ yelped the Psammead. ‘You can’t disobey – and neither can I. Don’t you see?’

  The Lamb and Edie – with Edie clutching the Psammead tightly – began to walk down the hill. But somehow, without turning around, they suddenly found they were walking up the hill again. Wherever they went, all paths led back to Anthea and Ernie.

  ‘You see?’ the Psammead settled more comfortably in Edie’s arms. ‘Now listen quietly.’

  ‘It’s a good place, that hospital,’ Ernie was saying. ‘I’ve fallen on my feet all right.’ A grin flashed across his face. ‘My foot, I mean. The food’s the best I’ve ever had in my life. But I’m itching to get back into the world. The d
octor reckons I’m doing really well.’

  He was as handsome as ever, Edie decided, now that his face had lost that hungry, scraped-out look she’d seen in the hospital – and he was still worthy of being her crackation.

  ‘When will you be ready for your false leg?’ Anthea asked.

  ‘I’m ready now, but there’s a national shortage of left feet, so I’ll have to wait.’

  ‘I’m glad about one thing – I’m glad you won’t have to go back to the war. What will you do?’

  ‘Professor Knight offered me a job as his assistant,’ Ernie said. ‘He can’t afford to pay much, but I’ll get my room and board at Mrs Taylor’s – and all the ancient history I can eat.’

  ‘And we’ll be able to see each other more often,’ Anthea said softly, clasping Ernie’s hand.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘We won’t. We can’t go on seeing each other. It’s got to stop.’

  ‘But – why?’

  ‘Come on, you know why,’ Ernie said. ‘This isn’t right. I shouldn’t have let myself fall for you so deeply. That’s why I sent the postcard to the Prof and not to you. I want to marry you, but you know it’s hopeless – and that means it’s not right to carry on as lovers.’

  ‘I don’t care. I nearly lost you,’ Anthea said, ‘and I’m not letting you go ever again.’

  The Lamb groaned with embarrassment; the Psammead hissed, ‘Shhh!’

  ‘You’re a high-born temple maiden,’ Ernie said, ‘and I’m just a runaway slave.’

  ‘Don’t joke about it!’

  ‘I’m not joking. Your people are gentlefolk and you’re a lady. I’m a docker’s son, with no education, one leg, an East End accent that could strip paint – and I only joined the army because I was hungry. You’d be surprised how many of us took the King’s shilling to get three meals a day. I’m as common as it gets, and it’s no good you saying you don’t care. Your parents would care, all right. Your dad’s all for socialism and the rights of the working man, but if he could see us now, he’d punch my lights out. That’s the way the world is.’

  They sat in silence, hands clasped, gazing out at the view of the city.

  ‘I hate the world sometimes,’ Anthea said. ‘The unfairness of it. I won’t force you to see me if you don’t want to – but nobody can stop me loving you, and I’ll wait for you all my life if I have to.’

  Ernie gently raised her hand to his lips.

  And then the world turned a somersault, and the Lamb, Edie and the Psammead were back in the gravel pit.

  *

  ‘Phew!’ the Lamb gasped. ‘Thank goodness – I was afraid we’d have to watch them kissing.’

  ‘Poor Panther,’ Edie said. ‘And poor Ernie – I don’t know about Father but would Mother really be so against them, if she found out?’

  The Lamb thought about this. ‘She wouldn’t be all that keen.’

  ‘But why? Ernie’s so nice.’

  ‘You know how she goes on about “our sort of people”. She wouldn’t think he was our sort, that’s all.’

  ‘I still don’t see why that’s so dreadful.’ Edie had decided that the love affair was romantic and beautiful. ‘I think it would be ripping if they got married – I’d love to be a bridesmaid.’

  ‘I’m utterly drained,’ the Psammead said. ‘But I think I get the point. If time could be turned back, I might not punish Osman and Tulap so severely. It’s a shame to keep young lovers apart.’

  Thirteen

  THE LOWEST OF THE LOW

  ANTHEA WAS MORTIFIED WHEN they told her what they’d seen. She covered her burning face with her hands.

  ‘Honestly, we didn’t listen on purpose,’ Edie said. ‘We tried to walk away – but then the world sort of swung round and we were walking towards you again.’

  ‘It wasn’t our fault,’ the Lamb said. ‘Edie wanted to see those ancient lovers, but we got you and Ernie instead. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not cross with you,’ Anthea said, uncovering her face reluctantly. ‘I’m just so dreadfully embarrassed that you heard me telling all those whoppers about going sketching. I hate lying.’

  ‘And you’re very bad at it,’ Jane said. ‘You turn bright red and your voice goes squeaky. I’m rather amazed the parents didn’t notice.’

  It was Saturday evening, after dinner, and the parents had gone over to Windytops to play bridge with the Winterbottoms. The children had the sitting room to themselves and Edie had tried to persuade the Psammead to come downstairs, but the afternoon’s adventure had made him snappish and he was asleep in his sand bath.

  ‘Don’t!’ Anthea groaned. ‘I’ll never live this down – that troublesome Psammead! Thanks to him I’ve been caught canoodling in the park with a soldier, like a naughty parlourmaid.’

  ‘Steady on,’ Jane murmured.

  ‘Well, that’s how it looks.’

  ‘You should’ve told us,’ Edie said. ‘It’s mean that you only told Jane. I suppose that’s what you’ve been whispering about. Actually, I knew perfectly well that something was going on.’

  ‘The babes know everything now,’ Jane said. ‘You might as well come clean. You told Bobs and Cyril.’

  ‘Look, if you’re going to talk about frightful things like LOVE, I’m leaving,’ the Lamb said. ‘I’m glad you didn’t tell us.’

  Anthea smiled for the first time. ‘I’ll make it as unsoppy as I can. As you’ve probably guessed, the sordid fact is that I’ve been carrying on with Ernie in secret. The week after we first met, I ran into him again while I was Christmas shopping in Oxford Street – completely accidentally. After that, we knew we had to meet again. By the time we realised we were in love, it was too late to do anything about it. Ernie tried to put me off before he went to France, but it was no use.’

  Edie took Anthea’s hand. ‘What’ll you do now?’

  ‘Ernie won’t allow me to say we’re engaged, when the whole thing is so impossible. He says it’s pointless even to think about it until he’s found a way of earning a living. But I’m afraid I’m bound to upset Mother anyway.’ She looked at her youngest brother and sister. ‘I needed to get away and do something proper – it’s silly to waste time painting and paying calls when this war is so terrible. I’ve signed up to be a VAD.’

  They knew this stood for ‘Voluntary Aid Detachment’; the hospitals were swamped with casualties, and there was a desperate shortage of regular trained nurses. The VADs were partly trained volunteers, like Anthea.

  ‘It’s perfectly splendid of you,’ Jane said. ‘I do wish I could go with you – it’s infuriating that they won’t take seventeen-year-olds, which is what I’ll be in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’ This was the headline for Edie, who couldn’t imagine the White House – or the world – without Anthea. She had always been there, as constant as Mother and Father, or the moon and the sun.

  ‘Darling,’ Anthea said, ‘it won’t be for long.’

  ‘But you’ll have to see such awful things – bones and blood—’

  ‘That’s another reason they should take me,’ Jane said. ‘I’m not in the least bothered by the sight of blood. And it would be such a splendid way to start my training as a doctor.’

  Since the visit to Ernie’s military hospital, and their meeting with Dr Garrett Anderson, Jane was even more determined to become a doctor. One of the teachers at school had told her about the London School of Medicine for Women, which was attached to the University of London, but her parents hated the idea; Mother thought studying medicine would ruin Jane’s chances of getting married, while Father said it was too expensive, ‘and probably chock-full of whiskered old suffragettes.’

  ‘But why do you have to go away now?’ Edie asked. ‘Just when Ernie’s come back?’ She didn’t quite understand why the lovers couldn’t see each other.

  ‘They need every pair of hands,’ Anthea said. ‘And I’m not going to spend my days pining for Ernie like some swooning maiden. I’m not sure how I’ll feel about gruesom
e sights, but I’m sure I can get used to it – I just know I have to do something for this war, because it swallows up everything else.’

  ‘We’ll miss you horribly,’ Jane said.

  ‘I’ll miss all of you – but at least you’ll be free to visit Old Nurse’s house. Ernie says I mustn’t visit while he’s there, but he’ll be delighted to see you lot and the Psammead.’

  ‘And we can write to you,’ Jane said, ‘to tell you how he’s getting on.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Anthea said. ‘You don’t have to spy on him, just tell me he’s all right.’

  ‘When do you have to go?’ Like Edie, the Lamb was trying, and failing, to imagine the White House without Anthea.

  ‘I heard this morning,’ she said. ‘I start in a month, as a probationer at St George’s Hospital in Hyde Park Corner. I haven’t told Mother yet, but I didn’t see the point of having a row about it until I knew I’d definitely been accepted.’

  ‘What’s a probationer?’ Edie asked.

  Anthea laughed softly. ‘I asked the same question, and the lady who was interviewing me said, “My dear, you will very soon learn that ‘probationer’ means ‘lowest of the low’.”’

  Letter from Nurse A. Pemberton,

  The Nurses’ Home,

  St George’s Hospital, London W

  Dear Jane, Lamb, Edie and Psammead,

  Don’t read any of this to the parents; the whole truth would only worry them.

  How am I? Well, I’ve reached the end of my first week without dropping dead. St George’s is a vast, sprawling red-brick place. I live in the nurses’ home in the grounds, in a small and spartan bedroom which I share with a very nice girl called Olive Bloss, whose father is a dentist in Ripon. It’s the first time away from home for both of us, and somehow that makes the homesickness less agonising.

  I’m writing in a corner of our common room, where there is a gas fire and a gramophone and we can make cocoa. I’m more tired than I’ve ever been in my entire life and my hands are so red and raw that I can barely hold my pen. Don’t tell Mother, because she won’t like it, but I spent most of this week scrubbing floors while being snapped at by a rather beastly sister; she’s a regular trained nurse and she thinks us VADs are just silly little lady amateurs – I’m sure she saves all the most disgusting jobs for us. That interviewer spoke truthfully – in this hospital we certainly are the lowest of the low.