Five Children and It The Secret Life of Books

Once upon a time,

a little girl clambered up a ladder

and into her own private dream world.

In a secret place, safe and hidden from view,

she devoured book after book,

lost in the magical possibilities of stories.

That little girl would grow up to write

some of the best-loved children's books in the English language.

Her name

was Edith Nesbit.

These days, Edith Nesbit is probably best known for The Railway Children,

her unforgettable story about steam trains and stirring reunions.

But my favourite Nesbit book was written much earlier in her career.

And I think it has had an even deeper influence.

It's this one, Five Children And It.

Published in 1902,

it's a classic fantasy story about a group of siblings

who discover a creature that can grant wishes.

My mother read Five Children And It to me when I was a little girl

and I have in turn read it to both my children.

But it's not just a warm, witty children's story,

it's a rewriting of Edith's own, often complicated, life.

In this film, I'll find out about her rootless childhood...

This is probably the happiest time of her life,

it gave her stability for the first time.

..and her struggle to bring up her own children.

The only income the family had was really from her and from her pen.

I'll discover the terrible tragedy that coloured her imagination.

Edith came with hot water bottles, trying to bring him back to life,

but nothing worked.

And how, out of emotional chaos,

she created a new kind of children's fiction.

I think she has been incredibly influential. The Narnia stories,

and now JK Rowling.

Edith Nesbit is now rightly celebrated

as one of the greatest authors of the golden age

of children's fiction.

But she wasn't some cosy, comfortable figure.

This was a woman who dared to break the rules.

Both in how she wrote

and how she lived.

It all began here on Bluebell Hill in Kent.

Edith Nesbit and her family of five children

used to come here from London on holiday.

This place, with its strange sunken paths and old, overgrown diggings,

became the setting for one of the most startling discoveries

in all of children's fiction.

"Before Anthea and Cyril and the others

"had been a week in the country, they found a fairy.

"At least, they called it that

"because that is what it called itself

"and, of course, IT knew best.

"But it was not at all like any fairy you ever saw

"or heard of or read about.

"It was at the gravel pits."

GROANING

CHILDREN WHIMPER

The classic BBC TV series depicted It

as a kind of little hairy leprechaun.

IT COUGHS AND SPLUTTERS

What is it?

But the creature who originally emerged onto the page

was actually much, much weirder.

"Its eyes were on long horns, like a 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.

"Its legs and arms were furry too,

"and it had hands and feet like a monkey's."

No wonder the producers decided to make it a little less bizarre!

To find out how Nesbit's sand fairy first burst into public view,

I'm visiting the British Library.

Here we've got the Strand Magazine and we are looking at an issue from

April 1902 and we have got something called The Psammead or The Gifts.

So, it's not called Five Children And It.

This is the forerunner of Five Children And It.

The Psammead, where does this word come from?

It seems to be an invention by Edith Nesbit.

She took the Greek word sammos for sand and she added "ad" at the end.

On the lines of things like naiad

and dryad, words for nymph.

So, she's completely made this up, the sand fairy?

Yes. This is an illustration by HR Millar, Harold Robert Millar,

who was born in Dumfriesshire, and he illustrated

a lot of the fantasy works of E Nesbit.

And there we have it, the little tubby thing covered in fur

and I love those eyes on the stalks.

She was apparently very struck by the fact he had managed

to illustrate it exactly as she'd imagined it.

She said he must be telepathic but he said he thought it was more to do

with the power of her invention.

It is, it's absolutely glorious,

but this isn't remotely what we think of as a fairy

and yet HR Millar has done sort of classic fairies.

Yes. This is the Diamond Fairy Book.

And, slightly earlier, 1897,

and here we have got a much more conventional, lyrical picture...

-Beautiful, isn't it?

-..of a fairy.

-Absolutely beautiful.

And it is extraordinary that you can have such a classic fairy,

in one book and then you go to the extraordinary Psammead in the other.

Goodness, we love him.

Nesbit's unfairy-like sand fairy

might have been a brilliantly new invention

but it had its origin in a primordial world

where both monsters and magic

were in plentiful supply.

"Why, almost everyone had pterodactyl for breakfast in my time.

"You see, it was like this.

"Of course, there were heaps of sand fairies then

" and in the morning early,

"you went out and hunted for them. And when you'd found one,

"it gave you your wish.

"People used to send their little boys down to the seashore early

"in the morning before breakfast to get the day's wishes,

"and very often the eldest boy in the family would be told to wish

"for a Megatherium, ready jointed for cooking."

This was Edith Nesbit's favourite place to visit as a child,

Crystal Palace Park and its famous prehistoric beasts.

But if these stone monsters were one inspiration

for Five Children And It,

there was another ancient influence,

the folk tale tradition of foolish wishes

and their unintended consequences.

"I dare say you have often thought what you would do if you had three

"wishes given you and had despised the old man and his wife in the black pudding story

"and felt certain that if you had the chance,

"you could think of three really useful wishes without a moment's hesitation.

"These children had often talked this matter over but no-one could

"think of anything. Only Anthea did manage to remember a private wish

"of her own and Jane's which they had never told the boys.

" 'I wish, we were all as beautiful as the day,'

"she said in a great hurry."

The children's very first wish goes horribly wrong.

Anthea, Jane, Cyril and Robert

become so unnervingly beautiful that their baby brother,

unchanged by the sand fairy's magic, doesn't recognise them.

And neither does anyone else.

Of course, Nesbit can't leave her young characters

in this fix forever.

Her solution is to build in a sunset clause.

By the end of the day, the magic will stop working.

It's a neat plot device.

Every morning brings the chance of a fresh adventure.

But Edith Nesbit knew from bitter experience

that even the most fervent hopes evaporate

and they don't always bring bright new beginnings.

Edith's father, a college lecturer, died when she was only four.

Not long after, Edith's older sister, Mary, fell ill with TB.

To escape damp, polluted London,

their mother took Edith, Mary and their two brothers

first to the south coast and then to the continent.

Edith had a rootless upbringing,

shunted off to a string of unsympathetic relatives,

miserable boarding schools and out of season foreign hotels,

but staying nowhere for very long.

Then, when she had just turned 13, her sister died.

The long, desperate odyssey was over and the family returned to Britain.

And this was where they came.

Halstead Hall in the village of Halstead on the North Downs.

I'm meeting Brendon McGurran, the current owner of the house.

This was Edith's bedroom

when she came to Halstead Hall.

-This is lovely.

-I think this is probably the first time

that she had a room all of her own.

After all that travelling she'd done.

One feature, it's not much,

but the lock is still there from when she was in this room.

-Very important for a teenage girl. Lock your brothers out.

-Indeed.

Just over here,

there's references to her looking out over the shrubbery.

This tells us that her desk may have been here,

she would have been looking out over this very window.

What do you think Halstead Hall meant to Edith?

This is probably the happiest time of her life.

Obviously it gave her stability for the first time as well.

There's another part of the house that's very important to Edith,

if you'd like to follow me.

Oh, wow!

It's a whole other world.

This is, of course, the passageway, that's referred to.

-Mind the beams...

-Yes, I'm minding!

..as you are making your way around.

It's a little bit dusty.

Obviously it was very dark.

Can you imagine doing that climb in a Victorian pinafore?

It would have been difficult.

I dare say they were used to it

because I think they came up here many times.

This was their favourite hiding place.

There would have been lots of nooks and crannies for her to hide in.

Probably quite inspirational for her as well.

Do we know if she did any writing up here?

We believe this is where she wrote her first poem which was published.

Absolutely magical.

By the time Edith left Halstead Hall at the age of 17,

her literary ambitions had taken firm root.

But although she would go on to write plays, reviews,

romances and, of course, children's stories,

I think poetry was her first love.

Poems appear all through Nesbit's children's books.

And Five Children And It begins with a witty and poignant verse

dedicated to her infant son.

"My Lamb, you are so very small, You have not learned to read at all,

"Yet never a printed book withstands The urgence of your dimpled hands.

"So though this book is for yourself,

"Let Mother keep it on the shelf

"Till you can read. O days that pass,

"That day will come too soon, alas."

Nesbit constantly wrote herself and her family into her books.

In Five Children And It,

the young characters are barely disguised versions

of her own children.

The lamb in the story is Nesbit's youngest son John,

also nicknamed Lamb.

He was just two when she began writing the story.

Cyril is Nesbit's eldest son,

Paul Cyril, Anthea is her daughter Iris,

and Jane and Robert are the other siblings, Rosamund and Fabian.

Like Edith's real children, like children everywhere,

the siblings squabble constantly,

simmering with resentment and frustration.

When landed with having to look after their baby brother,

they wished for someone else to take him off their hands.

Oh, what a pretty little thing.

Come for a walk with me.

'Nesbitt turns child abduction into an absurdly comic set piece.'

Drive on!

Drive on, I tell you!

She's taken him!

-Come on, we've got to get him back!

-Bring back our baby!

'Nesbit's brilliance is to use fantasy and humour

'as a way of exploring the very real anxieties of children's lives.'

'Bestselling children's author Jacqueline Wilson

'is a huge fan of Edith Nesbit

'and she has written her own reimagining of the sand fairy story

'Four Children And It.'

I'm not a great genius like E Nesbit,

but I wanted to do this reworking of her story, not using her characters,

simply having my very modern children dig up the Psammead,

the sand fairy, nowadays.

What is it about her writing that you love so much?

She is so down-to-earth, so immediate,

you're sucked into the story straightaway,

you believe in the magic too,

and isn't soppy little fairy-type magic.

What sort of legacy do you think she's handed down to current writers?

I think she's been incredibly influential.

I think she must have had a real influence on the way I write,

and I think this whole tradition of mixing up magic and real,

well-characterised children,

I mean, the Narnia stories and now JK Rowling,

you have Harry Potter,

so I think she started something

that will hopefully just go on and on and on.

Also, the thing that you both have in common is writing for children

but based in sometimes the harsh realities of life.

Just because it's a fantasy book,

I still want the children to be real children and sometimes sad things happen.

My main characters, Rosalind and Robbie,

their parents have split up and so they go from home to home,

but then there's a little girl, Maudy,

echoing E Nesbit's wonderful Lamb character, who is quite serene.

It's because her parents are together.

-Of course it is.

-And everybody just adores her.

I wonder if you could read for us the moment when your children meet Psammead

-for the first time.

-Certainly.

" 'She's Maudy, our little half-sister,' I said.

" 'Half a sister,' said the creature?

" 'Do you say that because she's half your size?'

" 'No, because we're only half related.

" 'We've got the same dad

" 'but Maudy's got a different mother,' I said.

" 'Hmm, family life seems particularly complicated nowadays,' said the Psammead."

And indeed it is complicated,

and that's reflected in Edith's own life.

Yes!

Edith Nesbit's domestic set-up was about as tangled

as you could imagine.

When Edith married brush maker, bohemian and Victorian baby father Hubert Bland,

he already had a young son by another woman.

In fact, Edith herself was heavily pregnant at the time of her wedding

and soon afterwards gave birth to their first son, Paul.

After Paul, Edith and Hubert had two more children,

Iris and Fabian.

Meanwhile, Hubert must have been feeling the itch again

and he started an affair with none other than Edith's best friend,

Alice Hoatson.

Hubert and Alice then had two children,

Rosamund and John.

And then there was a rather bizarre twist.

With Edith's consent, Alice moved in and, perhaps to avoid a scandal,

Edith adopted Rosamund and John, AKA the Lamb,

as her own.

It's tempting to see Edith as a victim in all this but the truth,

as always, is more complicated.

Of course, she must have felt desperately hurt and betrayed

by the actions of her husband and best friend.

But I think Alice's arrival in the household

might have been a kind of godsend.

In contrast to Edith's bouts of high drama,

Alice was a rather unassertive character,

happy to remain in the domestic background.

With Alice acting as housekeeper,

secretary and "affectionate auntie" to the five children,

Edith was free to pursue her literary career,

her political passions and her love affairs.

Edith and her husband, Hubert, were founder members of the Fabian Society,

the freethinking socialist circle that included bohemian figures

such as writer and serial womaniser HG Wells,

Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor,

and George Bernard Shaw, with whom Edith had a passionate,

if unrequited relationship.

But, between the flirtations and affairs,

the Fabians found time to campaign for real political reform.

Can I read you a quick bit from the book?

Oh, do.

If I can get my glasses onto my nose.

"Grown-ups wouldn't wish silly things like you do,

"but real, earnest things,

"and they'd ask for graduated income tax and old-age pensions

"and manhood suffrage and free secondary education

"and dull things like that."

So is that sort of what the Fabian Society was aiming for?

I would say, in a neat little paragraph,

the Psammead pretty much summed it up,

and these were very radical ideas at the time.

Modern children have grown up with the welfare state,

they've grown up with a safety net,

and so it's very, very difficult to explain the poverty,

the levels of poverty that were happening around the beginnings of the 20th century.

And Edith did struggle financially, didn't she?

Particularly in the early years of her marriage.

Absolutely. She had a very, sort of, quite averagely comfortable middle-class upbringing

and, when she married, Hubert suddenly became ill,

suddenly lost all his money, and the only income the family had was really

from her and from her pen.

But it was only towards the end of her 30s, the end of the century,

that she discovered her enormous talent for writing amusing stories

for children, and Five Children is somehow,

I suppose, the logical explosion of talent,

and what is so appealing about it, which was to me,

and I am sure generations before me,

was the idea that the children wished for what I would have wished for.

You know, beauty, money.

I mean, they wished for loads of money.

-They wished for it, yeah.

-And so she's a socialist but she is quite firm about,

of course, people want money, you know,

and I think she was very honest about all the wishes that she knew we'd all have.

What is today's wish?

We want to be rich.

Beyond the dreams of...something or other.

Avarice.

This place, full, be enough?

-Oh, yes!

-Yes.

Then you'd better get out quick or you'll be buried in it.

Quick!

Quick!

I hope your whisker will be better tomorrow.

'In the book, Edith warns of the perils of being swamped by riches,

'whilst revelling in piles of gold.'

And much good may it do you.

But, despite having her cake and eating it,

her commitment to Fabianism ran deep.

Just a year after the society was founded,

she publicly and permanently declared her commitment to the cause

by naming her newborn son Fabian,

and it was Fabian that Edith gave a starring role to

in Five Children And It.

Fabian's fictional alter ego, Robert,

has more than his fair share of the action.

It's Robert who cleverly escapes from besieging knights.

And it's Robert's wish to defeat his rival that transforms him into

a giant and star attraction at the local fair.

Robert is literally a larger-than-life character,

but Nesbit's brilliant creation conceals a terrible tragedy,

because she only conjured him into life

after the death of his real-life inspiration, Fabian.

The loss of her son was a catastrophe

which plunged Edith into terrible grief and self-reproach,

and I think fundamentally changed the way she wrote for children.

Margaret, thank you very much for coming to talk to me,

and I just wanted to know a bit more about Fabian's death.

Well, Fabian hadn't been well in 1900

and the doctors decided that taking out his adenoids and tonsils

would be the best cure for him,

which was often done at home in those days.

But the family had forgotten all about this operation,

and he was out to play when the doctors came,

Edith was in bed still,

and he had his breakfast, he'd had a meal the night before,

so everything completely wrong for chloroform.

-Oh.

-But she quickly got up,

Fabian was called in and the operation went ahead.

He was given the chloroform, probably quite successfully.

After the doctors were happy with it, they left the family in charge

but, when Hubert looked in, he couldn't wake his son up.

He rushed to Alice and said, "I can't wake him up.

"I think he's died."

But Edith came with hot water bottles, trying to warm him up again,

bring him back to life, but nothing worked.

And do we know what caused his death?

He'd choked on his own vomit.

So, even in those days,

they knew that before an anaesthetic you shouldn't eat.

-Absolutely.

-It must be devastating for a mother to know that

sort of you had caused something.

Absolutely. She must have blamed herself entirely.

But do you think that it's had any impact on her writing from that point on?

I think it did, because she moved away from stories of everyday life

and brought in this magic element,

and we know from HR Millar, her illustrator,

that she based Robert on Fabian,

so perhaps in her mind she was wishing she could use the magic to bring her son back.

When Edith finally picked up her pen again,

one of the first things she wrote was Five Children And It.

In it, she resurrected her son Fabian

as the adventure-loving Robert.

She even gave him angel's wings to fly with.

"The wings were very big, more beautiful than you can possibly imagine,

"for they were soft and smooth

"and every feather lay neatly in its place,

"and the feathers were of the most lovely mix,

"changing colours like the rainbow or iridescent glass or the beautiful

"scum that sometimes floats on water that is not at all nice to drink.

" 'Does it hurt?' asked Anthea with interest.

"But no-one answered, for Robert had spread his wings and jumped up and

"now he was slowly rising in the air."

Grief, guilt and intense,

unanswerable yearning formed the emotional backdrop to Five Children And It,

but out of these shadows Nesbit created something new and original.

Before this, her children's novels were realistic,

adventures rooted firmly in the everyday and familiar.

Now, magic and fantasy came increasingly into play.

Nesbit ends Five Children And It in a typically mischievous mood.

" 'I wonder if we ever shall see the Psammead again,'

"said Jane wistfully as they walked in the garden while Mother was

"putting the Lamb to bed.

" 'I'm sure we shall,' said Cyril, 'if you really wished it.'

" 'We've promised never to ask it for another wish,' said Anthea.

" 'I never want to,' said Robert, earnestly.

"They did see it again, of course, but not in this story,

"and it was not in a sandpit either, but in a very, very,

"very different place.

"It was in a...

"But I must say no more."

Edith Nesbit lived up to that promise.

After Five Children And It came two more books which featured

the wish-granting sand fairy,

The Phoenix And The Carpet and The Story Of The Amulet.

Even non-magical books like The Railway Children,

with its fantasy of a family reunited,

contained a deep sense of longing,

but none of her later works revolved quite so completely around the idea

of wishfulness as Five Children And It.

It's hard not to turn the pages of this book

and imagine that this is how Edith would have liked her life and her children's lives to be.

It's the story of children set free from everyday rules,

who have to learn the consequences of their hearts' desires but never

suffer the consequences for too long.

Edith may have blamed herself for failing her family but,

to generations of children, including me,

she was the very best of friends.

Why do so many children's stories feature magical creatures?

To find out more about fantasy and realism

in children's books past and present,

go to bbc.co.uk/secretlifeofbooks

and follow the link to the Open University.