The narrator’s playful blending of the magical and the real sets the stage for what’s to come. As the children begin digging toward Australia in the local gravel-pit, they hear a sound that resolves itself into the words “You let me alone” (p. 16), and out of the sand emerges one of Nesbit’s most celebrated inventions—the Psammead, or “Sand-fairy,” derived from the Greek psammos (sand) and the names naiad (water nymph) and dryad (wood nymph) of Greek mythology. Like the name itself, this imaginary being, in contrast to the twittering tinkerbells of Victorian fairylands, is a lumpy composite assembled out of the body parts of more familiar creatures: “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” (p. 17). (See Millar’s illustrations on pp. 6, 58, 76, 111, and 147.) The Psammead’s character reveals a similar amalgamation of the real and the marvelous: Grumpy, mercurial, and ever concerned with the hair on its upper left whisker that was once exposed to water, the Psammead is also obliged to fulfill human wishes, though his normal limit is one wish per day, and his magic terminates at sunset. The Psammead’s recollection of the prehistoric past, when the shell-filled gravel-pit was still by the seaside and the children of our remotest ancestors asked him for practical things like dinosaur dinners, also combines the ordinary and the magical, awakening the imagination to the presence of a distant past whose traces may still be present in the very ground we stand on.
Nesbit’s fantasy novels often hark back to traditional fairy tales, and behind Five Children and It lies the well-known tale of “the three wishes,” which appears in many versions around the world. Once the children realize that the Psammead will grant their wishes, they consider the implications of one of the variants of the traditional tale—the “black pudding story” (p. 20), in which a man who dislikes his wife’s cooking wishes for a helping of black pudding, to which she reacts by wishing the pudding on his nose; he then must use the third and final wish to undo the effects of the second. (Coincidentally, a darker and instantly famous version of the tale, W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” appeared in 1902.) While expressing our desire to transcend the limits of ordinary existence, the fairy tale of “the three wishes” warns us to beware of our own wishes, dreams, and fantasies by revealing the consequences of their literal fulfillment. As Bruno Bettelheim points out, however, the self-canceling circularity of these tales is also reassuring and enhances our willingness to accept the reality of things as they are.3 In Nesbit’s case, the children witness the adverse effects of their wishes and welcome the return to normality at the end of each day, but their recurrent desire to return to the magical, compounded by the sheer excitement of some of their madcap adventures, suggests that the pleasures of the imagination are enticing enough to offset the risks and dangers that its exercise entails.
The children squander their first few wishes on conventional vanities. No sooner does the Psammead fulfill their initial request—to be “as beautiful as the day” (p. 21)—than they long for a return to their flawed natural selves, especially after the Lamb, who fails to recognize them, starts to cry inconsolably, and the nursemaid Martha, assuming they are strangers, denies them entry into the house. The setting sun rescues the children from their plight, but despite some precautionary deliberations on the following day, their next wish—“to be rich beyond the dreams of something or other” (p. 33)—is as formulaic as their first. It also yields similarly disappointing results when they discover that the ancient coins with which the Psammead has filled the gravel-pit are refused by the local villagers, who are suspicious enough to summon the police. Nesbit spices up the episode with the children’s supplementary wish that the servants won’t notice the Psammead’s magic, which leads to mayhem when Martha appears on the scene and is unable to see the allegedly incriminating coins with which the children have filled their pockets. Once again, the dusk brings a return to normal, and when the children wake up the next morning, their squabbles over the logic of wish-fulfillment indicates that they’ve grown somewhat wary of the Psammead and more discriminating in their wishes.
At the opposite end from these stock desires are the impulsive wishes that proceed from anger or insecurity. Annoyed that the Lamb has knocked over his ginger-beer, Robert expresses his anger by wishing that others would want the child so that “we might get some peace in our lives” (p. 56). Unfortunately, one of the rules of the Psammead’s magic is that wishes cannot be annulled, and as a result, from then until sunset the Lamb must be rescued from the affectionate clutches of one stranger after another, including the haughty Lady Chittenden, who otherwise has no love for children. In a similar episode later on, Cyril blurts out that he wishes the Lamb would grow up, and consequently the children must spend an entire day with an insufferable prig who disavows his pet name as “a relic of foolish and far-off childhood” (p. 152) and insists that his brothers and sisters address him by one of his baptismal names, Hilary, St. Maur, or Devereux. (See Millar’s illustration on p. 159, which depicts Martha holding the grown-up Lamb in her arms as if her were an infant, which within her spatial frame of reference he still is.) Also based on hotheaded desire is the episode in which the children accost the rather imposing “baker’s boy” (p. 128), who is in no mood to play the victim in a game of bandits, and in the aftermath of the ensuing skirmish, Robert seeks to avenge his defeat by wishing he was bigger than his rival. His wish is immediately granted, but the now gargantuan Robert must exercise some restraint in giving the baker’s boy his comeuppance; and then, compelled to wait until sundown for the restoration of his normal proportions, he ends up as a sideshow spectacle at the local fair. Each of these incidents portrays the consequences of impetuous desire, but in their common concern with the vulnerability of children, they explore the conflict between the desire to secure the power that presumably comes with adult size and stature, and the grown-up recognition that we bear some responsibility for those who are even less secure than ourselves.
A third class of wishes is associated directly with art and the power of imagination. After the initial wishes for beauty and wealth go awry, the kind and thoughtful Anthea consults the Psammead, and while its only advice is “think before you speak” (p. 77), her wish for wings (that time-honored symbol of creative imagination) results not only in the literal gift of flight but in an experience more “wonderful and more like real magic than any wish the children had had yet” (p. 80). To be sure, when the day is done they are asleep in the turret of a church tower and must be rescued by the local vicar, but in the end the joy of their magical journey seems to outweigh the humiliations of their descent into ordinary reality and the punishment meted out by the angry Martha upon their arrival home. Moreover, as a result of this escapade Martha also meets the gamekeeper of the vicarage; therefore, as the narrator intimates, the magic of this episode may have some enduring effects, though at this point in the novel “that is another story” (p. 100), and we must wait for the final chapter to learn the outcome.