They were not even allowed to have a bonfire in the garden.
‘No more playing with fire, thank you,’ was father’s answer, when they asked him.
When the baby had been put to bed the children sat sadly round the fire in the nursery.
‘I’m beastly bored,’ said Robert.
‘Let’s talk about the Psammead,’ said Anthea, who generally tried to give the conversation a cheerful turn.
‘What’s the good of TALKING?’ said Cyril. ‘What I want is for something to happen. It’s awfully stuffy for a chap not to be allowed out in the evenings. There’s simply nothing to do when you’ve got through your homers.’
Jane finished the last of her home-lessons and shut the book with a bang.
‘We’ve got the pleasure of memory,’ said she. ‘Just think of last holidays.’
Last holidays, indeed, offered something to think of—for they had been spent in the country at a white house between a sand-pit and a gravel-pit, and things had happened. The children had found a Psammead, or sand-fairy, and it had let them have anything they wished for—just exactly anything, with no bother about its not being really for their good, or anything like that. And if you want to know what kind of things they wished for, and how their wishes turned out you can read it all in a book called Five Children and It (It was the Psammead). If you’ve not read it, perhaps I ought to tell you that the fifth child was the baby brother, who was called the Lamb, because the first thing he ever said was ‘Baa!’ and that the other children were not particularly handsome, nor were they extra clever, nor extraordinarily good. But they were not bad sorts on the whole; in fact, they were rather like you.
‘I don’t want to think about the pleasures of memory,’ said Cyril; ‘I want some more things to happen.’