From Cyril’s first letter from the front, I felt a deep sense of foreboding and uncertainty for the children and their fairy friend: I felt that they and the story sat poised a knife-edge of great change. I've never read Five Children and It but I'm familiar with the story from 90s TV series, so I already had hazy memories of the Pembletons and Psammead. The Psammead is meant to be the main character in the book, yet I feel like he’s sort of just there.

Have you ever wondered what happened to the Five Children and It characters when the First World War began? There's no sharp contrast felt either in the worlds of the original books - that golden, Edwardian, Kentish summer, and the world of a Britain at war. When I first saw that Kate Saunders had taken Nesbit’s classic trilogy and used the characters and place to tell her own story in commemoration of the First World War, I point-blank refused to touch it. There are still a few adults around who can recite "In Flanders Fields" but that is about all that is remembered about a war that changed society and civilization.

While the children are happy to see him, he is in the position of knowing their future and his tears makes for a very poignant beginning. A hand poured wax seal to finish it all off – great for keeping and putting in a journal or scrapbook as decoration!

She refuses to think less of the Psammead, whatever he has done: ‘I’ll never think less of you’ and when the Psammead finally prepares to leave, Edie’s words will break a little piece of your heart off: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help crying… It’s just that I love you so much! Why invoke these particular characters and their background of fun, innocent childhood and put them in wartime unless you were interested in how that contrast communicated. I can say that the broad idea of these characters encountering the war will stay with me and provoke thought and feeling.It was as if I was back with Cyril, Anthea, Bobs, Jane and the Lamb – albeit more grown up and with a new sibling in the fray: Edie.

Time jumps forward to the First World War when the original Five children are grown, and the youngest two Lamb (who was a baby before) and Edie (not born yet) take over as the main children. The older children are all adolescents or young adults and, by sheer necessity, dull by dint of age.It should come as no surprise that WWI affects them, although somehow you don't think of that when you read the original books. The very upper-middle-class-ness of it grated a little -- and even the working class Cockney character spoke like that, so idek what was going on there. To take on Nesbit’s stories is brave and brilliantly done, and has the kind of ending that makes you feel sad and happy, warm and cold at the same time.