When I first came across my inspiration, E Nesbit, I wasn’t aware that I was being inspired. I was a child and she was the shadowy author behind some of my favourite books - The Railway Children, The Story of the Treasure-Seekers, Five Children and It. Somehow, though these books were written in the Edwardian age and I was reading them in the 1960s, it never occurred to me that they were in any way old-fashioned. Nesbit’s voice is surprisingly contemporary, and when I read (and re-read) her books, I loved the sense that she was talking directly to me, with entertainment as her sole purpose.
She wasn’t trying to inform me, or to enchant me - though she ended up doing both. She had a way of sharing a joke with her readers, which made one feel pleasantly sophisticated and urbane. Best of all, she knew exactly how real children behave; not winsomely, that’s for sure. Her kids are never lackeys trying to please the grown-ups.
Five Children and It, and its sequels The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet, were especially delightful to me because of the unforgettable presence of the Psammead - the haughty, grouchy sand fairy who could grant wishes. He was furry, he was fascinating, and of course his magic kept going wrong - the comic energy of these stories lies in the clash between magic and real life, which life always wins.
Nesbit became a real inspiration when I grew up and started writing myself. It wasn’t her way with magical characters that inspired me, so much as the fact that she wrote because she needed to make a living, and couldn’t do anything else (see also Louisa May Alcott and Frances Hodgson Burnett, my other two goddesses). I was in the same situation, and could only marvel at the unquenchable brilliance of Nesbit’s work while she was struggling to pay the bills. Before I started to write Five Children on the Western Front, I read the three Psammead books again, half expecting them to have lost some of their brilliance - and I fell under her spell of her imagination all over again.
