Edith Nesbit brings down the curtain on ‘The Railway Children’.
Most novelists agonise over their opening line. Edith Nesbit’s opener for The Railway Children (1905) wasn’t bad, but her final page takes the breath away. You will recall that three suburban children have moved with their mother to a small cottage near a railway line, after some men took their well-to-do father away one night in a most cloak-and-dagger fashion.
‘Be careful what you wish for’, they say, and there could be no more endearing example.
Four suburban children (two girls and two boys) have discovered a Phoenix wrapped up in a Persian carpet. The fire-bird, proud of its homeland, has encouraged them to send the magic carpet back to fetch Persia’s ‘most beautiful and delightful’ produce, and the bulging carpet has just returned.