Edith Nesbit, everyday magic and the trouble with wishes

Edith Nesbit had a gift that few writers have ever matched. She could take a perfectly ordinary family, set them down in a perfectly ordinary place, and then let something astonishing wander in through the back gate. Her magic turns up on a summer holiday, at the bottom of a gravel pit, rolled up inside a second-hand carpet. It arrives exactly where children are already a little bored, and it changes everything apart from the need to be home in time for tea.

In Five Children and It, Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane, with the baby brother everyone calls the Lamb, are digging in a gravel pit when they uncover a Psammead, a sand-fairy. He is one of the great creations of children's fiction, with eyes on long horns like a snail's, ears like a bat's, a tubby furry body and the hands and feet of a monkey. He is also extremely cross at being dug up. Grudgingly, he agrees to grant them one wish a day, and each wish lasts until sunset.

What follows is a gloriously practical study of what wishing really involves. The children wish to be as beautiful as the day, and their own household refuses to recognise them, so they spend a long, hungry afternoon shut out of their own lives. They wish for gold and discover that nobody in the neighbourhood will accept a pile of old coins from a group of grubby children without asking awkward questions. They wish for wings, fly gloriously over the countryside, fall asleep on top of a church tower, and wake at sunset to find their wings gone and no way down. Every wish is granted exactly, and every one teaches them something about the distance between wanting a thing and living with it.

Nesbit never delivers that lesson from a pulpit. She is far too funny. Her narrator chats to the reader like a clever, slightly mischievous aunt, breaking off to comment on grown-ups, on books and on the way things really are, while the children argue, sulk, make up and try again in voices that still sound startlingly real. The magic is wild and the people are utterly recognisable, and that combination is her secret.

The same family returns in The Phoenix and the Carpet, where a carpet bought for the nursery turns out to have an egg rolled up inside it. The egg finds its way into the fire, and out of the flames hatches a Phoenix, vain, courteous and very fond of being admired, while the carpet itself will carry the children wherever they wish to go. In The Story of the Amulet they come across the Psammead again, for sale in a London pet shop, and set off with half of an ancient charm to search distant times and places for the missing half. The adventures grow larger, and the children grow with them.

The Enchanted Castle may be the most haunting of all. Gerald, Jimmy and Kathleen find their way through a maze into the grounds of a great house, where a girl lies asleep in a princess's dress. Her name is Mabel, she is the housekeeper's niece, and she is only pretending, until the ring she shows them proves to be truly magic. It makes her invisible, then reveals far stranger powers, and its wishes have a way of taking words at their most exact meaning. By moonlight, the statues in the gardens come alive. Nesbit lets comedy and eeriness sit side by side, which is exactly how enchantment feels.

And then there is The Railway Children, which has no fairies in it at all and still feels touched by magic. When their father is taken away, Roberta, Peter and Phyllis move with their mother to a cottage called Three Chimneys, above a railway line. The trains become their friends. The children wave to an old gentleman on the morning train, he waves back, and from that small everyday kindness a whole chain of good things begins. It is a book about how ordinary courage and ordinary goodness can work like a spell.

Why read Nesbit now? Her central question has aged remarkably well. We live surrounded by machines that grant wishes almost instantly, and her books ask, with a smile, what happens next. What does it cost? Who else is affected? Can it be put right before sunset? Her children learn to wish carefully, generously and together, and the lesson lands softly because it comes wrapped in adventure.

Several of these stories are also available as audiobooks read by Eloise Fairfax, and they are a joy to hear, full of voices and asides. Wherever you start, start with the gravel pit. Somewhere in the warm sand, something furry and very bad-tempered is waiting to be found.