Free excerpt: Five Children on the Western Front.
From the Guardian:
The trouble started when it was too wet for the children to go out. Cyril said that the alcoves on the large, dingy staircase looked as if they were supposed to have statues in them, so he and his brother stripped down to their long, white underwear and stood in the alcoves pretending to be statues, and Anthea and Jane laughed so hard they had to cling to the banisters. But then Robert started doing fancy poses and fell out of his alcove onto the stairs with a terrifying crash, which brought Old Nurse and Ivy the maid rushing up from the basement kitchen.
‘So now we’ll have to think of something else,’ Robert said, buttoning his shirt in the wrong holes. ‘Let’s wake up you-know-who.’
Uh oh. NOW ALL I WANT TO DO IS READ E. NESBIT.