I also remember my mother’s slightly dubious tone when she read the part about Nana, the Newfoundland dog who was the Darlings’ nursery maid. The odd part about it is that when I grew up, I, too, had a dog doing nursery duty. Wizard, our German shepherd, took it as his duty to keep my overly adventurous son, Todd, from wandering off our premises, as we lived on a fairly busy road. His technique was to follow the boy everywhere. When Todd would get close to something that Wizard thought was dangerous, the dog would trip my son up and sit on his chest and howl—at which point I would arrive. To be truthful, I don’t think I recalled Nana at the time I allowed Wizard to take charge. But it worked as long as a human listened. Poor Nana, she tried to tell the Darlings that there was trouble the night Peter Pan entered the children’s bedroom. Nana made me wonder about Barrie’s upbringing in Scotland. He was the ninth child of a weaver, and I could almost imagine them having a sheep dog who kept a watchful eye on such a mob. And then I learned that Barrie was accompanied by his Saint Bernard dog in Kensington Gardens when he first met the Davies children, the lads who would soon inspire the adventures of Peter Pan and the Darlings.
Sir James Michael Barrie wrote Peter Pan as a cautionary tale, as so many such fantastical tales are. He first wrote it as a play, which was performed in London on December 27, 1904, and became an annual Christmas institution. He later turned it into a novel, adding the charming final chapter called “When Wendy Grew Up,” with the further adventures of Peter Pan and Wendy. (I rather like the notion that Peter Pan came to fetch her to the Neverland in time to do the spring cleaning … and then conveyed her female descendants, one by one, a tradition that will continue “as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless”).
As I mentioned, the directions to the Neverland have stayed with me all my life: “Second to the right, and then straight on till morning.” Well, even before I became a practicing science fiction writer, I had doubts about the usefulness of such ambivalent directions. However, on close examination, if one were facing north in London, right would be east. And straight on till morning … depending on when you took off—and I presume that the Darling children were put to bed about seven—you’d run into morning over India or the Micronesian sea, which has ever so many lovely untouched islands where pirates might still anchor, and coves and lagoons and the tropical vegetation that F. D. Bedford captured so enchantingly in his illustrations. So, whimsical as it may seem, “straight on till morning” is valid. Barrie never suggests that the Neverland is not on earth somewhere. Using fairy dust as an early antigravity spray and conjuring happy thoughts do speed one up on good days.
While Peter is more interested in luring Wendy to the Neverland, he recruits her brothers easily enough with the prospect of matching wits with not only “redskins” but pirates. What red-blooded boy could resist such treats? Indeed, this is why John and Michael insist on accompanying their sister. She, on the other hand, is ultimately persuaded by the prospect of meeting mermaids.
The story is, as I said, a cautionary tale—about the necessity of growing up, which Peter eschews with immense fervor and cleverness. He has no intention of ever growing up and assuming the responsibility of making a living, marrying, and having children to raise to a similar sense of duty and responsibility. And he has gathered about him a group of “lost boys” with whom to play, who admire his cleverness and bravery. We still have lost boys with us today, and I think we always will. They can be exasperating, arrogant, and selfish, wanting, as Peter Pan did, for things to work out their way, according to their plans, because they are so clever. But they can also be irresistibly charming.
However, I know I shouldn’t like someone who only wanted my company for my spring-cleaning or storytelling abilities. Ironically, while Peter does not wish to grow up, he pushes Wendy prematurely into motherhood—all for his benefit. She is diligent and responsible in her duties as the lost boys’ surrogate mother. She darns and mends for Peter and the lost boys, who are constantly ripping the knees from their trousers and putting holes in their socks. She insists on a proper bedtime and good food. She even keeps them from eating the sweet cake with which the pirates hope to ensnare them.
If Wendy is Mother, then it occurs to her that Peter Pan, as the leader of his troupe, is Father, a position that Peter denies.
“I was just thinking,” he said, a little scared. “It is only make-believe, isn’t it, that I am their father?”
“Oh yes,” Wendy said primly.
“You see,” he continued apologetically, “it would make me seem so old to be their real father.”
“But they are ours, Peter, yours and mine.”
“But not really, Wendy?” he asked anxiously.
“Not if you don’t wish it,” she replied; and she distinctly heard his sigh of relief.
One of the most delightful aspects of Peter Pan is Barrie’s ability to reveal the inside of a child’s mind, showing how faint the line is between imagination and reality. Wendy insists on a midday rest for the boys, especially after eating (whether the food is pretend or real.) She also makes sure they take their medicine at night. (One never knows why the medicine is needed, only that it is supposed to be taken at night.)
I think that nowadays girls, having been exposed to full women’s liberation, would not fall for Peter Pan’s soft talk. And while their fantasies might include traditional ones like “playing house,” they would certainly include other adventures too, such as training dragons, or becoming a doctor or prime minister. I also wonder just how many girls now would know how to thread a needle to sew Peter’s shadow onto his foot, much less darn socks and mend trousers.
Yet the world still needs a Peter Pan, if only to remind us of that marvelous stage of life—childhood. To show that we can confound most dangers and be stalwart survivors of piratical threats as well as attacks by crocodile teeth and even the machinations of the dastardly Captain Hook, who is secretly jealous of Peter Pan’s youth and vigor.
More important, Peter Pan reminds us of a need to “believe.”
One of my favorite moments in the book is when we are all called upon to save the life of Tinker Bell, Peter’s mischievous companion and Wendy’s rival. She has drunk the poison that Captain Hook left in Peter’s medicine cup. As the bright spark fades from her fragile body, Peter attempts to revive her.
Peter flung out his arms. There were no children there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung from trees.
“Do you believe?” he cried.
Tink sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to her fate.
She fancied she heard answers in the affirmative, and then again she wasn’t sure.
“What do you think?” she asked Peter.
“If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”
Peter sends out this message to every child who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and the response is sufficient to revive the dying fairy. There is some unreconstructed, immature childlike part in us still clinging to the notion that fairies can exist. For me, a writer of unbelievable and as yet undiscovered frontiers, it is essential to believe. I do believe in fairies, I do, I do, I do. And in Peter Pan.
One last point—as of December 27, in the year 2004, Peter Pan was one hundred years old. That’s even older than I am. Not bad for a lad who didn’t wish to grow up, don’t you think?
ANNE MCCAFFREY was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College, where she majored in Slavonic languages and literatures. A prolific bestselling author, McCaffrey is best known for her Dragonriders of Pern series. She lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Peter Pan, the novel as we know it today, was written by J. M. Barrie in 1911. The novel’s original title was Peter and Wendy. It was based on Barrie’s successful stag
e play called Peter Pan, or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, which was first produced in London in 1904. The text and illustrations of this Modern Library Paperback Classic edition of Peter Pan are taken from the first American edition of Peter and Wendy, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in October 1911.
The preceding page is a facsimile of the title page from the original 1911 edition. col5
CHAPTER I
PETER BREAKS THROUGH
All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.
Of course they lived at 14, and until Wendy came her mother was the chief one. She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.
The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon could have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a passion, slamming the door.
Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only loved him but respected him. He was one of those deep ones who know about stocks and shares. Of course no one really knows, but he quite seemed to know, and he often said stocks were up and shares were down in a way that would have made any woman respect him.
Mrs. Darling was married in white, and at first she kept the books perfectly, almost gleefully, as if it were a game, not so much as a Brussels sprout was missing; but by and by whole cauliflowers dropped out, and instead of them there were pictures of babies without faces. She drew them when she should have been totting up. They were Mrs. Darling’s guesses.
Wendy came first, then John, then Michael.
For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful whether they would be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to feed. Mr. Darling was frightfully proud of her, but he was very honourable, and he sat on the edge of Mrs. Darling’s bed, holding her hand and calculating expenses, while she looked at him imploringly. She wanted to risk it, come what might, but that was not his way; his way was with a pencil and a piece of paper, and if she confused him with suggestions he had to begin at the beginning again.
“Now don’t interrupt,” he would beg of her.
“I have one pound seventeen here, and two and six at the office; I can cut off my coffee at the office, say ten shillings, making two nine and six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine seven, with five naught naught in my cheque-book makes eight nine seven,—who is that moving?—eight nine seven, dot and carry seven—don’t speak, my own—and the pound you lent to that man who came to the door—quiet, child—dot and carry child—there, you’ve done it!—did I say nine nine seven? yes, I said nine nine seven; the question is, can we try it for a year on nine nine seven?”
“Of course we can, George,” she cried. But she was prejudiced in Wendy’s favour, and he was really the grander character of the two.
“Remember mumps,” he warned her almost threateningly, and off he went again. “Mumps one pound, that is what I have put down, but I daresay it will be more like thirty shillings—don’t speak—measles one five, German measles half a guinea, makes two fifteen six—don’t waggle your finger—whooping-cough, say fifteen shillings”—and so on it went, and it added up differently each time, but at last Wendy just got through, with mumps reduced to twelve six, and the two kinds of measles treated as one.
There was the same excitement over John, and Michael had even a narrower squeak; but both were kept, and soon, you might have seen the three of them going in a row to Miss Fulsom’s Kindergarten school, accompanied by their nurse.
Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had a nurse. As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana, who had belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her. She had always thought children important, however, and the Darlings had become acquainted with her in Kensington Gardens, where she spent most of her spare time peeping into perambulators, and was much hated by careless nursemaids, whom she followed to their homes and complained of to their mistresses. She proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse. How thorough she was at bath-time, and up at any moment of the night if one of her charges made the slightest cry. Of course her kennel was in the nursery. She had a genius for knowing when a cough is a thing to have no patience with and when it needs stocking round your throat. She believed to her last day in old-fashioned remedies like rhubarb leaf, and made sounds of contempt over all this new-fangled talk about germs, and so on. It was a lesson in propriety to see her escorting the children to school, walking sedately by their side when they were well behaved, and butting them back into line if they strayed. On John’s footer days she never once forgot his sweater, and she usually carried an umbrella in her mouth in case of rain. There is a room in the basement of Miss Fulsom’s school where the nurses wait. They sat on forms, while Nana lay on the floor, but that was the only difference. They affected to ignore her as of an inferior social status to themselves, and she despised their light talk. She resented visits to the nursery from Mrs. Darling’s friends, but if they did come she first whipped off Michael’s pinafore and put him into the one with blue braiding, and smoothed out Wendy and made a dash at John’s hair.
No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and Mr. Darling knew it, yet he sometimes wondered uneasily whether the neighbours talked.
He had his position in the city to consider.
Nana also troubled him in another way. He had sometimes a feeling that she did not admire him. “I know she admires you tremendously, George,” Mrs. Darling would assure him, and then she would sign to the children to be specially nice to father. Lovely dances followed, in which the only other servant, Liza, was sometimes allowed to join. Such a midget she looked in her long skirt and maid’s cap, though she had sworn, when engaged, that she would never see ten again. The gaiety of those romps! And gayest of all was Mrs. Darling, who would pirouette so wildly that all you could see of her was the kiss, and then if you had dashed at her you might have got it. There never was a simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan.
Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtinesses and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind, and on the top, beautifully aired, are sprea
d out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.
I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.
Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents, but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other’s nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.
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