Peter Pan

The boy at the window

All children grow up, except one.

The Darlings lived in a tall thin house in London — Mr Darling and Mrs Darling and Wendy and John and Michael, and a large dog called Nana who was the children's nurse and took the job extremely seriously.

Mrs Darling first heard about Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds at night, which is a thing mothers do after everyone is asleep, putting the day's thoughts back in their proper drawers. The name kept turning up in all three of them. *Peter Pan.* She had not the faintest idea who that was.

Then one night the window blew open, and Nana snapped at something in the dark, and the window came down hard. And when Mrs Darling ran in there was nobody there at all — only, caught in the sash, a boy's shadow.

She rolled it up neatly and put it in a drawer, the way you would.

Sewn on

He came back for it, of course.

Wendy woke to find a strange boy sitting on the nursery floor, crying with temper — he had found the shadow and could not make it stick, having tried soap.

"Boy," said Wendy, sitting up, "why are you crying?"

He got to his feet at once and bowed, because he had beautiful manners when he remembered them. Wendy got out of bed and fetched her sewing basket and sewed his shadow back on at the heel, which hurt slightly and which he bore very well, and after that he was so pleased with himself that he crowed like a rooster and danced around the room.

He told her his name was Peter Pan and that he lived in Neverland with the lost boys, and that there were no mothers there at all.

"No mothers?" said Wendy. "Peter, how perfectly awful."

And Peter said it was not awful, it was splendid, and then rather spoiled it by asking — extremely casually, looking at the ceiling — whether she happened to know any stories.

Second to the right

She knew hundreds.

That was the trouble, from Peter's point of view. The lost boys had nobody to tell them anything at bedtime, and here was a girl who knew hundreds, and it seemed to him quite obvious what ought to happen next.

Come with me, he said. All three of you. I'll teach you to fly.

Flying turned out to be mostly a matter of lovely thoughts, plus a dusting of fairy dust from Tinker Bell, who came in through the window furious about the whole arrangement and stayed furious for most of the story.

They went out over the chimneys, wobbling badly at first — Michael kept forgetting and dropping several feet before he remembered — and then better, and then they were properly away over the roofs of London with the lights going small underneath them.

"Which way?" called Wendy.

"Second to the right," Peter called back, "and straight on till morning."

It was not a real direction. Peter simply flew wherever he was going and things generally turned out. But it sounded splendid, and they followed him anyway.

The island, and the man with the hook

Neverland was every island a child has ever imagined, all at once — lagoons and caves and a wood full of noises, and it had been quietly waiting for Peter to come back and start it up again.

The lost boys lived underground in a house with a hollow tree for each of them. They took to Wendy immediately and made her a house of her own out of branches, and asked her to be their mother, and she said very well but there would be rules, and there were.

And on the far side of the island there was a ship.

Her captain was called Hook, and he had a hook where his right hand should have been, because Peter had cut the hand off in a fight years before and thrown it to a passing crocodile. The crocodile had liked it so much that it had followed Hook ever since, hoping for the rest of him.

Hook would have been more frightened of that crocodile than of anything in the world, except for one piece of luck: it had also swallowed a clock. So it went about the island going *tick, tick, tick*, and Hook always knew, and could always run.

It is a strange way to live. It had made him thin and gray and very dangerous.

The fight

Hook could not get at Peter in the wood, so he did the other thing. He waited until the children came up to play, and he took them — all of them, and Wendy — and carried them off to the ship to walk the plank in the morning.

Peter came after them alone.

He came aboard so quietly that the first thing the crew knew about it was the ticking. Peter could do the crocodile's tick perfectly, and he did it in the dark, and grown men who had done terrible things all their lives went over the side of their own ship rather than hear it coming closer.

Then he cut the children loose, and Hook found him standing on the deck.

They fought up and down the ship in the dark. Hook was the better swordsman and everybody there knew it, including Peter, who did not care in the slightest, and that turned out to matter more.

At the end of it Hook stood on the rail with the sea below him — and the sea, that night, was ticking.

The window, still open

They sailed the ship home, which took some days, and Peter steered it badly and magnificently.

The window was open. Wendy had been afraid it would be barred — she had thought about it the whole way, because in her mind there was a version of this where they came back and were not wanted — but Mrs Darling had not shut that window once since the night they went.

There was a great deal of crying, most of it from Mr Darling.

The lost boys were adopted on the spot. Mrs Darling counted them, said "well," and made room, which is the sort of thing mothers do.

Peter stayed outside on the sill.

He would not come in, and Mrs Darling came to the window and offered anyway — she would send him to school, she said, and then to an office, and he would grow up to be a man.

"And have a beard?" said Peter. "No thank you. Nobody is going to catch me and make me a man."

So Wendy climbed in and Peter did not, and that is the whole difference between them, and both of them understood it perfectly well.

Spring cleaning

He came back for her, that first year, to take her to Neverland for the spring cleaning. And the next year he forgot, and came the year after instead, and did not seem to know that he had missed one.

Wendy grew up. She could not help it, and after a while she did not want to.

She got taller and then she was grown and then she had a daughter of her own called Jane, and one night Jane was in the nursery and the window blew open and a boy came in, exactly the same age he had always been, looking for someone to do the spring cleaning.

He did not recognize Wendy at all. He was very polite about it.

And Wendy, who was sitting by the fire and could not fly any more and was not sorry, said yes — Jane could go, just for the spring cleaning, if she was careful.

So Jane went. And later Jane had a daughter called Margaret, and Margaret went too.

And it will go on like that, says the story, as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless — which is Barrie's line, and a stranger and sadder one than it looks.