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 [their house number on their street], 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 around 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 [in England soccer was called football, “footer” for
short] 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 naughtiness 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 spread 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, needlework, 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 [simple boat].
We too have been there; we can still hear the sound
of the surf, though we shall land no more.
Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest
and most compact; not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious
distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed.
When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the
least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes
very nearly real. That is why there are night-lights.
Occasionally in her travels through her children's minds Mrs. Darling found
things she could not understand, and of these quite the most perplexing was
the word Peter. She knew of no Peter,
and yet he was here and there in John and Michael's minds, while Wendy's
began to be scrawled all over with him. The name stood out in bolder letters than
any of the other words, and as Mrs. Darling gazed she felt that it
had an oddly cocky appearance.
“Yes, he is rather cocky, ” Wendy admitted with regret. Her mother
had been questioning her.
“But who is he, my pet? ”
“He is Peter Pan, you know, mother.”
At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into
her childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to
live with the fairies. There were odd stories about him; as that when
children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not
be frightened. She had believed in him at the time, but now that she
was married and full of sense she quite doubted whether there was any such person.
“Besides, ” she said to Wendy, “he would be grown up by this time.”
“Oh no, he isn't grown up, ” Wendy assured her confidently, “and he is
just my size.” She meant that he was her size in both mind and body;
she didn't know how she knew it, she just knew it.
Mrs. Darling consulted Mr. Darling, but he smiled pooh-pooh.“Mark my
words, ” he said, “it is some nonsense Nana has been putting into their heads;
just the sort of idea a dog would have. Leave it alone, and it will blow over.”
But it would not blow over; and soon the troublesome boy gave Mrs. Darling
quite a shock.
Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them.
For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event happened,
that when they were in the wood they met their dead father and had a game