Betwixt and Between

Almost exclusively about Peter Pan sorry

I read Peter Pan on trains through Europe. London to Paris, Paris to Geneva; looking for the first time at tiny alpine huts dotted across the slopes of Swiss mountains and imagined Heidi there, and my mum in her twenties living in an A-frame hut, making enormous wheels of cheese and milking cows. I sent Zoe a photo of the view out the train window and told her to squint and try see Clara’s wheelchair hurtling down a ravine. Heidi makes me think of Zoe and soft white buns and the excess of religion in the book that we discovered reading it as adults, but we still loved those happy scenes of fresh air and milk and frolicking.

I’ve been continuing to read children’s classics, inspired by my course with Kate De Goldi. The big guns I’ve read in the last few months - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Secret Garden and Peter Pan - made me realise that I had always subconsciously assumed that they were classics because of their delightful storylines, fresh for constant reinterpretation and adaptations. I feel silly saying that their incredible writing surprised me. Peter Pan made me laugh out loud, send photos of passages to my book club, read sections to my partner who was sitting opposite me on the train. The scene where all the groups are all following each other around the island but obliviously keeping exact pace with one another so no one catches anyone else - the picture is painted so perfectly and delightfully. Here I guess I’m reminded of the text beginning life as a play. James Barrie knew what he was doing. Hook thinking about ‘good form’, or lack of it, scarred from his days at a posh English boys school. His envy of Smee seeming to be the ultimate exemplar of good form - not even being aware of it. My favourite is when Hook tries to fight back against his internal, school-based critic by crying out about his notoriety and how he has bested other famous villains like Barbecue and Flint. The reply is simply, “Barbecue, Flint - what house?”

I think I finished Peter Pan in Bologna, between Daphne Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek and Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, on our bed in the apartment on Via de Pratello with a sloped roof and a skylight above me. There was a heatwave. The ending made me cry. I think about it constantly. It’s not just that Wendy grew up, devastating Peter - it’s the way the scene is written. It’s gut-wrenching. Wendy is hiding in the dark from Peter so he won’t see she’s an adult. He doesn’t know that any time has passed, he thinks the child in the bed, Wendy’s daughter, is Michael or John. Michael and John aren’t there, and I think of the Llewelyn-Davies boys who Barrie wrote Peter Pan for, and how George died in World War One and Michael drowned. Peter’s horror when Wendy turns on the light. She says she can’t fly anymore, tells him she’s grown up. His response, “You promised not to!” kills me; then the outright denial:

“I couldn’t help it. I am a married woman, Peter.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, and the little girl in the bed is my baby.”

“No, she’s not.”

Then Peter’s sobbing. And Wendy’s daughter wakes up and repeats the sweet, famous line, “Boy, why are you crying?” And it begins again.

In a notebook I find a quote that I wrote down after reading the glorious Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones: “The penalty of being grown up was that you saw things like this photograph as they really were”. Underneath I scribbled: ‘Growing up as loss. Sense of loss in children’s literature. I need to read Peter Pan.’

This is an obvious trend in children’s stories, that to grow up is to lose access to your imagination, to magic. But with Peter Pan - the boy who never grew up- who wouldn’t grow up - we feel sorry for him. The Darling children and even the Lost Boys, to an extent, know when things are real vs. make believe, but Peter doesn’t. It’s like we’re in on a secret without him. Is this because of that layer of Peter Pan being written for adults? The other book I’ve read recently with flying children in it is The Summer Birds by Penelope Farmer. Like in Peter Pan, children in this book are given the gift of flight by a mysterious, magical boy. Flight, the ultimate childhood (or human?) dream? The Summer Birds has a darkness to it, and instead of feeling sorry for Peter, we feel sorry for the teacher in the book who is too old to be taught to fly. There’s an idea that James Barrie didn’t want to grow up, but I think it’s more that he wishes he never had to. His older brother died when he was 13 and James was six, and he remembers wearing his dead brothers clothes and whistling his favourite tunes to try and alleviate his mother’s grief. His mother also had to grown up too young, taking over the household domestic responsibilities at eight when her mother died. James and his mother used to talk about her brief childhood and share favourite children’s stories.

We are in Naples when Taylor Swift’s new album comes out, with a song on it called Peter. It’s about the grief of a lost love, someone you thought would one day be the one. The chorus says, ‘You said you were gonna grow up, then you were gonna come find me’. It ends with ‘The woman who sits by the window has turned out the light’, when the boy who was supposed to grow up has lost his chance. Again, we feel sorry for this ‘boy’ who hasn’t grown up.

Compared with all the other children’s fiction I’ve been reading lately, Peter Pan is unique in this - the pity for the one who stays in magic, stays in Neverland, doesn’t grow up. But is this a choice, or is Peter an element of imagination himself? In which case it’s the idea that we have to break that relationship with childhood joy and magic in order to live in reality - and that that isn’t a bad thing. But in many kids books the loss of imagination is bad; the parents or adults are symbols of restriction, of boredom, of the curtailing of adventures, freedom, magic. This seems to be a trend in the 20th century children’s literature I’ve read. More recent authors have started to look at adults in a more positive light, making some adults/parents allies, like in Anna James’s Pages and Co series. We still get the skipped generation magic - the grandparent/grandchild relationships of classics like The Princess and the Goblin, The Children of Greenknowe, but more on this another time.

I’m now back in Wellington and have read the first Peter Pan story, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The battered copy I read from the library stacks has the original illustrations by Arthur Rackham. They’re creepy and sinister and beautiful at the same time. I feel like I could squeeze the fat, rolling arms of baby Peter. This story started as James Barrie telling the Llewelyn-Davies boys that their baby brother could fly; that all babies can fly - that’s why there are bars on nursery windows. In Kensington Gardens, Peter Pan is a baby who escaped his nursery and flew back to Kensington Gardens, to the island of birds where all babies come from. And it’s here that I learn what Peter is - a being who is ‘Betwixt-and-Between’. He was born as a baby, had a mother, but has stayed with the birds and fairies. But both the birds and fairies are aware of his otherness.

I feel a bit like this myself at the moment, between things. The classic post-holiday slump, returning to cold, damp winter. I still feel at times like I’m in Britain, when I hear the songs we listened to in our rental car driving through tiny country lanes in Cornwall and Wales. Or when I smell the distinctive, specific laundry soap smell that makes me think of England both this year and ten years ago when I lived in London. I’m still thinking about the books I read while I was away, and where I read them, and wishing I were still beach combing in Cornwall with Daphne Du Maurier’s lovers from Frenchman’s Creek on my mind, or peering into a rock pool like the one from The Sea Egg by Lucy Boston. I keep replaying my dive into the cold silk of the Hampstead Heath Ladies Pond. The immediate gasp of cold to the head, full body shock, the ducks guarding the lifeguard’s hut, the bright pink beanie a fellow swimmer wore as she calmly breast-stroked her way around the serene, magical place. It felt like I’d entered a secret, joyous portal, a bubble of another world.

I’ll keep reading, which is my usual way of dealing with (/escaping) reality. Reading to live.

Reading or just read:

Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers - Ok turns out Mary Poppins is pretty nuts and definitely less cheery and sweet than in the movies. They go on some batshit adventures then Mary Poppins regularly gaslights Jane and Michael post-adventure and pretends nothing happened.

Black Maria, Diana Wynne Jones - Actually incredible, perhaps a new favourite DWJ. This reminded me in some ways of Fire and Hemlock, in the way magic is never called what it is, and just exists in a sinister manner within a very mundane world. It also, like Fire and Hemlock, makes me want todissect it with others, write a thesis, attend a conference, do a Ted Talk, etc etc.

My Friend the Octopus, Lindsay Galvin - Completely delightful, well-written historical junior fiction set in 1893 Brighton. I loved this one big time. Seaside, baking, 1890s fashion, sea creatures, the Brighton aquarium.

Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain, Amy Jeffs - I read a friend’s copy when we stayed at her house in London. Filled with stories of myth and mist and magic and wild, old places and illustrated with incredible, evocative woodcut prints by the author. I’ve got her next book Wild sitting on my bedside table to be read soon.