by J. M. Barrie
12. “I have no real experience.” Wendy is recruited into motherhood at a young age. Barrie’s mother, as we learn in Margaret Ogilvy, took on maternal duties at a young age: “She was eight when her mother’s death made her mistress of the house and mother to her little brother, and from that time she scrubbed and mended and baked and sewed, and argued with the flesher about the quarter pound of beef and penny bone . . . and she carried the water from the pump, and had her washing days and her ironings and a stocking always on the wire for odd moments” (Margaret Ogilvy, 28–29). The attention to sewing and to domestic activities throughout are a clear homage to Margaret Ogilvy, and Barrie freely conceded that his mother appeared in every work he had written. Wendy can also be seen as a Snow White figure who takes care of seven lost boys.
13. “you naughty children.” As soon as Wendy assumes the role of mother, she becomes both scolder and storyteller, admonishing the children to come indoors and promising them a fairy tale. She slips with ease into the maternal role occupied by Mrs. Darling, and domestic order is established by the end of the chapter.
14. they would have mischiefed. “Mischief” is used here as a verb, meaning to do physical harm to or attack. After the fairies tweak Peter’s nose in the play, we discover: “Fairies, you see, can touch him.”
CHAPTER 7
The Home under the Ground
One of the first things Peter did next day was to measure Wendy and John and Michael for hollow trees. Hook, you remember, had sneered at the boys for thinking they needed a tree apiece, but this was ignorance, for unless your tree fitted you it was difficult to go up and down, and no two of the boys were quite the same size. Once you fitted, you drew in your breath at the top, and down you went at exactly the right speed, while to ascend you drew in and let out alternately, and so wriggled up. Of course, when you have mastered the action you are able to do these things without thinking of them, and nothing can be more graceful.
But you simply must fit,1 and Peter measures you for your tree as carefully as for a suit of clothes: the only difference being that the clothes are made to fit you, while you have to be made to fit the tree. Usually it is done quite easily, as by your wearing too many garments or too few; but if you are bumpy in awkward places or the only available tree is an odd shape, Peter does some things to you, and after that you fit. Once you fit, great care must be taken to go on fitting, and this, as Wendy was to discover to her delight, keeps a whole family in perfect condition.
Wendy and Michael fitted their trees at the first try, but John had to be altered a little.
After a few days’ practice they could go up and down as gaily as buckets in a well. And how ardently they grew to love their home under the ground; especially Wendy. It consisted of one large room, as all houses should do, with a floor in which you could dig if you wanted to go fishing, and in this floor grew stout mushrooms2 of a charming colour, which were used as stools. A Never tree tried hard to grow in the centre of the room,3 but every morning they sawed the trunk through, level with the floor. By tea-time it was always about two feet high, and then they put a door on top of it, the whole thus becoming a table; as soon as they cleared away, they sawed off the trunk again, and thus there was more room to play. There was an enormous fireplace which was in almost any part of the room where you cared to light it, and across this Wendy stretched strings, made of fibre, from which she suspended her washing. The bed was tilted against the wall by day, and let down at 6:30, when it filled nearly half the room; and all the boys except Michael slept in it, lying like sardines in a tin. There was a strict rule against turning round until one gave the signal, when all turned at once. Michael should have used it also; but Wendy would have a baby, and he was the littlest, and you know what women are, and the short and long of it is that he was hung up in a basket.
It was rough and simple, and not unlike what baby bears would have made of an underground house in the same circumstances. But there was one recess in the wall, no larger than a bird-cage, which was the private apartment of Tinker Bell. It could be shut off from the rest of the house by a tiny curtain, which Tink, who was most fastidious, always kept drawn when dressing or undressing. No woman, however large, could have had a more exquisite boudoir and bedchamber combined. The couch, as she always called it, was a genuine Queen Mab,4 with club legs; and she varied the bedspreads according to what fruit-blossom was in season. Her mirror was a Puss-in-Boots, of which there are now only three, unchipped, known to the fairy dealers; the wash-stand was Pie-crust and reversible, the chest of drawers an authentic Charming the Sixth, and the carpet and rugs of the best (the early) period of Margery and Robin. There was a chandelier from Tiddlywinks for the look of the thing, but of course she lit the residence herself. Tink was very contemptuous of the rest of the house, as indeed was perhaps inevitable; and her chamber, though beautiful, looked rather conceited, having the appearance of a nose permanently turned up.
I suppose it was all especially entrancing to Wendy, because those rampagious5 boys of hers gave her so much to do. Really there were whole weeks when, except perhaps with a stocking in the evening, she was never above ground. The cooking, I can tell you, kept her nose to the pot. Their chief food was roasted breadfruit,6 yams, cocoa-nuts, baked pig, mammee-apples, tappa rolls and bananas, washed down with calabashes of poe-poe; but you never exactly knew whether there would be a real meal or just a make-believe, it all depended upon Peter’s whim. He could eat, really eat, if it was part of a game, but he could not stodge just to feel stodgy,7 which is what most children like better than anything else; the next best thing being to talk about it. Make-believe was so real to him8 that during a meal of it you could see him getting rounder. Of course it was trying, but you simply had to follow his lead, and if you could prove to him that you were getting loose for your tree he let you stodge.
Wendy’s favourite time for sewing and darning was after they had all gone to bed. Then, as she expressed it, she had a breathing time for herself; and she occupied it in making new things for them, and putting double pieces on the knees, for they were all most frightfully hard on their knees.
When she sat down to a basketful of their stockings, every heel with a hole in it, she would fling up her arms and exclaim, “Oh dear, I am sure I sometimes think spinsters are to be envied!”9
Her face beamed when she exclaimed this.
You remember about her pet wolf. Well, it very soon discovered that she had come to the island and it found her out, and they just ran into each other’s arms. After that it followed her about everywhere.
As time wore on did she think much about the beloved parents she had left behind her? This is a difficult question, because it is quite impossible to say how time does wear on in the Neverland, where it is calculated by moons and suns, and there are ever so many more of them than on the mainland. But I am afraid that Wendy did not really worry about her father and mother; she was absolutely confident that they would always keep the window open for her to fly back by, and this gave her complete ease of mind. What did disturb her at times was that John remembered his parents vaguely only, as people he had once known, while Michael was quite willing to believe that she was really his mother. These things scared her a little, and nobly anxious to do her duty, she tried to fix the old life in their minds by setting them examination papers on it, as like as possible to the ones she used to do at school. The other boys thought this awfully interesting, and insisted on joining, and they made slates for themselves, and sat round the table, writing and thinking hard about the questions she had written on another slate and passed round. They were the most ordinary questions—“What was the colour of Mother’s eyes? Which was taller, Father or Mother? Was Mother blonde or brunette? Answer all three questions if possible.” “(A) Write an essay of not less than 40 words on How I spent my last Holidays, or The Characters of Father and Mother compared. Only one of these to be attempted.” Or “(1) Describe Mother’s laugh; (2) Describe Father’s laugh; (3) Describe Mother’s Party Dress; (4)
Describe the Kennel and its Inmate.”
They were just everyday questions like these, and when you could not answer them you were told to make a cross; and it was really dreadful what a number of crosses even John made. Of course the only boy who replied to every question was Slightly, and no one could have been more hopeful of coming out first, but his answers were perfectly ridiculous, and he really came out last: a melancholy thing.
Peter did not compete. For one thing he despised all mothers except Wendy,10 and for another he was the only boy on the island who could neither write nor spell;11 not the smallest word. He was above all that sort of thing.
By the way, the questions were all written in the past tense. What was the colour of Mother’s eyes, and so on. Wendy, you see, had been forgetting too.
Adventures, of course, as we shall see, were of daily occurrence; but about this time Peter invented, with Wendy’s help, a new game that fascinated him enormously, until he suddenly had no more interest in it, which, as you have been told, was what always happened with his games. It consisted in pretending not to have adventures, in doing the sort of thing John and Michael had been doing all their lives: sitting on stools flinging balls in the air, pushing each other, going out for walks and coming back without having killed so much as a grizzly. To see Peter doing nothing on a stool was a great sight; he could not help looking solemn at such times, to sit still seemed to him such a comic thing to do. He boasted that he had gone walking for the good of his health. For several suns these were the most novel of all adventures to him; and John and Michael had to pretend to be delighted also; otherwise he would have treated them severely.
He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then when you went out you found the body; and, on the other hand, he might say a great deal about it, and yet you could not find the body. Sometimes he came home with his head bandaged, and then Wendy cooed over him and bathed it in lukewarm water, while he told a dazzling tale. But she was never quite sure, you know. There were, however, many adventures which she knew to be true because she was in them herself, and there were still more that were at least partly true, for the other boys were in them and said they were wholly true. To describe them all would require a book as large as an English-Latin, Latin-English Dictionary, and the most we can do is to give one as a specimen of an average hour on the island. The difficulty is which one to choose. Should we take the brush with the redskins at Slightly Gulch? It was a sanguinary affair, and especially interesting as showing one of Peter’s peculiarities, which was that in the middle of a fight he would suddenly change sides. At the Gulch, when victory was still in the balance, sometimes leaning this way and sometimes that, he called out, “I’m redskin to-day; what are you, Tootles?” And Tootles answered, “Redskin; what are you, Nibs?” and Nibs said, “Redskin; what are you Twin?” and so on; and they were all redskin; and of course this would have ended the fight had not the real redskins, fascinated by Peter’s methods, agreed to be lost boys for that once, and so at it they all went again, more fiercely than ever.
The extraordinary upshot of this adventure was—but we have not decided yet12 that this is the adventure we are to narrate. Perhaps a better one would be the night attack by the redskins on the house under the ground, when several of them stuck in the hollow trees and had to be pulled out like corks. Or we might tell how Peter saved Tiger Lily’s life in the Mermaids’ Lagoon, and so made her his ally.
Or we could tell of that cake the pirates cooked so that the boys might eat it and perish; and how they placed it in one cunning spot after another; but always Wendy snatched it from the hands of her children, so that in time it lost its succulence, and became as hard as a stone, and was used as a missile, and Hook fell over it in the dark.
Or suppose we tell of the birds that were Peter’s friends, particularly of the Never bird that built in a tree overhanging the lagoon, and how the nest fell into the water, and still the bird sat on her eggs, and Peter gave orders that she was not to be disturbed. That is a pretty story, and the end shows how grateful a bird can be; but if we tell it we must also tell the whole adventure of the lagoon, which would of course be telling two adventures rather than just one. A shorter adventure, and quite as exciting, was Tinker Bell’s attempt, with the help of some street fairies, to have the sleeping Wendy conveyed on a great floating leaf to the mainland. Fortunately the leaf gave way and Wendy woke, thinking it was bath-time, and swam back. Or again, we might choose Peter’s defiance of the lions, when he drew a circle round him on the ground with an arrow13 and defied them to cross it; and though he waited for hours, with the other boys and Wendy looking on breathlessly from trees, not one of them dared to accept his challenge.
Which of these adventures shall we choose? The best way will be to toss for it.
I have tossed, and the lagoon has won. This almost makes one wish that the gulch or the cake or Tink’s leaf had won. Of course I could do it again, and make it best out of three; however, perhaps fairest to stick to the lagoon.
1. But you simply must fit. The narrator uses a form of address that suggests the novel’s origins in an oral storytelling situation. The conversational “you”—here as elsewhere in the work—allows us to conjure up an adult speaking to a child or to a group of children, explaining exactly how “you” are fitted to a tree.
2. grew stout mushrooms. Fairies were frequently associated with mushrooms and toadstools in Victorian England. Arthur Rackham and Richard Dadd, among other British illustrators, brought the two together, with fairies often dancing in a ring around toadstools, or a ring of mushrooms serving as a stage for the fairy dance.
3. A Never tree tried hard to grow in the centre of the room. Trees here are connected with individuals (each child has his own), and they are part of the island’s landscape, but they also have a cosmic significance. In many mythological systems, a tree is rooted at the world’s navel (omphalos)—at its “centre”—as the axis mundi. In Norse mythology Yggdrasil is the World Tree, a great ash joining different worlds and generating life.
4. Queen Mab. Queen Mab, the fairy ruler of European folklore, gave dreams to human beings. She was also known as a mischief maker who sometimes exchanged babies at their birth. Mercutio describes her in Romeo and Juliet as “the fairies’ midwife, and she comes / In shape no bigger than an agate-stone.” The remaining pieces of furniture have equally whimsical names, used in part to satirize the pretentiousness of antique dealers in Barrie’s London.
5. rampagious. Usually spelled “rampageous,” the term means “unruly,” “boisterous,” or “given to rampages.”
6. roasted breadfruit. Mammee-apples are from the mammee tree of tropical South America and resemble mangosteens. Tappa rolls are rolls of unwoven cloth made from the paper mulberry tree in Polynesia. They are not edible. Calabashes of poe-poe are gourds containing the Hawaiian food poi, made from the corm of the taro plant. These exotic dishes do not fix Neverland’s location, but they make it clear that Peter inhabits a tropical island.
7. stodge just to feel stodgy. “Stodge” means to gorge, and to “feel stodgy” is to have eaten one’s fill.
8. Make-believe was so real to him. Cynthia Asquith, who carried out her secretarial duties right in Barrie’s home and spent more time with him than almost any other person did, reports that her employer wandered “in some entrancing borderland between fantasy and fact. For him the frontier between these two realms was never very clearly marked. Once, when he had just told me some ostensibly autobiographical anecdote, a genuinely puzzled, even worried, expression came into his face. ‘I can’t remember, now, whether the actual incident ever really took place,’ he said wistfully” (Asquith, Portrait, 76).
9. “Oh dear, I am sure I sometimes think spinsters are to be envied!” Wendy appears to be following a script, quoting phrases she has heard from her own mother and mimicking her beh
avior.
10. he despised all mothers except Wendy. The narrator inserts “despise” and “mother” into the same sentence with alarming frequency. He will later report that mothers are always willing to be buffers (or mediators) and that children resent them for it. And near the end of the novel, the narrator will, out of the blue, denounce Mrs. Darling, claiming that she has “no proper spirit.”
11. the only boy on the island who could neither write nor spell. With no education at all, Peter is not only the boy who will not grow up but also the boy who will never read. His illiteracy can be connected with his lack of memory and inability to think beyond the present moment to the past or to the future. Growing up in a family and in a culture that understood the value of education, Barrie may have inserted this aside to show exactly how far Peter stands from culture and how closely allied he is with nature. And school is also, of course, the antithesis of Neverland.
12. but we have not decided yet. The narrator produces a fictional space in which multiple outcomes are possible and in which everything remains provisional and contingent. Like Peter, the narrator is unpredictable, mercurial, and resistant to being fixed.
13. he drew a circle round him on the ground with an arrow. The gesture of drawing an exclusionary circle with a weapon is repeated by Hook, when he uses his “iron claw” to draw “a circle of dead water round him, from which they fled like affrighted fishes.” The final combat between Peter Pan and Hook takes place when the boys form “a ring round them.” Again we see how episodes in the work are inspired by boys’ play, with theatrical gestures (a weapon flourished) and arrangements (combat with spectators) adding to the effect of the stage version.
CHAPTER 8
The Mermaids’ Lagoon
If you shut your eyes1 and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire. But just before they go on fire you see the lagoon. This is the nearest you ever get to it on the mainland, just one heavenly moment; if there could be two moments you might see the surf and hear the mermaids singing.