Peter Pan in Scarlet Read online

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  Published with the support of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity

  Text copyright © 2006 Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London (Charity Reg. No. 235825)

  Illustrations copyright © 2006 David Wyatt

  Calligraphy copyright © 2006 Stephen Raw

  The moral rights of Geraldine McCaughrean, the author, have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  First published 2006

  First published in this eBook edition 2010

  Acknowledgement is made to the Precentor and Director of Music at Eton College for permission to use the words of the Eton Boating Song. ‘Dedicatory Ode’ from Complete Verse by Hilaire Belloc (copyright © The Estate of Hilaire Belloc 1970) is reproduced by permission of PFD (www.pfd.co.uk) on behalf of The Estate of Hilaire Belloc.

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  ISBN: 978–0–19–279284–6

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  For all daring explorers,

  and for Mr Barrie, of course

  HOW THIS BOOK CAME ABOUT

  First it was a play. Then it was a book. During the early years of the twentieth century, the story of Peter Pan was a runaway success which made James Matthew Barrie the most successful author in Britain.

  In 1929, Barrie made a remarkable gift to his favourite charity. He gave away all his rights in Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. This meant that whenever anyone staged a production of the play or bought a copy of Peter Pan and Wendy, the hospital would be the richer for it, instead of Barrie. Over the years, it has proved a more valuable gift than he could ever have imagined.

  In 2004, Great Ormond Street Hospital decided to sanction, for the very first time, a sequel to the book Peter Pan and Wendy. They held a competition to find, from among authors all over the world, someone to continue Peter’s adventures in Neverland. With a plot outline and a sample chapter, Geraldine McCaughrean won that competition. Peter Pan in Scarlet is the book she wrote. Now you can read it.

  From quiet homes and first beginning,

  Out to the undiscovered ends,

  There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,

  But laughter and the love of friends.

  Hilaire Belloc

  ‘I’m not going to bed,’ said John—which startled his wife. Children are never ready for bed, but grown-ups like John are usually hankering for their pillows and eiderdowns from the moment they finish dinner. ‘I’m not going to bed!’ said John again, and so ferociously that his wife knew he was very frightened indeed.

  ‘You have been dreaming again, haven’t you?’ she said tenderly. ‘Such a trial.’

  John scrubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. ‘I told you. I never dream! What does a man have to do to be believed in his own house?’

  His wife stroked his shiny head and went to turn down the bedclothes. And there on John’s side of the bed, something bulged up through the coverlet. It wasn’t a hot-water bottle or a teddy bear or a library book. Mrs John folded down the sheets. It was a cutlass.

  With a sigh, she hung it on the hook behind the bedroom door, alongside the quiver of arrows and John’s dressing gown. Both she and her husband liked to pretend it was not happening (because that’s what grown-ups do when they are in trouble) but secretly they both knew: John was dreaming of Neverland again. After every dream, something was left behind in his bed next morning, like the stones around a dish after a serving of prunes. A sword here, a candle there, a bow, a medicine bottle, a top hat … The night after he dreamt of mermaids, a fishy smell hung about the stairs all day. The wardrobe was piled high with the dregs of dreams—an alarm clock, an Indian head-dress, an eye-patch, a pirate’s tricorn hat. (The worst nights were when John dreamed of Captain Hook.)

  Mrs John plumped up the pillows with a brisk blow of her hand—and a gunshot rang out through the whole house, waking the neighbours and terrifying the dog. The bullet shied about the room, bouncing off the lamp-stand and smashing a vase. Cautiously, with two fingers, Mrs John drew the pistol from under the pillow and dropped it into the bin, like a kipper found to be not quite fresh.

  ‘They are so real!’ whimpered her husband from the doorway. ‘These wretched dreams are just so REAL!’

  All over London and even as far afield as Fotheringdene and Grimswater, old boys were dreaming the same kind of dreams. Not young, silly boys but boys grown-up: cheerful, stolid boys who worked in banks or drove trains or grew strawberries or wrote plays or stood for Parliament. Cosy at home, surrounded by family and friends, they thought themselves comfortable and safe … until the dreams began. Now each night they dreamed of Neverland and woke to find leftovers in their beds—daggers or coils of rope, a pile of leaves or a hook.

  And what did they have in common, these dreamers? Just one thing. They had all once been Boys in Neverland.

  ‘I have called you all together, because something must be done!’ said Judge Tootles, twirling his big moustache. ‘It is not good enough! Gone on far too long! Won’t do! Enough is enough! We must act!’

  They were eating brown soup in the library of the Gentlemen’s Club off Piccadilly—a brown room with brown portraits of gentlemen wearing brown suits. Smoke from the fireplace hung in the air like a brown fog. On the dining table lay an assortment of weapons, the sole of a shoe, a cap, a pair of giant bird’s eggs.

  The Honourable Slightly fingered them thoughtfully: ‘The flotsam of Night washed up on the shores of Morning!’ he said (but then the Honourable Slightly played the clarinet in a nightclub and was inclined to write poetry).

  ‘Call Mrs Wendy! Mrs Wendy would know what to do!’ said Judge Tootles. But of course Wendy had not been invited, because ladies are not allowed in the Gentlemen’s Club.

  ‘I say we should let sleeping dogs lie,’ said Mr Nibs, but nobody thanked him, because dogs are not allowed in the Gentlemen’s Club either.

  ‘Mind over matter!’ exclaimed Mr Jo
hn. ‘We must just try harder not to dream!’

  ‘We tried that,’ said the Twins mournfully. ‘Stayed awake all night for a week.’

  ‘And what happened?’ asked Mr John, intrigued.

  ‘We fell asleep on the London omnibus on the way to work, and dreamed all the way to Putney. When we got off, we were both wearing warpaint.’

  ‘How perfectly charming,’ said the Honourable Slightly.

  ‘Last night we dreamed of the Lagoon,’ added the second Twin.

  There was a murmur of heartfelt sighs. Each of the Old Boys had dreamed lately of the Lagoon and woken with wet hair, and dazzle in his eyes.

  ‘Is there a cure, Curly?’ enquired Mr Nibs, but Doctor Curly knew of no cure for an outbreak of unwanted dreams.

  ‘We should write a letter of complaint!’ boomed Judge Tootles. But nobody knew of a Ministry for Dreams or whether there was a Minister of State for Nightmares.

  In the end, with nothing solved and no plan of campaign, the Old Boys sank into silence and fell asleep in their armchairs, their brown coffee cups dropping brown drips on to the brown carpet. And they all dreamed the same dream.

  They dreamed they were playing tag with the mermaids, while the reflections of rainbows twisted around and between them like water snakes. Then, from somewhere deeper down and darker, came a hugely slithering shape that brushed the soles of their feet with its knobbly, scaly hide …

  When they woke, the Old Boys’ clothes were sopping wet, and there on its back, in the middle of the Gentlemen’s Library was a prodigious crocodile, lashing its tail and snapping its jaws in an effort to turn over and make supper of them.

  The Gentlemen’s Club emptied in the record time of forty-three seconds, and next day Members everywhere received a letter from the management.

  In the end, of course, it was Mrs Wendy who explained it. ‘Dreams are leaking out of Neverland,’ she said. ‘Something must be wrong. If we want the dreams to stop, we must find out what.’

  Mrs Wendy was a grown woman, and as sensible as can be. She had a tidy mind. For six days in any week she strongly disapproved of dreams littering up the house. But on the seventh, she was not quite so sure. Recently she had begun hurrying to bed, eager for that twilight flicker that comes between waking and sleep. From behind closed eyelids she would watch for a dream to come floating towards her—just as once she had watched at her bedroom window, hoping against hope for a small figure to come swooping through the local stars. Each bedtime her heart beat faster at the thought of glimpsing the Lagoon again, or hearing the cry of the Neverbird. Above all, she longed to see Peter again: the friend she had left behind in Neverland all those years before.

  Now Neverland was rubbing against the Here and Now, wearing holes in the fabric in between. Tendrils of dream were starting to poke through. All was not well. Somehow Mrs Wendy knew it.

  ‘Perhaps the dreams are messages,’ said one Twin.

  ‘Perhaps they are warnings,’ said the other.

  ‘Perhaps they are symptoms,’ said Dr Curly, putting his stethoscope to his own forehead and listening for the dreams inside.

  ‘I’m awfully afraid they may be,’ said Wendy. ‘Something is wrong in Neverland, gentlemen … and that is why we must go back.’

  ‘Go back!?’

  Go back to Neverland? Go back to the mysterious island, with its mermaids, pirates, and redskins? The Old Boys snorted and blustered and shook their heads till their cheeks flapped. Go back to Neverland? Never!

  ‘Preposterous!’

  ‘Ridiculous!’

  ‘Poppycock!’

  ‘Fol-de-riddle!’

  ‘I’m a busy man!’

  In the rosy gloom of her parlour, Mrs Wendy poured more tea and passed round the cucumber sandwiches. ‘As I see it, there are three problems,’ she said, ignoring their cries of protest. ‘First, we have all grown too big. No one but a child can fly to Neverland.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Judge Tootles looked down at the straining buttons of his waistcoat. Over the years, he had indeed grown too big, in every direction.

  ‘Secondly, we can no longer fly as we could then,’ said Mrs Wendy.

  ‘Well, there you are, then!’ Mr John remembered the evening when a boy dressed in a suit of leaves had flown into his life and taught him, too, to fly. He remembered leaping from the open bedroom window and that first heart-stopping moment when night had caught him in its open palm. He remembered dipping and soaring through the black sky, blipped by bats, nipped by the frost, keeping tight hold of his umbrella … Oh, how brave he had been in those days! Mr John gave a start as Mrs Wendy dropped a sugar lump into his cup with a pair of silver tongs: his thoughts had been up among the moonbeams.

  ‘And before we can fly,’ Mrs Wendy was saying, ‘we need fairy dust.’

  ‘Then it is plainly impossible.’ The Honourable Slightly looked down at the breadcrumbs on his trousers, and a lump filled his throat. He remembered fairy dust. He remembered it glittering on his skin like water drops. He remembered the tingling sensation it sent racing through his veins. Even after all these years, he still remembered.

  ‘I think it is best if we do not tell anyone we are going,’ said Mrs Wendy. ‘It might upset those we love. Also it might attract the attention of the newspapers.’

  There did not seem to be any arguing with her, so the Old Boys wrote down what she said, in their appointment diaries, under the heading

  ‘I think Saturday week would be best,’ said Mrs Wendy. ‘There is a full moon that night, and the children will not need collecting from school. With luck, this annoying cold of mine will have cleared up, too. So, gentlemen. Shall we say June the fifth? I am sure I can rely on you to arrange everything?’

  The Old Boys wrote in their appointment diaries:

  Then they sucked their pencils and waited for Mrs Wendy to tell them what to do next. Wendy would know. Why, even with a cold she did not need an appointment diary to remind her what jobs needed doing!

  Next day, Mrs Wendy’s cold kept her from going out, but the Old Boys found themselves in Kensington Gardens with butterfly nets, wandering up and down. Looking for fairies.

  There was a stiff breeze blowing. Something white and fluffy brushed Mr Nibs’s face and he gave a shriek. ‘There’s one! It kissed me!’ And all the gentlemen went pounding after it. The wind was rising. Other scraps of whiteness scudded past, until the air seemed to be full of flying snowflakes all twirling and dancing, feathery light. The Old Boys trampled the grass flat with running to and fro, swiping at fairies, accidentally swatting each other, whooping and shrieking, ‘Got one!’

  ‘So have—OW!’

  ‘Here’s one, look!’

  But when they peered into their butterfly nets, all they found were the fluffy seed-heads off summer’s first dandelions. There was not a single fairy in among the dande-down.

  All day they searched. As the sun went down and starlings gathered over the glimmering city, the Lost Boys hid themselves among the bushes of Kensington Gardens. Early stars ventured into the sky, their reflections spangling the Serpentine. And suddenly the air was a-flicker with wings!

  Jubilant, the ambushers leapt out of hiding and ran to and fro, nets flailing.

  ‘Got one!’

  ‘By Jove!’

  ‘Don’t hurt them!’

  ‘Ouch! Watch what you are doing, sir!’

  ‘I say! This is ripping fun!’

  But when they turned the nets inside out, what did they find? Midges and moths and mayflies.

  ‘I have one in here! Definitely! Incontrovertibly!’ cried Mr John, cramming his bowler hat back on to his head to trap the captive inside. The others gathered round, jostling to see. The hat came off again, with a sigh of suction; Mr John reached in with finger and thumb, plucked something out of the satin lining and held it up to show them—the iridescent purple, the shiny, flexing, turquoise body …

  Only a dragonfly.

  Mr John opened his fingertips, and eight pairs of disapp
ointed eyes followed the lovely creature as it staggered and waltzed back towards the water.

  ‘I don’t believe there is a single fairy …’ began Dr Curly, but the others felled him to the ground and clapped their hands over his mouth.

  ‘Don’t say it! Don’t ever say that!’ cried Mr Nibs, horrified. ‘Don’t you remember? Every time someone says they don’t believe in fairies, a fairy somewhere dies!’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe in them!’ said the doctor, tugging the rumples out of his suit. ‘I was only going to say, I don’t believe there is one single fairy here. Tonight.In this park. I have mud on my trousers, insect bites on my ankles, and I have not eaten supper yet. Can we give up now?’

  The other Old Boys looked around them at the twilit park, the distant, glimmering streetlamps. They looked at the soles of their shoes, in case they had trodden on any fairies by mistake. They looked into the water of the Serpentine, in case any of the stars reflected there were really fairies, swimming. No fairies, no fairy dust. Perhaps, after all, they would not be going back to Neverland.

  ‘All for the best. Absurd idea,’ growled Mr John, but no one answered.

  The Honourable Slightly took from his pocket a gleaming bubble filmy with every colour of the rainbow. ‘Last night I dreamed I was playing water polo with the mermaids,’ he said. ‘This was on my pillow when I woke.’

  The bubble popped and was gone.

  The park gates were locked when they got there. The Old Boys had to climb over, and Judge Tootles tore his best tweed jacket.

  In the end, it was Mrs Wendy who managed it, of course. She led the way to Kensington Gardens next day, wearing a linen coat and a splendid hat with a feather in it.

  ‘But we looked here yesterday!’ her brother protested. ‘There wasn’t a fairy to be found!’

  ‘We are not looking for fairies,’ said Mrs Wendy. ‘We are looking for prams!’