The Real Peter Pan Read Online Free PDF Page A

about Mary Ansell. Dolly described her as ‘commonplace, 2nd rate & admirable’.
    Besides having an interest in cricket and playing with toys, Barrie confessed to having taken a few simple lessons in conjuring in a dimly lit chamber beneath a shop from ‘a gifted young man with a long neck and a pimply face, who as I entered took a barber’s pole from my pocket, saying at the same time, “Come, come, sir, this will never do.”’
    Whether because he knew too much, or because he wore a trick shirt, he was the most depressing person I ever encountered; he felt none of the artist’s joy, and it was sad to see one so well calculated to give pleasure to thousands not caring a dump about it.
    The barber’s pole was successfully extracted from many a child’s mouth in the Kensington Gardens, even though the difficulty of disposing of it Barrie found considerable.
    Then there was the magic egg-cup. ‘I usually carried it about with me, and with its connivance I did some astonishing things withpennies; but even the penny that costs sixpence is uncertain, and just when you are saying triumphantly that it will be found in the eggcup, it may clatter to the ground…’
    The next moment he was pretending to hypnotise a child with his eyebrows. He had an unusual ability to elevate and lower his eyebrows separately, like two buckets in a well, while gazing into the face of a child intently with his large, morose, staring eyes, not unlike those of Porthos. It was a trick that almost never failed to give him a chance to check a screaming boy’s tears.
    The boy would stop mid-scream and consider the unexpected movement without prejudice, his face remaining as it was, his mouth open to emit the frozen howl if the trick did not surpass expectation. The fair-minded boy was giving the odd little man a chance. It was all Barrie needed. Next minute he was telling him about fairies as though he knew all about them.
    He had a favourite haunt called the Story Seat and told a new fairy tale there every afternoon for years. Asked when was the first fairy, he would say: ‘When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.’
    Nannies would press their charges upon him, making no connection at all with the stories coming out of the Old Bailey about Oscar Wilde and his young friends.
    Indeed, so innocently was he regarded that, in 1902, Lord Esher, Secretary to His Majesty’s Office of Works, who was responsible for the gardens and who for reasons perhaps best kept to himself took to calling Mr Barrie ‘the furry beast’, presented him with his own key so that he could go there whenever he liked, even unattended after lock-out time.
    ‘Lock-out time is fairy time in the gardens,’ Barrie would tell his young charges.
    You can be looking at fairies during the day without knowing. I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing looking at a fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that she pretended to be something else. This is one of their best tricks. They usually pretend to be flowers, because the court sits in the Fairies’ Basin, and the Fairy Basin, you remember, is all covered with ground-ivy (from which they make their castor-oil), with flowers growing in it here and there. Most of them really are flowers, but some of them are fairies. You never can be sure of them, but a good plan is to walk by looking the other way, and then turn round sharply. Another good plan, which I sometimes follow, is to stare them down. After a long time they can’t help winking, and then you know for certain that they are fairies. There are also numbers of them along the Baby’s Walk (which as you know runs off the bottom of the Broad Walk towards the Serpentine Lake). There are so many flowers there, and all along the Baby’s Walk,