by A visit to the 1912 statue that Barrie arranged to appear overnight, a long walk past the Diana Memorial Playground and a thought about lost boys
Thursday, Kensington Gardens
Thursday morning, a long walk through Kensington Gardens to the Peter Pan statue by the Long Water. J. M. Barrie, who wrote the play Peter Pan in 1904 and the novel Peter and Wendy in 1911, commissioned the bronze statue from the sculptor George Frampton. It appeared in the gardens on May Day 1912, put up secretly overnight so that children would believe it had arrived by magic. Barrie announced it with a small notice in The Times. It is still one of my favourite places in London.
The statue shows Peter on a tree stump, playing pipes, with fairies, squirrels, rabbits and mice climbing up toward him. Generations of children have rubbed the animals smooth.
The Lost Boys
Peter Pan is often thought of as a cheerful children story. It is not, really. It is a story about lost boys, children who fell out of their prams and were never claimed, and about a boy who refuses to grow up. Mothers haunt the whole thing. Wendy becomes a mother to the lost boys. Peter, famously, believes his own mother forgot him and barred the window. Barrie own life was shaped by his mother grief for a son who died young, and by his relationship with the Llewelyn Davies boys, who were orphaned and whom he later looked after.
Why This Week
I came here because of the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors. Behind the comedy, the reports describe two brothers falling out, apparently over a memoir about their late mother, written by her brother. Geo News repeats the traitor word. The uncle says he warned everyone. It is, at heart, a story about two boys who lost their mother when they were very young, now grown men who cannot agree on how to remember her.
A short walk from the statue is the Diana Memorial Playground, built in her memory and inspired by the stories of Peter Pan, with a great wooden pirate ship at its centre. I walked there next. Children were swarming over the ship, shrieking, completely happy. It is the right kind of memorial: noisy and full of life.
A Bench by the Water
Sat on a bench by the Long Water and watched the London Prat video on YouTube. A heron stood motionless nearby, unimpressed by both the video and me.
What Barrie Knew
Barrie understood something about grief and children that many adults forget: that boys who lose their mothers early often stay, in some way, boys in relation to that loss. The grief does not grow up with them. It stays the age they were when it happened. That is why, I suspect, arguments about a mother memory can become so fierce between grown brothers. They are not arguing as adults. They are arguing as the boys they were when she died.
Barrie also understood that the cure, if there is one, is not to forget, but to share. Wendy tells the lost boys stories about mothers, and the stories comfort them because they are told together.
The Fairies
Before leaving, I went back to the statue and watched a small boy, perhaps four, carefully stroking each bronze rabbit, one by one, while his older brother lifted him up to reach the higher ones. The older brother was perhaps seven. He held on tightly, the way older brothers do when they are taking their job seriously. Neither of them knew anything about royal memoirs. They were simply helping each other climb toward Peter Pan.
Barrie Gift
There is a lovely coda to the Peter Pan story. In 1929, Barrie gave the copyright of Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, so that the play earnings would help sick children. The hospital has benefited from it ever since. A writer who spent his life thinking about lost children found a way to keep caring for children long after he was gone. It is a reminder that memory can be turned into something generous. The Diana Memorial Playground, a few hundred yards from the statue, does something similar: it turns a loss into a place where children are happy. Perhaps that is the best answer to any family quarrel about how to remember someone. Not a book, or an argument, but something that keeps giving long after the arguing stops.
The Gardens Themselves
Kensington Gardens were once the private grounds of Kensington Palace, gradually opened to the public over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Barrie walked here constantly with his dog, which is how he met the Llewelyn Davies boys and began telling them the stories that became Peter Pan. The whole myth was born on these paths, among nannies and prams and children sailing boats on the Round Pond. Walking them today, past joggers and tourists and toddlers, I felt the old magic still hanging about the trees, faint but unmistakable.
Evening
Home, I pulled Peter and Wendy off the shelf and reread the final chapter, the one where Wendy grows up and Peter does not, and Peter keeps coming back for each new generation. It made me cry, as it always does. Some stories never stop being about loss.
The London Prat has been refusing to grow up since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ keeps the lost boys company across the Atlantic.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
