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Neverlands are made of children’s dreams; each constructed from the patterns of their fancies, their geography the exact shape of their imaginations.
The Neverland was made of Wendy .
***
The thing about growing up, it refuses to be over and done with. It inches forward, drips, almost imperceptibly, past lost teeth and what’s five times fifty and an award for General Knowledge until the moss-and-flowers dress is inches too short even though everything feels just the same.
Whenever she is back in London (and never mind it is most of the year, or often all of the year; it feels for her a mere breather) Wendy Darling itches with liminality. She’s sure there should be something, anything, different; she is Growing Up, after all! Her mother had sighed upon it, her father prides on it (Peter runs from it), it is a Most Important thing!
It feels wrong that she should still be, well, herself.
***
She holds a whole world in her hands. She feels it most in the mornings, when the sun hasn’t started warming them and and everything living is asleep. She cocks her head and the world -
tilts , a funnel cloud ending at her feet, the ground sinking a little bit deeper where she steps.
(John and Michael are there too, and their upside down boats and flying lagoons, but it’s her stories that built the Neverland for them.)
The birds sing and dance for Peter, but they awake for her .
***
She flies for longer than anyone realizes. Years after the last spring cleaning, years after John and Michael and Tootles and the rest stop believing, years after they forget, she can still float to fetch a bird that’s trapped itself on her ceiling. She gets complimented on her dancing; the truth is her feet barely touch the ground.
It only ends once the last of the pixie dust washes off her, for everyone knows you need pixie dust to fly. But if she were to meet a fairy, and ask really nicely...
She passes through Kensington Gardens often, and wonders.
***
She tests it only once, halfway through their numberless days. She pinches an prods, sighs loudly and cajoles, until thunder booms, and the island storms.
She feels terrible about it, of course. They can’t fly; the mermaids’ lagoon overflows; the pirates’ powder kegs get wet and Hook loses his hat, ripped up by the hail. And flying, mermaids and pirates are, after all, what Peter traded her for her stories. The rain stops after one afternoon.
Peter continues to look at her funny for many days, which, for him, is an amazing feat of memory.
She tests it only once.
***
The War sneaks up on them all.
They expected it to be short, but it drags on and on, taking Wendy’s family, her friends and neighbours, paying them back with bombs.
John, of course, enlists at once. So do most of the once lost boys although none of them can remember why the thought of battle makes their blood sing. (After the first week on the Western Front, those feelings are gone, too.)
Michael, baby Michael, is at first too young to volunteer, then his love of trains saves him from conscription.
Lord Who Was Once Slightly (of too ill health for the front), and his Lady wife turn their estate into an auxiliary hospital, and it’s there, on a rainy morning on the eve of her 23rd birthday, where Wendy Darling first reports to her fortnight’s probation as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment.
That night she is on a ship, no longer tied to a mast, but counting Peter’s dead.
***
Peter looks her age, most days. He has chubby cheeks and knobbly knees and all of his first teeth. He sleeps sprawled on top of the other boys until they resemble more a litter of puppies than children in a bed. She doesn’t know whose socks she keeps mending, because his feet are always bare.
Then there’s the other times.
She’ll wake in the middle of the night to an odd, familiar feeling. She’ll step outside her little house (the ground sagging slightly under her weight, as if she surprised it, as if it wasn’t ready to hold her just yet), and look up to the trees; he’ll be all the way up, sitting in a branch much too thin to hold him.
Always Wendy flies up at him when this happens, settles herself with her back against the trunk, doesn’t speak.
Peter is always sitting up, looking at the void, and his eyes are pools of stars. She knows she must not touch him at these times, although she doesn’t know why, or what would happen if she did. Moonlight passes through him. His face is plain, his knees have no bones; he doesn’t look like a boy at all.
Wendy can’t help but feel it’s London on the other end of the black, the children who fall out of their prams for him to pick up, and the others. She wonders if maybe he sees farther still, through all of the British Empire, or even the lands beyond; how many others there are, whether he helps them all.
On occasion he mouths without sound, like he’s trying to speak but misplacing the words somewhere between his throat and his mouth. These nights the Neverland truly sleeps, like it never does when Peter’s around. The otherworldliness of the place really startles her then. It’s a place she’s knows so well, as all children do, arriving at its shores on playtime, but just like when they’re about to fall asleep, it’s scarier in the dark, when it’s real.
(Peter is larger than life, so much so sometimes she wonders if she isn’t a part of his games.
Sometimes she feels he isn’t there at all.)
***
The people in charge are dismissive - rich little girls who don’t know what they’ve gotten into. Here, little girls, go serve soup.
So Wendy does. She serves soup, and makes beds, and cleans floors; organizes supplies, fetches and carries.
Later she changes dressings and cleans wounds; washes off blood and mud; and later still, in the hospitals on the front, she is one of the many rushing across No Man’s Land after downed planes, the enemy guns so close she can smell the smoke, with only her starched blue uniform ( her womanhood ) and a promise to protect her.
When there’s nothing else she can do, she’ll echo herself ( you will die as British gentlemen). She thinks of John, and bombs, and Nibs's thermometer, and finds she still believes it.
By the end of the War she finds herself driving an ambulance, an old lorry that pulls to the right and splutters pathetically, collecting wounded soldiers with enemy shells raining around her, in her hand the phantom limb of a sword.
Wendy Moira Angela Darling remembers when she kept a whole world in balance. Her heart was once big enough to keep an island beating; facing pain and blood and fire is not that much harder.
***
One of the last times they talked about it, after , before it all had faded completely from John and Michel’s memories, before they stopped believing, Wendy finds their memories don't match.
It had been Red Handed Jill. She remembers it clear as day: Hook's proffered arm in his most rakish suit, the feel of velvet under her hand, now red, now green. The distinguished voice making an offer: a sword, the open seas; treasure beyond her wildest dreams, adventures to make her nightmares cower. That much is clear to her.
What irks her, though, is that she can't remember why she said no.
***
One autumn she pulls a wounded soldier off a burning hospital. They stagger together, through the dark and the mud and the pain, to her old spluttering ambulance, and keep their arms around each other as they’re carried away, packed like sardines and tumbling this way and that.
That winter he proposes. She says yes. They marry in spring, her with a pink sash on her white dress, him in his uniform and devilishly handsome, her brothers and friends miraculously all around her.
Anyways, there’s no magical child at the wedding, halting the proceedings and demanding the groom pick up a sword at once. Why would there be? It’s been ten springs since Wendy saw him last, and she’s not sure she can remember what his crowing sounded like.
***
Every now and then, Wendy Moira Angela B_____, neé Darling, has nightmares. In the sleepless nights that follow, she wonders whether Peter really did forget the first cruelty he suffered (which for him was every single one), or if his was so painful it overwrote all that were to come.
***
The thing about growing up, it refuses to be over and done with. It keeps on rolling, more like a river than a landslide, heedless of the intuition that there should be a cap, a singular, shiny point when you’re Grown, and that’s it. Every time (after getting married, after having a daughter) where Wendy finds herself yourself saying “there, I am a grown woman now”, she finds there’s so much more, in life, and in her.
This goes on until there comes a time she simply can’t imagine staying forever as she is.
She liked growing up so much, she gave up flying for it; she gave up mermaids, and pirates (which are despicable, but, after all, fun to despise), and adventures cozily piled up. Because it were the same pirates. The same mermaids playing the same games, the same fights going round and round, the same sky that knew no seasons.
Wendy Moira Angela Darling likes to grow up. She likes it so much she will keep doing it, ahead of everyone else, of her own free will.