Free The Real Peter Pan by Piers Dudgeon

who had vowed that he would show me how to make a fire. We adjourned to the library (where we knew we were not likely to be disturbed) and there from concealed places about his person, he produced Jack’s implements, a rough bow and a rougher arrow, pointed at both ends. Then he ordered a pat of butter (the waiter must be wondering still), and, like Jack, he twisted the arrow around the string of the bow and began to saw, placing the end of the arrow against his chest, which was protected from its point by a chip of wood; the other point he placed against a bit of tinder. Jack had no butter, but we had no bit of tinder. The result, however, was the same. In half a minute, my friend had made a fire, at which we lit our cigars and smoked to the memory of Ballantyne and The Coral Island.
    Then it was down to Black Lake Cottage, where Peter Pan made the transition from Kensington Gardens, and Michael’s formal initiation took place just six weeks into his young life.
    In those days the salmon-coloured trains of the South-Western Railway took one peacefully down from Waterloo to alight at Farnham. Then you cycled or drove for two miles down the Tilford Road behind a horse…
    until presently, to the right of the dusty, yellow road, there was a sudden clearing in the trees. Here, in still unspoilt Surrey and the very depths, as it seemed, of the country, the little two-storey cottage stood. On three sides the dark woods came right up to the edge of the garden, and as you climbed the rising ground at the back there were glimpses and then a wide prospect through the tall, straight trunks of acres of tree-tops laid out below. No other house, in those days, was within sight or sound. And though under grey skies there was something a little forbidding about the way that Black Lake Cottage was shut in, the summer poured plenty of sunlight through its windows and over the long, level lawn. 20
    Denis Mackail’s description, written in 1940, catches the atmosphere well. Today there may be more houses, but they are not intrusive. The ‘cottage’ is now considerably more than a cottage, there is even a new house built behind it, within the old grounds, which once included ‘four acres of garden with carefully planned zig-zagging paths [which] led to secret bowers, rockeries, a Japanese garden and a pond with lizards and goldfish. There was a little tea-house lit on summer nights by Chinese lanterns,’ 21 and still plenty of room for a cricket pitch and a place to play golf croquet.
    The Tilford Road follows the line of one of those ancient sunkenlanes for which rural Britain was once famous, and still the house is almost hidden from view by trees. On the north side, a broad-leaved haven where once Sylvia’s boys let rip with their bows and arrows, is even open to the public, though it can surely only be locals who know. Across the road lies the massive, scented, impossibly tall perpendicular forestation of pine surrounding the Black Lake itself, soon to become a South Seas lagoon.
    It is to the letter Peter Ibbetson’s secluded pocket of dreams, cutoff from the wide world on three sides by trees, as described by du Maurier:
    An Eden where one might gather and eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge without fear, and learn lovingly the ways of life without losing one’s innocence; a forest that had remade for itself a new virginity, and become primeval once more; where beautiful Nature had reasserted her own sweet will, and massed and tangled everything together.
    With George and Oliver challenging his belief in fairies, Barrie feared ‘I was losing my grip.’ But here at Black Lake he restored it by recreating Peter’s childhood paradise, even using the same mystical terminology as du Maurier – ‘the Tree of Knowledge’:
    One by one as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe you reached the Tree of Knowledge. Sometimes you swung back into the