Chapter 1: Peter Breaks Through

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was eleven years old she was playing in the bath, and she pressed one of her fingers into the warm space between her legs and arched her back and blushed. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for her mother, Mrs. Darling, put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after your first experience of pleasure. That first little death (for that is what we call it) is the beginning of the end.

And, it should be noted, that Mrs. Darling recalled, years later, that the shadow of a boy might have danced in the corner of her eye, though she could not be sure.

Of course they lived at number 14, and until Wendy came her mother was the chief one. She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a pert bosom. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East: however many you discover there is always one more. And that most private place, just above her womanly cleft, had one kiss beneath its prominent pink hood that no-one could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous when she was flushed and breathless.

The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they craved her, and they all ran to her house to bed her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her, in almost every possible way, many times over; except for her innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he even gave up trying for the kiss, leaving Mrs. Darling to fondle and finger herself if she wanted any pleasure.

Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only loved him but respected him. He was one of those deep ones who know about stocks and shares but so very little of sex, at least in as much as how to satisfy one’s wife. Mrs. Darling was married in white, as is proper, and she played the game so perfectly, even gleefully, pleasing her husband with her hands and her mouth and her cunt, night after night.

Wendy came first, then John, then Michael.

For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful whether they would be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to feed. Mr. Darling was frightfully proud of her, but he was very honourable, and he sat on the edge of Mrs. Darling’s bed, holding her hand and calculating expenses, while she looked at him imploringly. She wanted to risk it, come what might, but that was not his way; his way was with a pencil and a piece of paper, and if she confused him with suggestions, or with her hands or lips upon his manhood, he had to start at the beginning again.

“Now don’t interrupt,” he would beg of her, despite the twitching of his eager prick. “I have one pound seventeen here, and two and six at the office; I can cut off my whores at the club, say ten shillings, making two nine and six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine seven, with five naught naught in my cheque-book makes eight nine seven—who is that licking my frenulum?—eight nine seven, dot and carry seven—don’t suck upon my helmet, my love—and the pound you earned from that man who watched you undress—quiet, child—dot and carry child—there, you’ve done it!—did I say nine nine seven? Yes, I said nine nine seven; the question is, can we try it for a year on nine nine seven? Oh? Oh! Oh!”

“Of course we can, George,” she cried, as he spasmed and erupted upon her rosy cheeks. She was prejudiced in Wendy’s favour, of course, but she could never deny her husband, even if he was unable to return the pleasure she brought him.

There was the same excitement over John, and Michael had even a narrower squeak; but both were kept, and soon, you might have seen the three of them going in a row to Miss Fulsom’s Kindergarten school, accompanied by their nurse.

Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had a nurse. As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children drank, this nurse was a seventeen-year-old negro girl called Nana, who had been homeless and feral until the Darlings engaged her. Mr. Darling had first become acquainted with Nana in Kensington Gardens after dark, where she had tried to steal his wallet; he had had her stripped and beaten and, having been disgusted by her unkempt bush, utterly shaved; and then captivated by her thick, dark, protruding labia, he savoured them as one might enjoy ice cream on a hot day. (Mrs. Darling had sighed and turned away, wishing only that he would lavish such attention upon her.)

Nana proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse. How thorough she was at bath-time, particularly with John and Michael, with whom she spent over an hour in the tub every night; John enjoyed how tenderly she washed Little John (as she called his boyhood organ) and Michael would splash her naively with water to see if the darkness of her skin would wash off. Nana had no bedroom of her own so she slept naked upon a rug on the floor in the corner of the nursery; of course, this meant she could be up at any moment of the night if one of her charges made the slightest cry, and she would hold, stroke and fondle them until they relaxed in her arms. She had a genius for knowing when a boy’s arousal during a dream is a thing to let be and when it is a matter to be taken into hand. She believed to her last day in old-fashioned remedies such as massaging the result of a gentleman’s pleasure upon one’s skin to ward off evil spirits, and made sounds of contempt over all this new-fangled talk about germs which could be transferred via coitus, and so on. It was a lesson in propriety to see her escorting the children to school, walking sedately by their side when they were well behaved, and in pulling down their trousers and bending them over and spanking them if they strayed. Nana resented visits to the nursery from Mrs. Darling’s friends, but if they did come she first dressed Wendy who had a penchant for sprawling nude on the settee, jacked off John’s seemingly ever-present erection so it would subside and thereby make him presentable in polite company, and made a dash at Michael’s hair. Finally, and not always in time, she would talc her skin to pale it, and wrap a towel or blanket about herself to conceal her nakedness.