The creepiness of Peter Pan

When I was a child, I frankly and thoroughly detested Peter Pan in every single one of its manifestations; horrible Christmas stage spectacular, horrible Disney cartoon, horrible, horrible novel. It was a passionate and immediate hatred, shot through with something very like terror. In part, I guess, it was the idea that someone might come through your bedroom curtains and abduct you; partly the idea, sinister and frightening, of a child prevented from growing up. Childhood has its own helpless fears, and it would be a strange child who found the prospect of never changing an appealing one.

Really, the unanalysed dislike I had for Peter Pan was a dislike for something which evidently had undeclared designs upon me. I disliked C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books for a similar reason; just at those moments where, as a young reader, you wanted to commune with a mind like your own, you came up hard against some undeclared adult preoccupations.