So Long, Neverland

P eter Pan was born in the garden of a Georgian mansion. James Matthew Barrie, writer and creator of the beloved character, conjured Pan into being in the yard of Moat Brae in Dumfries, Scotland, where he played pirates and fairies and dreamt of Neverland.

Barrie often visited the house — originally built in 1823 and nicknamed Number One Dumfries — when he was a teenager. From 1873 to 1878, he attended Dumfries Academy, located conveniently near Moat Brae, which was owned by Barrie’s boyhood friends, Stuart and Hal Gordon. In the half acre of gardens Moat Brae enclosed, Barrie and the Gordon brothers imagined Neverland. Barrie in a 1924 speech said that their “escapades in a certain Dumfries garden, which is enchanted land to me, were certainly the genesis of that nefarious work,” Peter Pan. The five years Barrie spent roaming the land “were probably the happiest of my life, for indeed I have loved this place.”

After the Gordon family sold the property in the early 1900s, Moat Brae became a private nursing home, which closed in 1997. In the following decade, the home sank into disrepair. Three days before its scheduled demolition, the Peter Pan Action Group, a band of dedicated local citizens, filed court injunctions on behalf of the building and rescued it. The home underwent a lengthy and expensive renovation in the 2010s with the goal of creating a place for children to meet Peter Pan and fall in love with stories. After ten years of fundraising and hard work, in 2019, the National Center for Children’s Literature and Storytelling opened at Moat Brae. With props, costumes, a puppet theatre, books, and a magical shadow traipsing across its walls, Moat Brae became a space for children to imagine and, like the boy who never grew old, to believe in fairy tales.

The center had a short run. Rising costs, a lack of visitors because of Covid, and “a marked reduction in statutory funding, grant funding, donor income and legacies” caused the museum to close in August 2024, just five years after it opened. Potential buyers now have until October 3 to submit bids on the property.

Finding Neverland is my favorite movie. It tells Peter Pan’s origin story, loosely, by describing the relationship Barrie builds with four young boys and their widowed mother. Barrie’s character in the movie learns, as the author did in real life, about boys who don’t want to grow up. Although some have called the movie idiosyncratic, or perhaps a bit boring, I think it’s magical — partly because of its score, which was composed and produced by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek. Kaczmarek died in May, at the age of 71. Meeting Kaczmarek and visiting Moat Brae were always wishes of mine. As a girl, I could never find the piano sheet music to “Peter,” my favorite piece from the soundtrack, so I pulled an email address online and wrote to someone who I thought might be a family member of Kaczmarek’s — to no avail.

Barring another heroic effort, Moat Brae will cease to be the place of dreams that I have hoped to one day visit. So many relics that contributed to my own understanding of Neverland have grown up, and grown old, too fast — which is the cruel irony of loving Peter Pan and the people who keep his story alive.

Barrie credited his writing to M’Connachie, the “name I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half,” he said in a 1922 commencement address at St. Andrews. “We are complement and supplement. I am the half that is dour and practical and canny, he is the fanciful half; my desire is to be the family solicitor, standing firm on my hearthrug among the harsh realities of the office furniture; while he prefers to fly around on one wing. I should not mind him doing that, but he drags me with him.”

He was a man of eternal imagination who provided the greatest story to read whenever one needs to be reminded why time doesn’t stand still. Pan is adventurous and free of responsibility, but he forever, and selfishly, idolizes youth; growing up is painful, but it’s far less painful than never growing up at all, the boy teaches us. All this to say that the efforts Barrie’s admirers have put into keeping his, and Pan’s, legacy alive — through music, stories, and displays — are themselves a sort of magic. And while I’m strangely affected by the news of Moat Brae’s impending sale, I’m more optimistic that men and women will keep alive Barrie’s Pan for centuries to come.

“Don’t be frightened of the future,” Barrie told St. Andrews students: “Make merry while you may. Yet lightheartedness is not for ever and a day. At its best it is the gay companion of innocence; and when innocence goes — as it must go — they soon trip off together, looking for something younger. But courage comes all the way.”