Chapter 1 - Miss Worksham’s Institute for Young Ladies of Noble Families Fallen on Hard Times

   

Despite the fact that Wendy – like all children – tried her very uttermost not to grow up, the moment came when she was old enough to leave her family and go away to school.

To tell the truth, Mr. Darling maintained that they were too poor to be able to afford the fees required by a private academic institution. However, all the neighbouring children who were Wendy’s age had been enrolled for quite some time at some prestigious school or another, and Mrs. Darling was in a state of profound embarrassment. She didn’t know what to say when the other ladies asked her, ever more insistently: “Where are you sending your daughter next year?”

Therefore, in the summer of 1907, Mr. and Mrs. Darling embarked on a long and difficult search for a school with fees that were within their means (albeit at the cost of making great sacrifices, as Mr. Darling continued to stress). Finally, they settled on Miss Henrietta Worksham’s “Institute for Young Ladies of Noble Families Fallen on Hard Times”.

In her younger days, Miss Worksham had been governess to James, son of the fifth count of Heavycourt. In the course of fifteen years of honourable service in that austere and aristocratic house, she had learned from her Ladyship, the countess, how to cultivate the correct attitude of haughty disdain. She felt nothing but contempt for all those who were not of noble birth, except for persons like herself, who had dedicated their life to the service of the blue-blooded members of society. It was with this commendable spirit of service to others that Miss Henrietta had decided to open a private institute with accessible charges reserved (at least in principle) to young girls of noble families who were in economic difficulties. To her great surprise the enrolment of such pupils to her school never happened with one exception, which we will talk about later. Instead the school soon had girls from the well-to-do middle class, whose parents hoped for nothing more that there would be a chance for their girls to sit next to a daughter of even a poor Lord, as long as she had a bachelor brother a little older.

Perhaps deluded by her expectations, as years went by, Miss Worksham's attitude towards the world at large changed from being just simply haughty to one of a heavy and icy distain. However, strange as it may seem, the superior air she affected when she met the parents of her middle class pupils did not frighten them off. Instead, it constituted the best possible advertisement for her Institute.

On the day she received Mr. and Mrs. Darling, Miss Worksham looked even more disdainful than usual and this put a great strain on poor Mr. Darling. Under her icy stare, Mr. Darling soon became quite hot under the collar. He swallowed hard, terrified that Miss Worksham might refuse to accept Wendy, even though, up until a moment before, he had been complaining that the fees were tremendously expensive and that he couldn’t possibly afford them.

When, after what seemed an endless ordeal, he was finally informed by the headmistress that Wendy would be allowed to attend the school, Mr. Darling was so overjoyed that he quite forgot himself. He leapt to his feet, shouting “Bingo!” just as he had done that time when he won first prize at the parish fete – an action that Miss Worksham considered so vulgar that she momentarily considered withdrawing her decision to accept young Miss Darling.

On that occasion, Miss Worksham (like the Reverend Swell on the day of the fete) formed a decidedly poor opinion of Mr. Darling and decided to accept Wendy purely because the Institute was experiencing a few financial difficulties. However, personal contact with the young girl soon convinced her that the recent controversial theory developed by Mr. Darwin concerning the evolution of the human species was probably correct.

It was precisely because of young Miss Darling’s many good qualities that Miss Worksham assigned her a bed in the dormitory right next to Betty Ffink Pfenninger Jones, the pupil with the most distinguished pedigree in the entire school.

Naturally, the fact that Lord Bryan Ffink Pfenninger Jones, Earl of Dollingmere, one of the richest men in England, had decided to place Betty, his niece, in Miss Worksham’s school, had filled Miss Henrietta’s heart with righteous pride. However, she would no doubt have felt rather differently if she had known that Lord Bryan’s choice had fallen on her institute simply because it was the cheapest in the country.

Being unaware of his Lordship’s motives, Miss Worksham had steadfastly devoted herself to the thankless task of endowing poor Betty with the three “Ds” (Decorum, Decorum, Decorum) that she considered her duty to instil into each pupil and especially those of aristocratic descent. With Betty, however, she had had scant success.

The little girl seemed to be totally indifferent to all Miss Henrietta’s efforts. She had been brought up by her uncle’s servants, who had given her little care or affection. She was clumsy and unpolished, with a vague and absent-minded air about her and her appearance wasn’t improved by a tangled mass of unruly fair hair that seemed to fly out in all directions.

When they went to bed on Wendy’s first night at the Institute, Betty had just been subjected to one of Miss Worksham’s dreaded tongue-lashings. She was cowering under the bedcovers, crying her heart out. The kind-hearted Wendy immediately tried to comfort her.

“Would you like me to tell you a story before we go to sleep?” she asked Betty. “I always told the lost boys one when I was their mother on the island of Neverland…”

At these words, the sobbing suddenly stopped and a frail little voice came out from under the blankets: “What’s the Neverland?”

As you can imagine, it wasn’t long before Wendy became Betty’s best friend. Night after night, she told her all about her family, her brothers and her nursemaid Nana, who was a dog. She also told her about Peter Pan, who lived with the fairies, and who lost his shadow in her nursery one evening, and how she had sewn it back on again. And then she had described the little fairy, Tinker Bell, and the fairy dust that made you able to fly and how she and her brothers had flown to the Neverland, where she had been captured by the pirates and their wicked Captain Hook.

There were so many other wonderful things that Wendy told Betty that first term before Christmas, in Miss Henrietta Worksham’s Institute for Young Ladies of Noble Families Fallen on Hard Times.

As Christmas was drawing near, Miss Worksham’s young pupils began to get ready to go home to spend the festive season with their parents and Wendy asked Betty what she was going to do during the holidays. Just think how upset she was when she learned that her little friend would be staying on at school and that she had NEVER gone home for Christmas. She had always been left on her own, either with her uncle’s servants or with the Institute’s domestic staff.

At that point Wendy told her a secret. Mrs. Darling, she whispered, had promised that if she was the top of her class, she could go for a few days with Peter to the Island, immediately after Christmas.

After this revelation, which quite took Betty’s breath away, Wendy proceeded to invite her to come to the Darling’s house in London to spend Christmas with Mr. and Mrs. Darling, Nana, John and Michael. Afterwards, on the 28^th December, they would both go with Peter and her brothers to the Island.

It was the Friday night of the last weekend before the holidays and the girls had no homework for the following Monday, so young Betty decided to do something that, as we’ll find out later, would have terrible consequences for the outcome of our story. She decided that she must absolutely, immediately, without delay, write a letter, a long letter, no - a GREAT LOOOOOOOOOONG letter to her brother William, telling him all about the wonderful holiday she was going to have.