Andrew O'Hagan

that somehow immortality is not all it's cracked up to be.

But it's a bit of a curse, actually, for Peter.

And that book carries all that in the form of a children's story.

And it's actually like so many children's stories.

There's something quite frightening at the centre of it.

I think so.

I mean, who would be Peter in the end?

I mean, you want to be Wendy.

Wendy is the one with the real wings.

That's the irony of that story.

She might be tied to terra firma, to solid ground, but actually that's where you would want to be as a human being.

Because this creature, Peter Pan, is condemned in a sense, trapped, imprisoned in youth.

And I mean, for Mayflies, that was a scene that was just staring at me.

Because what is memory if not a kind of entrapment?

You look back at your childhood and you think,

Well, you can take pleasure in it because it's gone, really.

But if you'd always been stuck back there, never able to grow, well, that's a different sort of nightmare to conjure with.

Well, I mean, one of the things that will be interesting

obvious to me and less known to most readers, I think, is the explicit use of a lot of those, what we thought of as kitchen sink dramas in England and Scotland during the period of my parents' youth.

So in the 50s, the late 50s and early 60s, writers like Alan Silito with his Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which became a famous film starring Albert Finney, or plays like A Taste of Honey,