When Memory Lane took me to Never Land

It must, I suspect, be my age that keeps driving me back down Memory Lane.

On my trip to London this week, I stayed in a hotel in Kensington. West Kensington, I should add, not the really fashionable bit. But even so, I wandered down a few charming Mews or around squares lush with leaves and with their private park in the middle, and saw how privilege is still doing just fine in Britain, Brexit or no Brexit, recession or no recession.

Quiet elegance in Kensington
How the other 1% live

The hotel was also within walking distance of Hyde Park. This is the biggest park in London, although technically only one end of it is actually Hyde Park: all the western bit is called Kensington Gardens. For a walker wandering around it, however, it all feels like one colossal extent of glorious greenery, with its fountains and even its lake, the Serpentine. Except that when Hyde Park gives way to Kensington Gardens, the lake changes name too, just to confuse visitors. It becomes the Long Water.

The Long Water. Looking towards the Serpentine

It occurred to me that I really didn’t know Hyde Park at all well. Mostly I only go there for demonstrations, and then only to the far eastern end. Then I trail along the side of the park and through the streets of London with a million or two others, doing our damnedest to stop damn fool acts like the Iraq War or Brexit. Quite why we bother isn’t clear to me, since we hardly achieved our aim on those occasions.

This time I went for two or three walks in the park and made a point of acquainting myself with some of the bits I’d never been to, or not been to for a long time. I went to see the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, dedicated as the name implies to the memory of the person the French persist in referring to as “Leddi Di”. It looked like a fairly impressive playground but not that different from ones I’d seen elsewhere. Euro Disney it certainly wasn’t.

The Diana Pricess of Wales Memorial Fountain was also pleasant, but hardly breathtaking. And, because the designers had clearly decided not to let go of the theme once they’d got hold of it, they’re linked by a Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Path which is probably the best of the three, but only because a long path through fine parkland is always attractive.

None of these things, however, were my real objective in going to the park. I wanted to go, or rather go back, to the Peter Pan statue. Somewhere deep in my somewhat misty memory was a recollection of my parents taking my brother and me there when I was about eight, and telling me on the way that it was absolutely marvellous and evocative of the whole world of Never Land.

I couldn’t remember whether, once I’d stood before the statue, I’d felt any of that magic, and I wanted to get back to see what feelings it would awake in me.

You can imagine, I wanted to see whether I’d experience a sense of poignancy, of nostalgia, of the lost wonder of childhood, particularly as the parents who’d taken us to see Pan have both since gone to their graves. My wife always laughs at the way that I can spring a tear over a rom com. Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to indulge all my mawkish sentimentalism to the full.

Finally, I got there. And stood before the pleasant little statue, bits of which, like any bronze sculpture, had been rubbed by thousands of hands to gleam yellow. And what did it evoke in me?

Peter Pan. Rediscovered at last

Well, to be honest, nothing at all. No tingle of nostalgia. No pricking of the eyelids at long-distant recollections of childhood.

In fact, I couldn’t remember the anything about my previous visit to it at all.

Corbyn and Peter Pan politics

“Every time a child says, ‘I don't believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”

Peter Pan leads the way to a fantasy land
where fairies depend on children's beliefs

“I believe it because it is absurd,” said Tertullian, one of the fathers of the Christian church. It’s a powerful and highly sophisticated statement.

Christianity, like any belief system, requires faith, an ability to believe despite a lack of evidence, even against all evidence. After all, you need no faith to believe that the sun will set in the West: that’s the definition of the West. To believe that a man can be executed and rise on the third day, that does require faith.

This is as true of trivial beliefs as these more profound ones, such as Peter Pan’s statement about fairies. Or the belief that a portly, white-bearded man in a red suit will come down a chimney to bring good children presents.

I find it impossible to make such an act of faith. I say that even though I know the great comfort that faith provides. It’s no accident that the words “communion” and “community” are linked: shared belief creates a community and belonging to one is a deep human need and a source of consolation in a difficult world.

Even so, I can’t make that leap. Like Diderot, I find it less of a miracle that Lazarus was brought back from the dead, than that nobody, but nobody, chose to record the fact. Surely, somewhere there’d be something from a neutral third party: a spice merchant from Asia Minor, a Roman officer writing home, perhaps a sailor from Alexandria, even if all they were saying was “there’s a really weird tale going around this place at the moment, about a guy called Lazarus. They say, would you believe, that he died but a visiting miracle-worker brought him back to life.” Instead, nothing, nada, nix. The only authority is from the gospel writers themselves, those who were promoting the belief in the first place.

Not a problem, of course, for those like Tertullian who believe because it is absurd. But for someone like me, looking for evidence to support a point of view (which isn’t quite as strong as a belief: it can be overturned by new evidence), I simply can’t accept the story on such thin backing.

So I’m deprived of the child’s joy in waiting for the tooth fairy to call, believing in the fairy even though no one’s ever seen her. Or indeed the sense of belonging that inspires a mass at its best, even though no one’s ever documented the conversion of a biscuit and a chalice of wine into flesh and blood. Or indeed, the atmosphere at a meeting of Corbynistas, encouraging each other to further acts of faith, even though no Opposition leader in history has ever won an election from a base of unpopularity as dire as their guru’s.

That’s a double misfortune for me. In the first place, because I can’t enjoy the simple comfort of the believer drawn from the mere fact of belief. There must be joy in the fervour of the Corbynist who can, like Tertullian, convince himself of the truth of an absurd notion, such as John McDonnell’s that Corbyn can turn the poll position around in twelve months. I can’t share in it.

Then there’s the second misfortune. A child whose parents are sufficiently indulgent, and sufficiently well-heeled, will wake up in the morning to find that a coin has replaced the tooth she placed under the pillow on going to bed. Unless the parents are exceptionally indulgent, an adult who does the same with a lost tooth is likely to suffer acute disappointment. Generally, indeed, we expect adults to grow out of such childish beliefs.

In the case of Corbynist fancy, not growing out of it has serious consequences for everyone in Britain: clinging to the belief that Corbyn can defeat the Tories prevents us replacing him by someone who might make some progress against them. That simply ensures continued Tory rule. The results are all about us to see: hospitals offering doctors nearly £1000 to do a shift in A&E to prevent complete collapse into unsafe service, kids from poor backgrounds far less likely to attend good schools, families of dying invalids deprived of basic support.

Unlike the Peter Pan claim, in the Corbyn fantasy, it isn’t lack of belief that kills. On the contrary, it’s belief itself. The longer we cling on to that absurd faith, we ensure the suffering, even death, of more people – not fairies, let me stress, but people.

Personally, I can’t believe that fairies exist and depend on the belief of children to assure their own survival.

I can’t believe that the universe is run by a God who took human form to suffer and die to redeem humankind from a fate to which he’d condemned it in the first place.

And I can’t believe that the least popular Opposition leader in my lifetime has the slightest chance of winning a general election.

Well, it would be absurd, wouldn’t it?