Thunderstruck

HOOK

THE NEW CENTURY RACED FORWARD. Motorized taxis and buses clogged Piccadilly. The fastest ocean liners cut the time for an Atlantic crossing down to five and a half days. In Germany the imperial war fleet rapidly expanded, and British anxiety rose in step. The government began talks with the French, and in 1903 Erskine Childers published his one and only novel, The Riddle of the Sands, in which two young Britons stumble across preparations for a German invasion of England. Prophetically, the German villain captains a ship named Blitz. In Germany the authorities ordered the book confiscated. In Britain it became an immediate best-seller and served as a rallying cry. The last sentence in the book asked, “Is it not becoming patent that the time has come for training all Englishmen systematically either for the sea or for the rifle?”

But this question raised a corollary: Were the men of England up to the challenge? Ever since the turn of the century, concern had risen that forces at work in England had caused a decline in masculinity and the fitness of men for war. This fear intensified when a general revealed the shocking fact that 60 percent of England’s men could not meet the physical requirements of military service. As it happened, the general was wrong, but the figure 60 percent became branded onto the British psyche.

Blame fell upon the usual suspects. A royal commission found that from 1881 to 1901 the number of foreigners in Britain had risen from 135,000 to 286,000. The influx had not merely diminished the population; it had caused, according to Scotland Yard, an upsurge in crime. Most blame was attributed to the fact that Britain’s population had increasingly forsaken the countryside for the city. The government investigated the crisis and found that the percentage of people living in cities had indeed risen markedly from the mid-nineteenth century but had not caused the decay of British manhood, though this happy conclusion tended to be overlooked, for many people never got past the chilling name of the investigative body that produced it, the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. A month later the government launched another investigation with an equally disheartening name, the Royal Commission on Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded, and discovered that between 1891 and 1901 the number of mentally defective Britons had increased by 21.44 percent, compared to the previous decade’s increase of just over 3 percent. There was no escaping it: Insane, weak and impoverished, the British Empire was in decline, and the Germans knew it, and any day now they would attempt to seize England for their own.

In London on the night of December 27, 1904, at the Duke of York’s Theater, a new play opened and immediately found resonance with that part of the British soul that ached for a past that seemed warmer and more secure. The action opened in the nursery of a house in what the playwright, James M. Barrie, described as a “rather depressed street in Bloomsbury,” and it involved children led off to adventure by a mysterious flying boy named Peter. The Daily Telegraph would call the play “so true, so natural, so touching that it brought the audience to the writer’s feet and held them captive there.”

There were pirates and Indians, and danger. At the end of Act IV the audience gasped as Peter’s fairy companion, Tinker Bell, drank poisoned medicine meant for him.

Peter turned to the audience. “Her light is growing faint, and if it goes out, that means she is dead! Her voice is so low I can scarcely tell what she is saying. She says—she says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies!”

He turned and spread his arms. “Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!”

And oh yes, on this cold night in London in December 1904, they did believe.

THEN CAME HOOK, the pirate captain, and the audience chilled at the intimation of coming evil.

“How still the night is,” said Hook. “Nothing sounds alive.”