By the time she was three and a bit, we had realized that Clare was a strong character and a good talker. She went to bed chatting, could often be heard in the night talking to one of her many cuddly friends, and got up in the morning still halfway through the paragraph she had put on hold when she went to sleep. She threw herself into anything she did and sometimes threw toys, books, and furniture into it as well.

One day, Jenny discovered that a well-known ballet school was giving lunchtime performances in a hall not far from our new home. It seemed too good to miss. Our children all loved dancing, even if for the boys, now aged five and three, dancing usually meant getting dressed up as pirates and terrorizing each other with swords. Clare was disdainful of such crude approaches. When she wanted to dance, she put on her pink slippers, her Snow White dress, and (admittedly) her pirate hat and twirled around on the rug in the lounge, indignant when the boys failed to respect her performance space. We were in a house full of pirates. Clare had decided that she was a princess pirate, a higher order of being than a captain or cabin boy, but a pirate nonetheless.

The ballet school was performing scenes from Don Quixote, which meant we had to break the news that while Don Quixote fought with windmills he was not, strictly speaking, a pirate as he had a horse rather than a ship. The boys showed great tolerance and agreed to go anyway, as long as they could dress up as pirates. We were a little hesitant because we had recently taken them to see The Pirates of Penzance at the school where I worked and they had dressed for the occasion. They loved the show but it was all we could do to stop them jumping up and joining in; Jake cried at the end because he wanted to put it on again and see it all over like a DVD. That’s the problem with live theater, same as with live anything. It ends.

Don Quixote is a famous victim of sleeplessness. At the beginning of his adventures, we learn that the lovable knight with the sad face has spent so much time reading books about chivalry, the pulp fiction of the time, that he sits up from dusk to dawn, and as a result of not sleeping, his brain has either dried up or withered (depending on the translation) and he has gone mad, losing the useful ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. The idea of a brain drying up through lack of sleep is resonant. The word “exhaustion” originates in the Latin word haustus, meaning “drink,” particularly with the connotation of drinking deeply or drinking right up. The suggestion is not that drink leads to tiredness. Rather, being exhausted means that you have been drunk to the lees, that every drop has been squeezed out of you. We frequently meet Don Quixote keeping vigil through the night for some daft purpose or other. Throughout his struggles, people often try to get him to have a lie down and a good sleep, not least his trusting friend, Sancho, who has things to say on the subject, culled from his inexhaustible fund of proverbs and aphorisms. In chapter XLIII, he says, “When we’re asleep, we’re all the same, great and small, rich and poor.” Later, in chapter LXVIII, he imparts this bit of wisdom regarding sleep:

All I do know is that so long as I am asleep I am rid of all fears and hopes and toils and glory, and long live the man who invented sleep, the cloak that covers all human thoughts, the food that takes away hunger, the water that chases away thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that cools the heat and, in short, the universal coinage that can buy anything, the scales and weights that make the shepherd the equal of the king and the fool the equal of the wise man. There’s only one drawback about sleep, so I’ve heard — it’s like death, because there’s very little difference between a man who’s asleep and one who’s dead.

In Don Quixote, the devil is always tagged as the one who never sleeps, the saboteur of the human spirit. At the end of his days, the knight of sorrowful countenance returns home and his doctor diagnoses depression and despondency. He gets into bed and, at long last, has a decent sleep. When he wakes up, his mind is free and clear, the shadows have vanished and he realizes that he has been living in an artificial world, that all the silly fantasies he has been reading have shut out his light and that only a better relationship with reality can heal him.

I can’t recall the precise moment at which Peter Pan entered our lives. But Peter Pan is like that: he slips in through the window at night when everyone is asleep. Peter Pan is so light that he can—as J. M. Barrie, the wealthy Scottish writer who first dreamed of Peter Pan, puts it—“sleep in the air without falling, by merely lying on his back and floating.” He is so naughty that he can creep up behind the stars and blow them out. But he became a great friend because he led us to a place that exists somewhere between here and morning called Neverland, a place where a crocodile has swallowed the alarm clock and thus conveniently dealt with the problem of ever having to wake up. It was in Neverland that we met Captain Hook, our first real pirate.

Peter Pan ran away from his parents on the day he was born because he never wanted to become a man; he always has his baby teeth. Barrie seems to have shared something of this: Barrie was always a boy, even to the extent that he seems to have been physically unable to consummate his marriage in 1894 to a beautiful actress, Mary Ansell. They certainly had no children, and the marriage dissolved without much fizz. It seems that the emotional keystone in Barrie’s life was a moment when he approached the bedside of his mother, Margaret, who had taken to her bed for long periods to mourn the death of David, a favorite son who had died at the age of thirteen when he hit his head on the ice in a skating accident. Seeing a figure approach her bed in the gloom, Margaret mistook Barrie for the dead David. “No, it’s not him, it’s just me,” said Barrie. But the cogs in Barrie’s soul locked in that place, and he soon began to imitate the mannerisms of his dead brother. He remained a boy for the rest of his life. It seems he could not allow his mother to lose another boy by becoming a man. How ironic that such sad and strange circumstances led, however indirectly, to the joy of Peter Pan.