J. M. BARRIE’S TALE about how the Darling children are lured away to Neverland by a boy who never grows up struck me as terrifying long before Michael Jackson came along.

Yet it is thanks to Barrie and his 1929 bequest of his royalties to Great Ormond Street Hospital that thousands of children have had their lives saved or improved.

There have been numerous unofficial “sequels” in print and film, but Geraldine McCaughrean was picked from a competition of 200 writers to produce an official version of what happened to the Lost Boys and Wendy after they become “common grown-ups”.

Peter Pan in Scarlet begins superbly, picking up on the end of the original with Wendy now a mother and the Lost Boys turned into Old Boys. All are plagued by dreams of Neverland and when they wake up, real mementoes such as an alarm clock, an Indian head-dress, swords and, most marvellously, a real crocodile in a club have been left behind.

Various stratagems are attempted, from not going to sleep at all to writing a letter of complaint to the Minister for Dreams before one of the Old Boys comes up with the obvious answer: to call Wendy. She knows at once that something is wrong in Neverland. How, though, do grown-ups return to childhood? McCaughrean’s solution is a brilliant blend of Barrie’s imagination and her own. They need not only fairy dust, obtained by making a baby laugh a new fairy into existence, but also to dress up in their children’s clothes.

The new fairy, Fireflyer, is much more satisfactory than the vain and irritable Tinkerbell, but no more helpful; and when the Old Boys and Wendy return to their childhood states and fly again, they find Neverland and Peter himself have both changed. Neverland has been deserted by Lost Boys but infested with dragons and Peter’s green leaf suit is now an autumnal scarlet.

Their wendy house is now a tree house perched on top of the enormous Nevertree, and the Eternal Boy himself is bored. Fairies are waging war over red and blue, and there is a circus owned by a “Ravelling Man” who turns out to be somebody very sinister indeed. The story rattles along at breakneck speed, with so much in every chapter that there isn’t time for a child of 8 or more to get bored, although they may become irritated.

McCaughrean has captured both the exquisitely silly Edwardian flavour of Barrie’s language and even improved on his narrative style with descriptive touches such as rain coming down “in exclamation marks”. Wisely, she avoids Barrie’s arch jokes, which enjoy childish innocence in a way today’s children abhor. Alert to every hint in the original, she has made Tootles into a cross-dressing judge, Curly into a doctor and the Honourable Slightly into a childless nightclub clarinettist.

There is more awareness of how much suffering the loss of a child causes, with the creation, in an inspired touch, the Grief Reef made up of broken prams left by mothers searching for fallen children.

W. H. Auden pointed out how odd all great children’s authors are, and this is certainly true of Barrie, who suffered from psychogenetic dwarfism. Perhaps one of the reasons why McCaughrean’s admirably inventive but ultimately doomed novel doesn’t in the end work is that she is too sane and too knowing. McCaughrean, as a mother, knows what Barrie didn’t, that the First World War shattered all dreams of eternal youth.

The sorrow that adults feel at seeing their children lose their first teeth, unlike Peter, is tempered by the understanding that they must grow up, or die.

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