No fairytale: what happened to the real children behind fiction’s best-loved characters?

Peter Pan, Christopher Robin and Alice in Wonderland … being the star of a classic story might seem like a dream, but there’s a dark side, argues the author of The Children I’d loved the children for years before discovering they were real . I can almost summon the magic I felt when I first saw the photographs that proved it: the little boy clad in an approximation of hunters’ skins, posing victorious. The dark-haired girl with the offset gaze, her interior expression that of a person just growing used to being looked at. And – this is the one that really kills me – the big-eyed, dimple-chinne

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