In Abi Elphistone’s re-imagining of the classic Peter Pan story, Martha Pennydrop is ten, and desperate to grow up. Eagerly awaiting the Moment Life Begins, she busies herself with taking care of her little brother Scruff. But when Martha and Scruff discover a drawer full of mysterious gold dust in the bedroom of their new house so begins an incredible adventure to the magical world of Neverland which forces her to rediscover the imagination she thought she had to turn her back on to keep her brother safe. Meet the Pennydrop family in this exclusive extract below.

Saving Neverland
By Abi Elphinstone
Published by Puffin

Number 14 Darlington Road in Bloomsbury, London, looks like a perfectly ordinary townhouse – at first glance, anyway. 

It is tall and thin, with three rows of windows and a blue door with a brass knocker. Almost an exact copy of the terraced houses either side of it. And yet, if you were to linger a while outside Number 14, you would notice that one of the top-floor windows – the one with the white cotton curtains billowing in the breeze – is never shut. Even on the coldest winter nights, when frost clings to the rooftops and the air swirls with snow, you will find this particular window wide open. 

Had ten-year-old Martha Pennydrop known there was something strange about this window when her family moved into the house a few weeks ago, I very much doubt she would have chosen the room beyond it as her bedroom. But it had been at the start of the summer holidays, when nights are warm and bedroom windows are often left open, so she wasn’t aware that this one was impossible to shut, and that it had been that way for over a hundred years.  

And she certainly wasn’t aware that magic was involved because, until the mischief kicks in, magic looks remarkably innocent. 

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Martha was sitting on her bed the evening it all began. Sunlight spilled in through the open window, and, if Martha had not been concentrating so hard on the notepad in her lap, she might have noticed that her whole bedroom was lit gold in the setting sun. But Martha didn’t have time for noticing things anymore. She was ten now, and ten – as everyone knows – is the beginning of the end. It’s when your age jumps to double digits.  

It’s when you enter your last year of primary school. It’s when you’re expected to eat all the vegetables on your plate without complaining. 

Ten was, as far as Martha could tell, the age at which you either grew up or got left behind. And getting left behind wasn’t an option because Martha had discovered it came with dangerous consequences – consequences that were always there, lingering at the back of her mind.  

Growing up while sharing a bedroom with your seven-year-old brother, however, was like trying to complete a complicated puzzle in the same room as a rhinoceros. 

‘WHOOPEE!’ Scruff shrieked as he bounced on his bed in his pyjamas, knocking over a lamp and sending a photo frame clattering to the floor. He leaped still higher. 

‘These beds are so much springier than our old ones, don’t you think?’ 

Martha didn’t answer, but she looked up briefly because a secret part of her wanted to leap on to her bed and bounce with Scruff. She pressed her notepad into her lap to stop her legs getting any ideas because charging into childish games could, and most probably would, lead to disaster. It certainly had done six months ago . . . Martha shuddered at the memory of the Terrible Day and turned back to her notepad. 

‘If the roof wasn’t in the way,’ Scruff said, panting, ‘I could probably bounce out of the house and over half of London.’ 

Martha tried her best to focus on the list in her notepad. It was a checklist for the day just gone, detailing all the jobs she had done about the house to make sure things didn’t get out of control. She ran her finger down the list of evening duties to make sure she’d ticked each one off: 

• Have bath (make sure Scruff washes between his toes and behind his ears)
• Brush teeth (give Scruff a star on his Star Chart if he does it without shouting and kicking – ask Dad if Scruff can sponsor a sloth or a penguin or whatever his favourite animal is when he gets ten stars)
• Lay out clothes for the next day (search Scruff’s pockets for sweets as kitchen supply suspiciously low)
• Brush hair (if feeling strong, wrestle Scruff to ground and brush his too)
• Check Scruff’s inhaler is in our bedroom (VERY IMPORTANT)

Martha flicked over the page and scribbled out the same checklist for tomorrow. Then she turned to the back of her notepad and lifted out a photo. It showed her doing a backflip in their old town hall while the rest of her gymnastics club cheered her on. 

She smiled. Her dad had taken her to that club every Saturday: she’d learned to do the splits while performing a handstand and do a backflip from standing. And just as good as all that was her dad being around so much more then, driving her to and from the club, and spending the hours in between with Scruff, who loved animals so much that the keepers at the local animal sanctuary let him muck out the llamas at weekends. 

But then Mr Pennydrop had been asked to head up the removal company he worked for. Rather than working nearby, he’d had to take the train to and from the company’s head office in London, a two-hour journey twice a day, every weekday for a year. 

With each passing day, Martha noticed him becoming more and more stressed, so she and Scruff had tried to do nice things to help him relax. They’d decorated Mr Pennydrop’s briefcase with unicorn stickers, but on seeing them he hadn’t looked very pleased. They’d baked a cake for his birthday, but misread the recipe and stirred in washing powder instead of baking powder. The cake had tasted of soap. And they’d painted Father’s Day cards at the childminder’s house one evening after school, but in their rush to give them to their dad they hadn’t waited for the paint to dry, and the important documents Mr Pennydrop was holding had been ruined. 

Then the last day of the summer term had come, just over a month ago, and Mr Pennydrop announced he’d found a fully furnished flat to rent, on the top two floors of a house in London, and they were moving there because it would make life easier. Only life didn’t seem easier. Martha’s dad was trying his best with her and Scruff, but he was still just as stressed. Perhaps even more so given that he’d started locking himself up in his study after school pick-ups to chase up removal vans and organize paperwork. 

Martha thought of her mum briefly, hundreds of miles away from Number 14 Darlington Road in some new place or other. A Free Spirit was what Mr Pennydrop called his ex-wife (so free, it turned out, that she had checked out of the family when Martha and Scruff were very little and checked into a backpackers’ shack on a beach in Thailand and never returned). 

She sent postcards now and again, but Martha didn’t bother reading them. It wasn’t as if she missed her mum; she’d barely even known her. And, quite frankly, Martha had enough on her plate keeping the family going and preventing another Terrible Day. 

Saving Neverland by Abi Elphinstone is published by Puffin, priced £14.99.