what a cheque book is, but I should just love to give my mother one.
SLIGHTLY (as usual). My mother was fonder of me than your mothers were of you. (Uproar.) Oh yes, she was. Peter had to make up names for you, but my mother had wrote my name on the pinafore I was lost in. ‘Slightly Soiled’; that’s my name.
(They fall upon him pugnaciously; not that they are really worrying about their mothers, who are now as important to them as a piece of string, but because any excuse is good enough for a shindy. Not for long is he belaboured, for a sound is heard that sends them scurrying down their holes: in a second of time the scene is bereft of human life. What they have heard from near-by is a verse of the dreadful song with which on the Never Land the pirates stealthily trumpet their approach—
The flag of skull and bones,
A merry hour, a hempen rope,
And hey for Davy Jones!
