That's me at age two, in 1967, already fascinated with the Peter Pan statue in Bowring Park in St. John's. I grew up with this statue; by the time I was born it had stood in Bowring Park for 40 years.

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The Bowring Park statue has perhaps the most poignant inscription and backstory of any of the Peter Pan statues. An inscription on the statue reads "In Memory of a Dear Little Girl Who Loved the Park." As a child I read it and wondered who the dear little girl was.  

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Her name was Betty Munn -- it's actually inscribed in a different spot on the statue (see pics below) -- and she died at the age of three in the 1918 sinking of the ship Florizel. Her grandfather, Sir Edward Bowring, whose family firm had donated the land for the park a few years earlier, commissioned a copy of the famous Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, London, and had it placed in Bowring Park in memory of Betty in 1925. This was the third copy commissioned, after the London original and the Brussels statue.

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To learn more about Bowring Park and the statue there, follow this link. The statue, and the story behind it, inspired the children's book The Secret of Bowring Park, by Christine Gordon Manley.

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Wherever I go in the world, this Peter Pan statue is always the one I come home to.

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