"I don't want to put my toys away"
Journal: Journal of Juvenilia Studies
Year: 2023

At a public celebration of his seventieth birthday hosted by the PEN Club in London in October 1936, H. G. Wells expressed dismay at the experience. “I just hate it,” Wells told the gathering that included such luminaries as Bernard Shaw, Julian Huxley, G. B. Stern and André Maurois. “I feel like a youngster at a wonderful party sitting on the floor with all my games spread out before me. When you tell me I am 70, it is as if my nurse were coming to me to say, ‘Bertie, it is getting late—time to