Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  According to Nico, it was in a heroin-induced stupor that he finally yielded to Cynthia’s representations that he should sign a new will, leaving her £30,000 and all the rights in his plays and books (other than Peter Pan, already the property of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children). Peter had been present in the room when the fatal dose was administered at Cynthia’s suggestion. ‘When Uncle Jim got really ill,’ Nico told Andrew Birkin, ‘and was not expected to last the night, Peter made the Greatest Mistake of his Life and telephoned [Cynthia] down in Devon or Cornwall. She hired a car and motored through the night. Meanwhile, Peter, I and General Freyberg [a war hero and loyal friend of Barrie] went on watch – 8 to 12, 12 to 4, 4 to 8 am – each of us expecting to see JMB die. Cynthia arrived towards the end of Bernard Freyberg’s watch... still alive... got hold of surgeon Horder and solicitor Poole with the will... Horder gave an injection, and sufficient energy was pumped into Uncle Jim so that he could put his name to the will that Poole laid before him.

  ‘When Peter and I... were cut out from the will* we talked and thought and eventually went to consult a leading solicitor, Theodore Goddard. What did he advise? If, he said, we would get 1. Freyberg to state in Court how unconscious JMB was etc etc, and 2. Frank Thurston† to agree with the repeated manoeuvres of Cynthia [what Nico referred to as Cynthia ‘crying her woes: talking of her oldest (dotty) son and her poverty etc etc etc’] then we couldn’t fail – in his opinion – to win the case. We did get Bernard and Frank to say they would back us up; but then we each thought how horrid the whole thing was going to be, and we decided not to sue.’8

  Peter’s feud with Cynthia continued and was well known to the family. As fate would have it, the antagonists died within a few days of one another, Cynthia on the Thursday before Peter. But he had long given up the fight for control of the Barrie Estate, and was indeed on the point of retirement. Barrie’s will had been published twenty-three years before Peter stepped under the train at Sloane Square. It would surely not, on its own, have driven him to take his life. In any case, Peter had no reason to feel that Barrie had exploited him financially. On the contrary, from 1910 Barrie generously financed Peter’s upbringing, including his schooling at Eton, and he founded the publishing firm of Peter Davies Ltd for him. If Peter continued to agonise over Barrie’s will, Cynthia was to blame, not Barrie, and her all too human greed was surely not enough to persuade a man like Peter to commit suicide.

  Neither the legacy of the Great War nor the association with Peter Pan nor Cynthia’s actions were sufficient alone to topple Peter into depression. Stronger by far was the shock of investigating his family background, a project which had obsessed him for fifteen years before his death. After the Second World War, Peter began to research and write a family history, making use of the thousands of letters he had inherited from Barrie, along with ‘pencilled notes of conversations’ with Arthur who had been unable to talk after an operation to remove his upper jaw. A six-part history, not for publication, was originally envisaged and in 1946, to extend his primary source material, Peter began consulting family friends and personal witnesses, including Nanny Hodgson.

  The first part, dealing with the coming together of his father and mother, had gone well, a snapshot of late Victorian grace, charm and dignity; but, wrote Peter to Nanny, ‘The entry on the scene of JMB introduces a strange and unavoidably controversial element into this compilation.’

  That this was understatement was clear by December 1946, when Peter was admitting to Nanny that his work on it was ‘melancholy and sad enough’, and by April 1949: ‘Alas, the more one learns of those sad days, the sadder the tale becomes.’ So depressed did the research make him that he took to calling the history The Morgue, and eventually had to bring it to an early end.

  One of the questions that first troubled Peter, who had with equanimity published the ‘lives’ of so many other people, concerned Arthur’s apparent reluctance when Sylvia welcomed Barrie into their lives, and almost daily into their home when Arthur was out at work.

  Peter was shocked for example to discover that his mother and father had begun to take separate holidays only a few years into their marriage.

  ‘It was, I think, during the Easter holidays of this year [1905, when Peter was 8] that S. [Sylvia] with Jack and Michael went to Normandy with JMB and Mary B [Barrie’s wife], while G [George] and I went with A [Arthur] to Kirkby. It has always seemed to me, looking back, that this arrangement can hardly have been come to without a good deal of argument and protest... I have no letters referring to the episode.’

  On 25 November 1946, Peter wrote to Nanny: ‘I am going to ask you one or two questions which you may not care to answer. If you don’t want to, that’s all right of course. If you find you can, I shall be grateful to you.’ Beneath each of the questions he asked Nanny, Peter wrote the word ‘Answer’ and left a space for her to fill in her response.

  There was no love lost between Barrie and Nanny Hodgson, who resented his intrusion on her territory and disliked what she regarded as his subversive way with the boys. Barrie admitted there were ‘many coldnesses and even bickerings between us... We were rivals.’* Still fiercely loyal to her employers forty years after their deaths, and still protective towards Peter, her answers are nevertheless fair – even diplomatic. But the truth shines through.

  Q. Did JMB’s entry into the scheme of things occasionally cause ill-feeling or quarrelling between father and mother?

  A. What was of value to the One had little or no value to the Other.

  On the question of whether there was argument over Sylvia going with Barrie to France, she wrote:

  A. Any difference of opinion was never ‘Public Property’ – in the House... Your father was always more than willing where your mother’s happiness was concerned. [On the other hand] the Barries were overwhelming (and found your Mother’s help – grace – & beauty a great asset in meeting the right people etc). . .

  For the first time Peter had to entertain the possibility that Barrie had been a divisive force in his family, that he had come between his father and mother.

  Q. It is clear enough that father didn’t like [Barrie], at any rate in the early stages. Would you say that father nevertheless became much fonder of him towards the end [i.e. on his deathbed], and was much comforted, in his last months, by the thought that JMB’s money would be there to help mother and all of us after his death?

  Nanny’s answer was unequivocal.

  A. Your father acquiesced to the inevitable with astonishing Grace and Fortitude – it would help your mother – & further than that he never desired. Nor was able to go. [Her emphasis].

  Peter began to confront the picture of a wife colluding with a third party (Barrie) in the emasculation of a husband. The picture threatening to emerge was that Barrie had insinuated his way into the family against Arthur’s wishes, that Sylvia had encouraged him and that, on account of his love for Sylvia, Arthur had bottled up his resentment, before, in 1906, it had found physical expression in the deadly sarcoma on his mouth and jaw.

  Peter learned from other letters that ‘a state of tension’ existed between Sylvia and her elder sister, Beatrice, known as Trixy, who became exasperated by Sylvia’s insensitivity to Arthur’s feelings about her friendship with Barrie.

  He began to question his own memory of his mother. What was true and what had become confused with photographs and hearsay? In desperation he found solace in the reminiscence of others of both sexes on whom Sylvia had left the indelible impression ‘of something rarer than mere charm, and deeper than mere beauty’.

  Crompton Llewelyn Davies [Arthur’s brother], most unemotional of men and as a rule pretty reticent, once, shortly before his death, tried to talk about her to P and me; and it was as if he spoke of a being of more than earthly loveliness. He broke down and had to stop, though not before he had brought the tears to the eyes of both his listeners. This was more than 20 years after Sylvia’s death.9

  In t
he summer of 1946, Peter decided to take his sons Rivvy and George to stay with his elder brother Jack, partly for a holiday, partly to get Jack’s views about The Morgue.

  Jack, who had risen to Commander in the British Navy, lived with his wife Gerrie in a cottage called Pilchard’s Corner, at Port Gaverne, St Endellion, in north Cornwall. He had been the adventurous one of Sylvia’s boys, athletic, devastatingly attractive and, in Nico’s memory, ‘a womaniser. He used to take me to such places as The Palace Theatre and thrill me to the quick at his getting glorious smiles from the chorus girls.’

  Their cousin Daphne du Maurier, daughter of Sylvia’s brother Gerald, had a particular fix on Jack as a result of a shared family holiday at Slyfield House, near Stoke d’Abernon in Surrey. Jack could climb nearly to the top of the great cedar tree on the lawn and she was in awe of him: ‘Had I known, at the age of five, six, seven, how the Greeks felt about their Olympian gods,’ she recalled, ‘I would have shared their sentiments.’10

  Jack was obviously a sensitive boy as well as athletic and good looking, perhaps more sensitive at root than any of his brothers. When he was 12 Arthur told him he had cancer. ‘I remember very clearly indeed father walking me up and down the right hand (looking up the garden) path & telling me more or less what he was in for,’ he told Peter. ‘He drove me to tears – an easy matter! And he could talk perfectly clearly, so presumably it was at the latest before the big operation . . .’11

  This attractive combination of adventurousness and sensitivity made Jack a favourite of Sylvia, more or less equally with No. 4 son, Michael, the most beautiful of her boys. Jack had adored his mother and, as Peter wrote, ‘loved and worshipped his father’, but he had a changeable and susceptible temperament, for which Nanny said Sylvia had had to ‘make allowances’.

  When Peter went to Pilchard’s Corner to talk to him about The Morgue, things did not go well. ‘We began squabbling in next to no time,’ he wrote to Nanny.

  Jack was not against the idea of the family history in principle. Indeed dialogue with Peter continued, and they found some interesting, if rather disconcerting, common ground while talking about childhood. In April 1949, Peter wrote again to Nanny, saying, ‘Jack and I, while not very closely resembling each other in general, are both “clouded over a good deal and among those whom melancholy has marked their own.” I am dimly aware of a great many “complexes” in myself, which are traceable to 1907–1910 . . .’

  With Uncle Jim, the five brothers had ‘lived in the boy world to the exclusion of any other’, said Peter, which meant that they ‘were little troubled’ by the loss of both their parents. All that was remembered were the games they played, the fly fishing (their favourite pastime with Jim), the holidays in Scotland, everything a beautiful fantasy beyond which neither boy could gain access, even though by then Jack had been 16 and Peter 13.

  Peter wrote to Nanny in December 1946, ‘I have been a little surprised, and rather disgusted too, to find, on the evidence of old letters and the memories they recall, how little I can have felt at the time, thanks to dwelling in the selfish and separate world of childhood.’

  In January 1950 Peter sent Jack the first instalment of The Morgue, and Jack surprised him with the strength of his feelings about it. Going straight to the heart of the matter – the Barrie-Arthur-Sylvia triangle – he wrote that

  it is to me so important that I wonder if you could mention my disagreement somewhere, as there are to be several copies. I couldn’t at all agree that father did anything but most cordially dislike the bart [the boys’ nickname for Barrie after he accepted a baronetcy in 1913]. I felt again & again that [their father Arthur’s] remarks & letters simply blazoned the fact that he was doing all he could poor man to put up a smoke screen & leave Mother a little less sad & try & show her he didn’t grudge the bart being hale & hearty & rich enough to take over the business. I realised of course that I might too easily be biased, so I asked Gerrie, & she agreed with me. I’ve no doubt at all father was thankful, but he was a proud man, & it must have been extraordinarily bitter for him. And altogether too soft and saint-like to like the little man as well... I’d be grateful... if some small sign of my disagreement could go in.12

  As to the question of their mother’s character and whether she had colluded with Barrie in a situation that had deeply wounded their father, the line Jack took was that the family had never been Sylvia’s first priority anyway after Barrie arrived: ‘If one of the boys was ill, it was never Sylvia who held their heads or took their temperatures – it was always Arthur who did that kind of thing.’ After Uncle Jim made the boys famous, Jack wrote, ‘she wore her children as other women wear pearls or fox-furs’.

  Given Peter’s statement that Jack was, like himself, ‘clouded over’ about their childhood, one has to wonder whether the forceful hand of Jack’s wife Gerrie could be seen in his so certain response. When Andrew Birkin interviewed her twenty-five years later, she made a point of insisting that no one in her family had ever fallen under Barrie’s influence.

  Birkin asked whether she had ever watched Barrie captivate a child. ‘Yes, he tried to captivate Timothy and Jane [Jack and Gerrie’s children],’ Gerrie replied. ‘He completely failed, particularly with Jane.’

  ‘How did he set about it? He had a rather special way, didn’t he?’

  ‘He had a rather special way, but it didn’t rub off on Jane. I suppose he was trying to tell her stories, I don’t know. But I do know that as far as she was concerned he cut no ice at all. I think he would go to her because she was younger and more impressionable, more likely to be captivated, but it didn’t work at all.’

  Again, she was absolutely insistent that ‘Nothing of Barrie’s personality rubbed off on Jack at all. They were poles apart.’ In her own mind Gerrie had cleansed her family of Barrie, and cleansing, she clearly felt, had been needed. It was an act which she saw as supportive of her husband.

  Holed up with Jack in their isolated cottage in north Cornwall, Gerrie convinced herself that she had eradicated the ‘curse’ of their association with Barrie. Even their daughter, baptised Sylvia in 1924, was re-named Jane, emphatically distancing the family unit from the woman who had welcomed Barrie in. Then, in the 1970s, Gerrie introduced a competitive edge with Peggy, calling Peter’s wife ‘hopeless... useless, poor darling’ – the implication being that she failed where Gerrie succeeded, which was why Peter and not Jack had committed suicide.

  Lady Jane Barran, daughter of Peggy’s prettier twin sister Alison, confirms that Peggy was ‘difficult’, but Gerrie was no more successful ultimately than she. For during the 1950s, in parallel with Peter, Jack descended into a deep depression. Cousin Daphne visited him at Pilchard’s Corner in February 1959 and was shocked at what she found, writing to Oriel Malet* that she ‘called on a cousin of mine – one of the “Peter Pan” boys, now sixty-five – and I became very depressed, at him and his brusque wife, living in a dreary little house with an east wind biting at them. I thought back to being there, when he was a midshipman and very menacing, and brought me back a balloon, and jigged me up and down, and was very gay and entertaining... and now he is that grousing, grey-haired man.’

  Jack died the following September, seven months before Peter walked under a train. His creeping emotional and mental trauma, and parallel physical disintegration, replicated Peter’s physical and mental decline almost exactly.

  None of it made sense. Why should either of the brothers become so deeply depressed in later life? And what hold had Barrie over Sylvia to change her so?

  It is possible that Sylvia was blinded by love for the interloper, and didn’t care if she made her husband unhappy. But there is no evidence that she loved Barrie. On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that she loved Arthur deeply up to and beyond his death in 1907. They continued to conceive children long after Barrie entered the scene. Both so beautiful and in love in 1892 when they married, Sylvia and Arthur had seemed the embodiment of the romantic ideal. That both should die y
oung had been a tragedy that went beyond their individual loss.

  So, how had Barrie’s intervention in their lives brought Sylvia to such self-centredness that she could persecute her husband, and turn to wearing her children ‘as other women wear pearls or fox-furs’? And what was Barrie’s hold over the boys that half a century later they were still ‘clouded over’ about what went on?

  After Barrie’s death in 1937, Peter commissioned Denis Mackail to write the official biography, The Story of J.M.B. Mackail is supposed to have written it as therapy following a nervous breakdown, not perhaps the wisest prescription, but Mackail – a novelist and short story writer – had been an obvious choice. His mother Margaret was the daughter of Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite artist and pupil of Rossetti, one of the artistic set in which Sylvia’s father, George du Maurier, moved. Mackail also had the advantage of personal acquaintance with Barrie, Sylvia and the boys, even at one stage playing for Barrie’s cricket team. His one problem was Lady Cynthia, who kept an eagle eye on everything he wrote, dramatically slashing whole pages with a blue pencil when it looked as if he might be damaging Barrie’s reputation.

  In the end, Peter declared that Mackail had made a ‘searching and efficient’ job of it, and his jaunty style, a response to the Asquith pressure, enabled him to get away with a great deal. Nevertheless, one reader was less than satisfied – Barrie’s wife. Mary Ansell took issue over remarks that made her out to have been the daughter of a seaside landlady and, more intriguingly, over Mackail’s failure to tackle head on Barrie’s sexuality and his relationship with the boys. She wrote to Peter:

  J.M.’s tragedy was that he knew that as a man he was a failure and that love in its fullest sense could never be felt by him or experienced, and it was this knowledge that led to his sentimental philanderings. One could almost hear him, like Peter Pan, crowing triumphantly, but his heart was sick all the time. There was so much tragedy in his life that Mr Mackail has ignored – tragedy not to be treated humorously or lightly. Mr Mackail has a passion for the word ‘little’, and after a time it becomes boring. I would suggest that it should be placed on the title page and left there.13