Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  Peter was soon writing to Nanny that Nico’s ‘subconscious doesn’t seem to have been affected, for his disposition and temperament are noticeably, in my opinion, happy and sanguine and optimistic’.

  Jack’s wife Gerrie was in agreement: ‘Nico was the odd one out. He was the complete extrovert, completely happy. Nothing has ever gone wrong for him personally. And he still bounces. He is mentally and physically utterly different to all the others.’11

  Nico himself recognised how different he was: ‘I was/am just a brother who by the grace of God is more or less normal (or at any rate think I am)... And of course when one – I at any rate – gets on to dreams, one is in a world of lovely non-comprehension.’12

  So saying, ironically, Nico put the matter into its proper context: Nico, alone among the brothers, did not participate in the du Maurier world of dreams. Daphne did, always had done. Both she and her grandfather George du Maurier worked within it. They alone of all the family expressed it in their work.

  As a young man, ‘Kicky used to feel within himself two persons, the one serious, energetic, full of honest ambition and good purpose; the other a wastrel, reckless and careless, easily driven to the Devil.’13

  This last phrase was not hyperbole. Kicky had a talent for hypnosis, which he described as ‘a gift from the Devil’. For years it was a secret known only to the family and friends with whom he practised it. His strait-laced wife Emma Wightwick had objected to it, and he put it behind him when he married her. Kicky changed after marriage, as Peter had written to tell Nanny, adding, ‘Grannie [Emma] seems to me to have been a most excellent and admirable character but comparatively ordinary.’

  Emma disapproved and ‘the dreamer vanished’, as Daphne wrote. But the dreamer returned thirty years later to inspire three novels, including Trilby.

  Before he died, Kicky prophesied that a girl in the family would carry his gift into the future, and it was to this that Peter alluded when writing to Nanny, ‘I think that my mother [Sylvia] inherited a good deal from him.’

  Certainly Sylvia knew all about her father’s secret talent, but Daphne had begun to suspect that Sylvia’s boys had inherited it too, to varying degrees – George and Michael definitely, Peter and Jack less so, Nico not at all.

  At Eton, a boy called Roger Senhouse had been immediately struck by the aura around George and Michael, the two boys to whom Barrie was closest. The first time he saw George, ‘standing naked in the shower opposite my room after my first Old Boys match... I shall never forget that Blake-like effulgence,’ he wrote to Nico after Peter’s death. ‘I wanted to extend the Davies family in my mind and those early memories have held an important position in my life.’14

  Later, Senhouse became especially close to Michael, ‘I have never again since Michael’s death felt that those astonishing years have been equalled in intensity – the elan vitae in all the phases... I was then in touch with life forces that have since eluded me.’

  It has always been assumed that this aura, this Blake-like effulgence around the Llewelyn Davies boys, was inspired by Barrie. But it was, in fact, a du Maurier secret, the very fount of Kicky’s and Daphne’s talent as writers, and the reason why, when Denis Mackail observed Barrie come together with Michael, aged 10, he wrote: ‘He and Barrie draw closer and closer, and perhaps it isn’t always Barrie who leads or steers.’

  The du Maurier secret is what drew Barrie in, just as surely as it drew in Roger Senhouse. It was Barrie’s intense desire to share in this secret – to possess it – that drove him to target the Llewelyn Davies boys, and extend his malign power over the whole family.

  In ‘The Archduchess’, another of the stories in The Breaking Point, Daphne describes the du Maurier family secret figuratively as delivering the gift of ‘eternal youth’, the Romantic secret of Peter Pan, the boy who would never grow up and therefore retained his intimacy with the supernatural world. Barrie is the disenchanted interloper, maimed by his parents and programmed to maim, and he has come to steal the secret.

  * Daphne’s husband was Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning GCVQ, KBE, CB, DSO, wartime commander of Airborne Forces and Chief of Staff to Earl Mountbatten in SEAC. In 1947 he became Comptroller and Treasurer to HRH Princess Elizabeth, and from 1952 Treasurer to the Duke of Edinburgh.

  † In the early nineteenth century, Mary Anne Clarke, George du Maurier’s maternal grandmother, was the mistress of the Duke of York. She took the Duke to court for maintenance and struck such a splendid deal that the du Mauriers lived off the settlement into future generations. Daphne’s interest in her family history is also reflected in novels such as The Scapegoat (1957) and The Glass Blowers (1963), both set in the du Maurier heartland of Sarthe in north-west France.

  * Emma du Maurier (1843–1914), Peter and Daphne’s grandmother, wife of George (Kicky) du Maurier.

  * ‘No Motive’ was in fact withdrawn from The Apple Tree and not published until 1980 in The Rendezvous.

  PART II

  1789–1862

  Kicky and Barrie: learning to fly

  Kicky and Felix Moscheles: ‘We sat into the small hours of the morning, talking of the past, present and future, a long-necked Rhine-wine bottle and two green glasses beside us . . .’

  CHAPTER ONE

  Du Maurier dreamers

  We think of Daphne du Maurier as indelibly English. Slim, striking, and quietly commanding, with a strong confident jawline and a pronounced upper-class English accent, she was a Dame of the British Empire, and wrote novels that found their way into the folklore of England’s mystical West. But, as the name suggests, the family is French; the du Mauriers came from the Sarthe region of north-west France.

  No surprise, therefore, that Daphne set novels and short stories in France, or that the émigré or foreign invader is everywhere in her fiction, from Frenchman’s Creek to My Cousin Rachel, from The Progress of Julius to The Scapegoat, or that she once declared that she had one foot in each country: ‘If my mind and soul live in Fowey, perhaps I leave my heart behind in Paris.’

  The first du Maurier to set foot in London from France was also the first du Maurier. Robert Mathurin Busson du Maurier, a charming fraudster, arrived in 1789. He was on the run from the law and had adopted the suffix ‘du Maurier’ in order to avoid detection, and to recommend him to the English who welcomed aristocrats escaping the French Revolution.

  Robert du Maurier was an out-and-out fantasist. He fabricated not only his name, but an aristocratic lineage stretching back to the twelfth century. The original Bussons were in reality humble glass manufacturers, and ‘Du Maurier’ was the name of a farmhouse where Robert was born, as Daphne was the first to discover.

  Robert’s son, Louis, was also a dreamer. ‘He invented ingenious and strange machines which because of some flaw or other failed to work.’ Daphne tells us that he ‘once nearly blew his family into the next world’, inventing a lamp that was all set to supersede Sir Humphry Davy’s, used by miners everywhere. ‘He had a wizard’s flair for speculation, which just missed amassing him a fortune by the proverbial hair’s breadth.’1

  Louis’s saving grace was that he ‘sang like an angel’. His son, Kicky, inherited this talent, as well as a certain oomph from his mother, Ellen, the daughter of Mary Anne Clarke. No one in the family had made any money until Mary Anne Clarke became part of its genetic profile. She was the original kiss-and-tell, testifying against her royal lover before the bar of the House of Commons, bringing him to disgrace and netting a huge financial settlement.

  Both Mary Anne Clarke and Robert du Maurier served time in the King’s Bench prison, which, according to Daphne, explained why Ellen ‘fussed and worried over her children with all the singleness of purpose and forethought for their future that comes with deep-laid anxiety – the children must do well in the world, especially her favourite Kicky . . .’

  Kicky was born on 6 March 1834. As a child he had a weak disposition: he grew slowly and was never tall. His younger brother Eugene was bigger,
more athletic and far funnier than he. Kicky remained in his brother’s shadow, a quiet child sitting for hours with his face in his hands, listening to his mother play the harp, but he was always happy, living as he did in a household full of love.

  The du Maurier family was settled in Belgium for the earliest part of Kicky’s childhood. They moved to London in 1837, when Kicky was three and a half. Here, ‘my father grew very poor. He was a man of scientific tastes, and lost his money in inventions which never came to anything. So we had to wander forth again, and this time we went to Boulogne and there we lived in a beautiful house at the top of the Grande Rue’, the home of Grandmama Mary Anne Clarke. In 1842, after another downturn in business, the family moved to Passy, ‘a quiet village on the outskirts of Paris, facing the Bois de Boulogne’.2

  This was Kicky’s idyllic childhood time, to which he would return again and again in his dreams. One day in particular was the happiest of his entire life –

  For in an old tool shed full of tools and lumber, at the end of the garden, and half-way between an empty fowl-house and a disused stable (each an Eden itself), I found a small toy wheelbarrow – quite the most extraordinary, the most unheard-of and undreamed-of, humorously, daintily, exquisitely fascinating object I had ever come across in all my existence.

  I spent hours, enchanted hours, in wheeling brick-bats from the stable to the fowl-house, and more enchanted hours in wheeling them all back again, while genial French workmen, who were busy in and out of the house where we were to live, stopped every now and then to ask good-natured questions of the ‘p’tit Anglais’, and commend his knowledge of their tongue, and his remarkable skill in the management of a wheelbarrow. Well I remember wondering, with newly aroused self-consciousness, at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my bliss, and looking forward with happy confidence to an endless succession of such hours in the future... Oh, the beautiful garden! Roses, nasturtiums, and convolvulus, wall-flowers, sweet peas, and carnations, marigolds and sunflowers, dahlias and pansies, and hollyhocks, and poppies, and Heaven knows what besides! In my fond recollection they all bloom at once, irrespective of time and season.

  Here, he and two other boys would play at Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, ‘the fame of whose exploits was then filling all France’, and Kicky would pretend to be Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s frontiersman novels, rousing tales of adventure about primitive Red Indians and early pioneers of the American West, while alone he would engage in island fantasies, his first book being Robinson Crusoe and next favourite The Swiss Family Robinson.

  But the real fun came in the nearby Bois de Boulogne, not at all the pristine park it is now, and in particular by a pond called the mare d’Auteuil, which was surrounded on three sides by ‘a dense, wild wood... The very name has a magic from all the associations that gathered round it at that time.’

  As a child he would fish for tadpoles and fully developed reptiles in the muddy waters, and at night, ‘snoozing in my warm bed’, would ‘picture it to myself lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with all that weird, uncanny life seething beneath its stagnant surface’.

  Then gradually the water would sink, and the reeds, left naked, begin to move and rustle ominously, and from among their roots in the uncovered slush everything alive would make for the middle – hopping, gliding, writhing, frantically... Down shrank the water; and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge, fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats, gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-coloured offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled, and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my Manuel de Geologie Élémentaire.

  So, in the 1840s the highly imaginative Kicky enjoyed boyish adventures and the park and the mare d’Auteuil just like his grandsons, Sylvia’s boys, who enjoyed inventive games in the early 1900s by the Black Lake, and in Kensington Gardens by the Round Pond, playground of Peter Pan. Kicky even had an Uncle Jim figure in his life in the Bois de Boulogne. Le Major Duquesnois ‘took to me at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me... and told me a new fairy tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years. Scheherezade could do no more for a Sultan, and to save her own neck from a bowstring!’3

  The park became a kind of lodestone for everything Kicky understood of beauty in later life. Here, for ever, would exist the boy in him to which he longed to return, and to which he did return in dreams and in his fiction, ‘proving that nothing is forgotten that we and our forefathers have known, experienced and seen, but all images, like photographs, are printed on our subconscious minds forever’.4

  His father Louis meanwhile had entered into a partnership with his brother-in-law George Clarke in London, with an idea to clear all the world’s ports of seaweed. In 1851 he sent for Kicky, who had just failed the Latin paper of his baccalaureate and arrived without any qualifications at all.

  Kicky worked with Louis in the Birkbeck Laboratory of University College London and hated every minute of it, except that it meant he could draw caricatures of his professor and others who worked there, who ‘were hugely tickled by them at the time. Indeed, [the professor] remembers nothing else about me, except that I promised to be a very bad chemist.’

  Kicky was a popular and sparky little character, with a notable ability to entertain and amuse, whatever the situation and whatever the company. In 1855, he took a train to Cambridge with a friend. They fell in with some undergraduates, among them Walter Besant,* who gave this telling account of the evening the young du Maurier passed with them:

  One day Calverley, then a fellow, stopped me in the court and invited me into his rooms after hall. ‘I’ve got a young Frenchman,’ he said. ‘He’s clever. Come and be amused.’ I went. The young Frenchman spoke English as well as anybody; he told quantities of stories in a quiet irresponsible way, as if he was an outsider looking on at the world. No one went to chapel that evening. After the port, which went round with briskness for two or three hours, the young Frenchman went to the piano and began to sing in a sweet, flexible, high baritone or tenor. Presently somebody else took his place at the instrument, and he, with Calverley, and two or three dummies, performed a Royal Italian Opera in very fine style. The young Frenchman’s name was George du Maurier.

  Kicky’s eccentric, itinerant upbringing, far from dragging him down, had benefited his personality. He was spontaneous, energetic, completely without humbug and, having been brought up in two cultures at once, had a joyous objectivity and a talent for humour (‘in a quiet irresponsible way’).

  Then, in the summer of 1856, after a lawsuit over the miners’ lamp left him high and dry financially, Louis suddenly gave up the effort of living. Refusing to see a doctor, he ‘let rip’, according to his son, ‘with a rendering of one of Count de Ségur’s drinking songs [and] left the world almost with music on his lips’.

  By then, Kicky was in no doubt what he wanted to do. ‘I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become an artist in the Swiss painter M. Gleyre’s studio.’

  * Walter Besant was later a novelist and social reformer who stimulated the founding of the People’s Palace in 1887, the famous centre for education and amusement for the poor in London’s East End and now part of the University of London.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Peak Experience: the secret

  The new way forward for art students in Paris in the 1850s was painting not from artefacts of antiquity but from human models in the ateliers of successful artists, who gave of their experience in return for a small payment.

  ‘One day the model was male, the next female, and so on, alternating throughout the year,’ Kicky wrote. ‘A stove, a model-throne, stools, boxes, some fifty strongly-built low chairs with backs, a couple of sc
ore easels, and many drawing boards, completed the mobilier.’1

  These were places not of tranquillity, but of undisciplined, riotous and even cruel behaviour. There are stories of new students being ‘crucified’ on ladders and hung out in public places, and even of one death due to an initiation by scorching over a studio stove.

  Charles Gleyre’s studio, at 53 rue Notre Dame des Champs, was more like the disreputable common room of some English public school:

  In those days it was somewhat a rough place, and the carefully and religiously brought up lad was much shocked at the manners and customs of the students... I have seen the whole atelier astride of their chairs, prancing around the model, shouting the Marseille, which during the Empire was a song forbidden by the police. Some wag would slip out of the room and coming back rap threateningly at the door, when the procession would stop, the song cease, and each student would at once pretend to be hard at work at the drawing or painting before him, no matter whose it was. When the man who had knocked appeared instead of the police he was received with a yell of indignation, and sometimes the strange gallop was recommenced.2

  At Gleyre’s Kicky teamed up with another English artist, Thomas Armstrong, and a Scot, Thomas Reynolds Lamont. Armstrong gives a vivid picture of his first meeting with Kicky:

  I can revive the picture of him in my mind’s eye sitting astride one of the dingy Utrecht velvet chairs with his elbows on the back, pale almost to sallowness, square shouldered and very lean with no hair on his face except a slight moustache... he certainly was very attractive and sympathetic and the other young fellows with whom I was living felt much as I did. We admired his coats with square shoulders and long skirts after the fashion of the day, and we admired his voice and his singing, his power of drawing portraits and caricatures from memory, his strength and skill with his fists, and above all we were attracted by his very sympathetic manner. I think this certainty of finding sympathy was one of his greatest and most abiding charms. His personality was a very engaging one and evoked confidence in those who knew him very little.3