Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  In the end it was the gardener at Black Lake Cottage who spilled the beans, telling Jim that his wife had observed Mrs Barrie committing adultery. Jim sent a telegram to Mary telling her to remain in London. His expectation was that she would toe the line and stop seeing Cannan.

  Cannan was attractive and twenty years Mary’s junior. Her marriage had been over before it started. She told Jim that she wanted to marry Cannan, and she asked for a divorce.

  Barrie was adamant he did not want a divorce and instructed Sir George Lewis to offer Mary a financial settlement – ‘virtually on her own terms’.

  Friends were appalled at his treatment of her. Maurice Hewlett wrote to her blaming Jim’s behaviour on advice from Lewis, whom he described as ‘a loathsome Jew’. Mary stuck to her guns. She would not be bought. She wanted out, whatever the financial consequences. Barrie could cut her off, if he wished.

  The divorce hearing on 13 October 1909 was a bitter business. Mary wrote to H. G. Wells that Jim ‘came out badly in court. 3 lies’. First, that Mary had said the affair with Cannan was the only one she had had; it was not, nor had she said that it was. Second, that Black Lake Cottage was his property, when it had been Mary’s money that bought it in 1900, not Jim’s. Third, that he had lived happily with his wife.

  Mary got her divorce, and Jim agreed a settlement. Eventually they made friends again and he left her money in his will. Mary had won. Most unusual. One wonders what she knew.

  Jim had moved out of Leinster Corner and into Mason’s flat in Stratton Street. Subsequently, Lady Lewis came to his rescue with a flat at 3 Adelphi Terrace House, just off the Strand, on a bend of the Thames affording a view of no less than seven bridges. ‘Granville Barker went with me to see the flat,’ Jim wrote to her, ‘and we both thought it amazing what you have got done in the time.’ He slept there for the first time on 20 November 1909: ‘I am in and it is all so comfortable and beautiful & all owing to you.’ What she had done for him, he said, he would never forget. By 13 May 1910, in far better fettle, he wrote to Lady Lewis, describing the awesome feeling of looking out through the high expansive windows of the apartment across the Thames:

  I feel I am writing on board the good ship Adelphi, 1200 tons. The wind is blowing so hard. The skipper has lashed himself to the wheel. Down in the terrace a bicycle has just been blown across the street. Mr Shaw* has just made a gallant attempt to reach the pillar box. His beard is well in front of him. I feel I ought to open my portal and fling him a life-buoy. See if he does not have a column about this in tomorrow’s Times.

  Even as the party had returned from Caux, it was clear that there was something wrong with Sylvia and by February 1909 she was looking ‘very ill and thin, though lovely’.2

  There is much about Sylvia’s death that bears an uncanny resemblance to Arthur’s – including, of course, its tragic consequences for the boys. Like Arthur’s, Sylvia’s death certificate read cancer, though the shenanigans that surrounded her last few days seemed to throw doubt even on this – ‘I have always been under the impression that mother died of cancer. Surely this is the truth?’ Peter asked Nanny, seemingly bemused at the absence of a proper diagnosis or post-mortem.

  The location chosen by Jim for the final scene of Sylvia’s life was Ashton Farm, a remote holding near Countisbury in the Oare valley on Exmoor – Lorna Doone country, beautiful, dramatic and hopelessly inaccessible.

  The suggestion in The Morgue is that Sylvia hadn’t been told of the fatal diagnosis based on an X-ray, which Nanny had seen but which, she said, ‘conveyed nothing’. Dr Rendel was again on the case. He and a specialist had apparently decided against an operation because the tumour was too near the heart. Sylvia, in spite of feeling some pain, did not realise that she was terminally ill until almost the end. She was told nothing by anyone. She caught wind that something was up, however, and suggested a holiday on Exmoor assuming that, if she were badly ill, Jim and the doctors would not have allowed her to travel.

  The notion of a trip to Exmoor at such a time was absurd. Sylvia, a very sick woman, would be far away from specialist treatment or a top hospital or nursing home. Nevertheless, the whole family set out together, travelling five hours by rail and not far short of an hour by road across the moor. Once again, Barrie stage-managed the proceedings as if they were in a West End play that would run and run. Sylvia was the tragic star, of course, and Dr Rendel the attendant medic.

  An alarmed Emma du Maurier, at 67 years of age, pursued them. She expressed horror at the isolation of the house and its distance from doctors and told Jim to get Dr Rendel to send for Spicer, a specialist. Sylvia’s nurse – Nurse Loosemore – squabbled with Nanny Hodgson. The boys meanwhile took off, fishing for trout every day in the Doone Valley, or, as Peter recalled, ‘made expeditions to Lynton and ate huge teas with bilberry jam and Devonshire cream, or on idle days watched the buzzards circling slowly, high above the valley of the Lynn – while, in fact, we went our boyish ways – Sylvia weakened rapidly, and I think she never again left her room.’

  Sylvia died on 26 August 1910, a Friday. Dr Rendel, Jim, Nurse Loosemore and Emma du Maurier were the only ones present at the end. Cause of death was described at the time as increasing obstruction to breathing, and finally its complete prevention. The death certificate, certified by A. H. Spicer MB, states that cause of death was a malignant tumour in the posterior mediastinum (the thoracic cavity that contains the heart), ‘involving left lung Trachea and Oesophagus’.

  There was, however, no post-mortem. The death was registered two days later by Arthur’s brother, Crompton, in Barnstaple, an oddly speedy business, and arranged presumably at some expense, as the 28th was a Sunday.

  Initially, Michael and Nico stayed with Nanny, who ‘was not consulted about matters. You yourselves,’ she wrote to Peter, meaning George, Jack and Peter, ‘requested packing done and disappeared – re-appearing in a day or two with JMB... Have no recollection of Jack returning.’

  Barrie took the boys to London for Sylvia’s funeral, but only George and Peter returned with him. Presumably Jack had gone back to college.

  On the day his mother died, Jack was informed by Jim that Sylvia had agreed on her deathbed to marry him. Said Jack: ‘I was taken into a room where [Jim] was alone and he told me, which angered me even then, that Mother had promised to marry him and wore his ring. Even then I thought if it was true it must be because she knew she was dying.’3

  That Jim did this is either a mark of utter insensitivity or it was a lie and intended to introduce the idea that henceforth he would act as father to the boys. To Jack, the thought of Jim marrying his mother ‘was intolerable, even monstrous’, wrote Peter, who doubted that Sylvia had ever agreed to it. Years later, Nico reiterated that ‘Jack, who worshipped our father and mother, could not stand the thought of this little man thinking he could take father’s place.’

  Having packed off the uncooperative Jack, Jim arranged to be alone with the other boys in the area of the River Oare for some length of time, thereby avoiding contact with anyone who might intervene by offering a helping hand with his new ‘family’.

  We know this from a letter dated 10 September and sent from the rectory at Brendon, Lynton, close to Ashton Farm, to Lady Lewis, who had offered refuge:

  Thank you very much for your kind letter. Sylvia died very peacefully. At no time can it be said she had pain. She gradually became feeble physically tho’ in no other way. Her boys were constantly around her, and she preserved to her last smile the secret of keeping them happy.

  I am alone with them here. At the end of next week the older ones go back to their schools, and we shall return to London for that. I don’t know anything more at present.

  Thank you very much for saying I could go to you. I think I had better not go anywhere at present.

  Always yours,

  J. M. Barrie

  Thus, casually and with minimum fuss, did Barrie make the boys his own.

  He returned with them to Campden Hi
ll Square, where they were reunited with Nanny. Jim stayed with them for some time, anxious to keep his hand on the tiller. A new notebook, dated 22 October 1910, registers his address as 23 Campden Hill Square. Mackail writes that this was ‘his home far more than the flat, at present’. And Nico: ‘As often as not he was there.’

  The house was an all-male domicile, except of course for Nanny, who was especially important to the two youngest, Michael and Nico. ‘She was the person in our lives,’ said Nico later, an interesting turn of phrase. ‘She was the mother.’4

  The atmosphere seems to have been rather like that of a public school common-room; a large room on the first floor was known as ‘the schoolroom’. It was a form of society already familiar to the boys. Jim loved it. He was exultant at the very notion of the institution of the English public school, Eton in particular: ‘I am like a dog looking up to its owner, wondering what that noble face means,’ he wrote of the English public-school boy, lifting Little Billee’s wonder-love line for Trilby straight from Kicky’s text. He now had four such noble faces that could own him. Number 23 Campden Hill Square was an apparently safe environment. But, as anyone who went to public school in England in the twentieth century knows, one that could conceal a multitude of sins.

  The boys rallied: ‘We were selfish little creatures,’ admitted Nico, like Peter rather embarrassed in later years that they had accepted the transition so easily. Nico noted that henceforth there was an emphasis on games – ‘He was always egging us on to play this or that.’ Principal joy and the focus of life for the boys was a long table which could be converted into a three-quarter-sized billiard table, and was also used to play ping-pong. Nico recalled as typical a game Jim bought called ARBOCU, ‘a mixture of ARchery, BOwls, and CUrling . . .’, but it was just as likely that Jim would be found ‘bowling at one of them between two chairs’.5 Then there were the regular holidays to Scotland and the fly fishing. The boys’ fishing rods became like sacred things to them, instruments of an activity of high concentration and relaxation, something in which George in particular was well practised.

  The ease with which Jim was permitted to slip into this new role and take complete control of the boys is extraordinary. Did other members of the family turn a blind eye? Was there no ‘summit’ between the Davieses and the du Mauriers? Emma, now 69, wrote: ‘I am too old to be really any use to them. He [Jim] is unattached* and his one wish is to look after them in the way Sylvia would have wanted.’ Sylvia’s brother Gerald was ‘thick’ with Jim in the West End, acting in his plays. Arthur’s sister, Margaret, who had shown herself willing to help during Arthur’s illness, couldn’t have taken on five boys.

  As for Dolly, Jim took special care to put her and her husband, who was in a position of some power, at ease about the arrangement. On 23 February 1911, we find him in chatty form with Dolly and Arthur Ponsonby over lunch at his London flat.

  As on their earlier meeting after Arthur’s death, Dolly felt a little intimidated – ‘He always a little frightens me because his insight is so acute,’ she confided to her diary. Jim talked again of politics and of ‘the boys & their characters & of how George, though at Eton, was still a strong Liberal. He says they write one another long letters on politics. The little ones too, he says, are violent Radicals & at one moment would hardly consent to a Tory entering the house.’

  Dolly found this a bit hard to take – she knew these boys, after all – and asked Jim what they really understood about it. Barrie ‘explained so charmingly & simply his method – “I tell them that the dirty little raggamuffins are as good as they, & why shouldn’t they have the same advantages.” – or words to that effect.’

  After lunch, Arthur Ponsonby excused himself and Jim took Dolly and her two children, Elizabeth and Matthew, to Campden Hill Square for tea, to satisfy her that all was in order there. She saw Michael and Nico, the other three being at school and college, and then ‘Margaret* came in & was rather depressed & unnatural.’

  When later they went upstairs to the children’s room, rather than a political discussion, a more ‘characteristic conversation took place’, as Dolly’s diary records: ‘Nicholas remarked as Elizabeth and Matthew were putting on their gloves, “I like Matthew’s gloves best.” Michael says, “I don’t like kid gloves,” looking at Elizabeth’s. I say, “They are not kid gloves, they are doe-skin.” Michael says, “I like suede.” Margaret says, “Surely Michael, you prefer no gloves at all.”’

  Realising that a wrap-scene was required, Uncle Jim told the children how he had himself flown on stage on the set of Peter Pan, and that when word got out that he was going to fly ‘all rushed round to the front to see him – & JMB had the iron curtain let down as promptly’. Everyone laughed. Peter Pan always did the trick.

  In spite of Dolly’s and Margaret’s misgivings, no one challenged Jim’s abduction of the boys. He had no legal right to them. Their mother had not asked him to be their guardian. Years later, Dolly raised this with Peter, who replied in February 1946:

  You are of course perfectly right about our being spirited away, as children, from my mother’s and father’s friends. It would not be easy to say to what extent, if any, the process was deliberate, and to what extent inevitable in the peculiar circumstances; the whole business, as I look back on it, was almost unbelievably queer and pathetic and ludicrous and even macabre in a kind of way – and I dare say comic too from certain points of view. But at all events it was a bad thing, among some things that were good, for the children concerned; and I can well imagine what the thoughts of old friends of Arthur’s and Sylvia’s must have been.

  I myself am only now, in middle age, after thirty years or more, beginning to uncoil myself from the various complexes (I suppose the word is) ‘all that’ twisted me up . . .

  Jim had a friend called Charles Turley Smith who wrote books about schoolboys. He loved ‘Chay’ and his books so much that he used to give them to every boy he knew. Turley Smith was always ‘somewhere between the lines’ in the pages of Jim’s life.6 He lived in Cornwall, but still managed to be a regular member of the Allahakbarries, and as ‘Chay Turley’ was written into later editions of the Peter Pan play.

  A sequence of letters from Jim to Turley Smith express Jim’s thanks for gifts of hand-picked spring flowers. The first reads: ‘Many thanks for the bluebells and a squeeze of the hand for every one you plucked.’ Later, Jim wrote: ‘We are as close in love I think as two old friends can be.’

  Jim liked to keep him informed about the boy-world he now inhabited with Arthur and Sylvia’s sons:

  I have been visiting at Campden Hill for a longish time owing to one thing and another... I have been teaching Michael to bicycle, running up and down the quieter thoroughfares of Campden Hill and feeling what it must be like at the end of a marathon race. Have also taken him to a garden in St John’s Wood where an expert teaches fly fishing on a lawn. I saw a little of the Eton and Harrow match, but Harrow were so slovenly in the field it was poor sport... Peter is bowling very promisingly also. We are going for seven weeks or so beginning of August to Scourie in the west of Sutherland. 630 miles rail, then a drive 44 miles. The nearest small town is farther than from here to Paris in time. Nothing to do but fish, which however is what they want . . .7

  But Barrie did not yet feel entirely secure. And all of a sudden – at some point in March 1911 – a document was found, headed ‘Sylvia’s Will’. It was seven pages, written in Sylvia’s hand as she lay dying in Ashton. It detailed, with unmistakable clarity, who was to inherit her money and effects, and, most important, whom she wanted to look after the boys.

  The relevant part of it is the second paragraph.

  What I would like wd be if Jenny wd come to Mary & that the two together would be looking after the boys & the house & helping each other. And it would be so nice for Mary.

  Mary’ was Mary Hodgson – Nanny. ‘Jenny’ was Nanny’s sister.

  In an extraordinary manoeuvre Jim copied the whole thing out with one
alteration: he changed ‘Jenny’ to ‘Jimmy’, and then sent his version to the boys’ grandmother Emma du Maurier, as head of the du Maurier family, with a note:

  The above is an exact copy, including the words ‘Sylvia’s Will’, of paper found by me at 23 Campden Hill Square.

  Andrew Birkin was aware of it, but writes on the jmbarrie.co.uk web site, that Barrie substituted his name for Jenny’s ‘no doubt inadvertently’. There is of course the logical possibility that he honestly mistook the word ‘Jenny’ for ‘Jimmy’ and – delighted that he had proof of Sylvia’s desire for him to take control of the boys – rushed off a copy and sent it to Emma. Unfortunately for Barrie, the original and his copy still exist. There is no mistaking ‘Jenny’ for ‘Jimmy’. That Jim made the alteration exposes him utterly.

  What’s more, Sylvia had written that the arrangements she was making in the will would be ‘so nice for Mary’, i.e. for Mary Hodgson. Barrie knew better than anyone that his presence at Campden Hill Square would not be nice for Nanny Hodgson, not nice at all. He and Nanny never got on. What would have been nice for Nanny Hodgson was what Sylvia intended, namely that her sister Jenny had come to live in and that they looked after the boys together.

  The alteration of Sylvia’s Will shows that Barrie’s strategy was predatory. But for him, in his lifetime, it did the trick. It salved Emma du Maurier’s conscience and gave him free rein with the boys.

  Dolly meanwhile kept on the case. On 1 July she arrived at Adelphi Terrace. Jim, still anxious to reassure the Ponsonbys, disarmed her by ‘confiding’ in her about the second Will, which pre-empted her finding out about it and defused any curiosity about following it up.

  I went to see JMB in his flat where we had a nice talk about the boys & Sylvia & he told me how they had found Sylvia’s will 2 months ago, & except for 2 things he said he had done all she wished before seeing it. He said – there were 3 large sheets* well written in a clear firm hand & with no hint of emotion.