Dolly Ponsonby and her husband Arthur, who was now a leading M.P. in Asquith's Liberal Government, visited Barrie in February 1911:
‘Record of Breaks’ between Barrie and Michael. Barrie had presented the boys with their first billiards table in 1907: ‘Ask Nico not to break the billiard table absolutely until next half!’ implored George from Eton
‘Thurs. 23rd Feb. 1911. A[rthur] & I to lunch with Barrie in his little flat in Adelphi Terrace. He was so dear & wonderful. He is really profound & every word he speaks is full of pure gold & so human & kind & true. He always a little frightens me because his insight is so acute. He told us much of the boys & their characters & of George [who] though at Eton is 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. When I asked him what they really understood about it, he 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. He talked of the differences between Lloyd George & Winston, how L.G. lost his head & said rash things, & how Winston never did but made his mistakes on purpose. … I had tea with him too at Campden Hill Sqre & the children with Michael & Nicholas. Margaret [Llewelyn Davies] came in & was rather depressed & unnatural. … J.M.B. described much to the children's amusement how he flew on the stage at “Peter Pan”. The Company, hearing he was going to fly, all rushed round to the front to see him – & J.M.B. had the safety curtain let down as promptly!’
On March 7th, Barrie was writing to his old friend Quiller-Couch from Adelphi Terrace:
‘I have not much concern now with literature and the drama, which both have flowed me by. I have in a sense a larger family than you now. Five boys whose father died four years ago and now their mother last summer, and I look after them, and it is my main reason for going on. The Llewelyn Davies boys. However, I do a little writing also and do it here, tho' mostly I am with them.’
The boys went down to stay with Emma du Maurier at Ramsgate for Easter while Barrie remained in London, making his final revisions on Peter and Wendy. Nico wrote to him from Ramsgate on April 22nd:
Dear Mr Barrie thanks for the letter you sent me yesterday Buck up buck up what are you doing having your dinner then push it away and read my letter
FROM NIC-O
With the boys' summer holiday already on his mind, Barrie wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland: ‘I wonder whether you would in the goodness of your heart set some factor in Sutherland searching for a house for me up there for August and September. I bring four boys with me; what they yearn for is to be remote from Man and plenty of burn trout fishing, of which they never tire from the rising to the setting of the sun. The rate would not so much matter but there should be space for about ten of us including maids.’ The Duchess duly responded with Scourie Lodge, a small manor house on the north-west coast of Scotland. Barrie wrote to his cricketing friend Charles Turley Smith on July 10th: ‘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. … 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 him fly fishing on a lawn. … I have nearly finished my P. Pan book.’ Barrie's extravagance on the boys' behalf was beginning to cause concern among their relatives, particularly Margaret Llewelyn Davies, who had strong socialist principles, and spent much of her time working in London's slums. Dolly Ponsonby's diary records a visit from her while Barrie was in Scotland with the boys:
‘Monday Aug 7th, Bank Holiday [1911] M[argaret] & I talked all morning of Sylvia & Arthur's boys – & Jimmy Barrie. M is very desperate at moments about them & I too have felt the pity of their easy luxurious lives. In fact it has been on my tongue to say to J.M.B. does he want George to be a fashionable gentleman? Of course in principle he doesn't. In principle he is all for the ragged raggamuffins & says he wants the boys to be for them too. But in his desire to make up to the boys for all they have lost, he gives them every material pleasure. Nothing is denied them in the way of amusement, clothes, toys, etc. It is very, very disheartening, & when one thinks of Arthur their father – almost unbearable. … J.M.B. takes the boys to very grand restaurants in their best evening clothes & they go on to stalls or box at the theatre. They buy socks costing 12/6 a pair & Michael, aged 11, is given very expensive lessons in fly fishing.’
Barrie wrote to Nurse Loosemore from Scourie Lodge on September 17th:
Barrie with the Duchess of Sutherland and four of ‘my boys’ at Scourie Lodge in 1911. Back row, 1 to r: George (aged 18), the Duchess of Sutherland, Peter (14); front row: Nico (7), Barrie (51), Michael (11)
Dear Miss Loosemore,
…We have been here since the last week of July, and return to London in about a week's time. It is a remote place, nearly 50 miles from a railway, and when you want food you have to kill a sheep. It is very beautiful with sea & lochs, all as blue as the Mediterranean, and in the course of their wanderings the boys see eagles, otters, whales, seals, &c. The wanderings are all in search of fish, and it is a great place for fishing. Michael has caught a salmon & nearly a hundred sea-trout. … His first sea-trout had a tragic history. It weighed 2½ lbs & he went to bed with it on a chair by his side. Next day it was sent to England to be stuffed & arrived on Bank Holiday. The shop was closed so it was taken to the gardener's cottage of one of the firm. The gardener's wife thought it was a gift from some anonymous friend and ate it. I didn't dare tell Michael until he got the salmon.
Jack of course is not with us as he is still on his cruise in Canadian waters. But he writes very interesting letters and seems to be very well. They are all happy I think. It is already a year since their mother died. I took Nicholas out to fish that day, and it was a happy day for him as she would have wished. …
Yours always,
J. M. Barrie
Michael and Nico were accompanied on their fishing expeditions by a local Scots gillie, Johnny Mackay, who, according to Barrie, taught Michael ‘everything that is worth knowing (which is largely a matter of flies)’. A few months before he died in 1977, Johnny recounted with pleasure how Barrie, while fishing with the humbler worm, ‘looked so scruffy that when the Duchess of Westminster saw him she thought he was a poacher and ordered him off her land; and he was too shy to say who he was, so he went’.
Four 1911 entries in Barrie's Querist's Album. From top: George, Jack, Michael and Nico
In the spring of 1912, Nico left Norland Place and joined Michael at Wilkinson's. ‘Michael was always the cleverest of us five, he couldn't help coming top in every class. I was not bad at this and that, but Michael was always 10 times better.’ Nico may not have reached Michael's academic heights, but he made a lasting impression on a number of his contemporaries at Wilkinson's, including the future Poet Laureate, Cecil Day Lewis:
Nico in Wilkinson's uniform
‘The most remarkable boy at Wilkie's, as I remember it, was Nicholas Llewelyn Davies, … not for exceptional intelligence or prowess at games, … but because he possessed the magnetism which very occasionally distinguishes one small boy from the crowd of his fellows. … To analyse such magnetism is impossible. Nico had great charm, certainly, and poise, and a not unpleasing touch of arrogance, and a lively face with two prominent front teeth; but other boys possessed these qualifications. Nico's magnetism, however undefinable its source, was visible in its effect, for we used to follow him around like the tail following a comet. … My own incipient hero-worship, hitherto largely nourished on books, was now turned upon Nico. We had arrived at Wilkie's in the same term, but he seemed to me to be an altogether superior kind of being.
… Before very long, however, we became friends, sharing our bottles of ice-cream soda on the cricket ground and lording it over the retainers whom Nico's magnetic personality attracted, myself as a sort of Grand Vizier to him. On one occasion he took me back to his guardian's house in Campden Hill Square, and introduced me to him. I remember a large, dark room, and a small dark man sitting in it: he was not smoking a pipe, nor did he receive us little boys with any perceptible enthusiasm – indeed, I don't think he uttered a single word – which was a bit out of character on his part, since the small dark man, Nico's guardian, was the author of Peter Pan. After this negative encounter, we went up to an attic and fired with an air-gun at pedestrians in the Square.’3
If Day Lewis had known Barrie better, he would have realized that his silence was not in the least out of character. Many of the boys' friends encountered the same apparent indifference. ‘The most self-confident people in the world became as if they had a raw lemon in their mouths when they met Barrie’ was how one of Michael's friends remembered him. ‘I was terrified, and didn't dare speak in his presence. He never said a word, just sat like a tombstone. I viewed him with the utmost dislike, and I think that went for most of Michael's friends, though they would never have told Michael.’4 Sylvia's sister May had a similar response to Barrie: ‘He paralyses me as much as ever’, she wrote to Emma du Maurier at about this time. The boys, of course, experienced none of these barriers. Nico wrote of him, ‘He was the most wonderful of all companions, and the wittiest man I shall ever know, and all the usual talk about his being obsessed with thoughts of his mother and with general gloom is largely distortion (I cannot recall his once talking about his mother in all the years I knew him). … A creature of moods, yes indeed: maybe to be expected of a man of genius; hours of silence, but many many more hours of humour.’
George was now in his last half at Eton: ‘In the 1st XI, Treasurer of Pop, Fives Choices, Essay Prize – a splendid performance indeed’, observed Peter. Barrie wrote to George on May 29th, 1912:
Sir George Frampton's statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The statue, commissioned and paid for by Barrie, was erected in secrecy during the night of April 30, 1912, so that May morning strollers might conceive that it had appeared by magic. The response was not altogether favourable, and questions were asked in the House of Commons about an author's right to advertise his wares in such unorthodox fashion. Although Barrie's 1906 photographs of Michael had been the inspiration for the statue, Frampton had used another boy, James W. Shaw, as a model, and Barrie was dissatisfied with the results. ‘It doesn't show the Devil in Peter’, he complained
‘This confounded excitement about the XI has rather caught me and I have begun to dream about it. Mix them, curve them, swerve them, break them, and if he still hits it, kick him. I can't think of any better tip. … I wish I was as good at bowling as at the idiotic thing of flinging rings onto watches . … Do you remember how we plugged at the baskets of oranges at Olympia one Christmas? Only a few years ago, but you were no older than Michael is now.’
George in Pop at Eton
He wrote to George again on June 3rd:
‘Floreat Etona! I hope the weather is to be propitious and that you will have a perfect day … without a cloud in the sky for your last 4th of June. It is four years since the day when your mother and I were there and you made us stay on for the fireworks and were really just a small boy, impaling yourself by the waterside on railings. I did not then know even that there was such a thing as Pop. It has swum into my ken like some celestial young lady. … The great thing for me at all events is the feeling that if your father and mother were here on this 4th of June they would be well pleased on the whole with their eldest born. … Just off to 23 to cricket in the square.’
A month later, George distinguished himself in the Eton v. Harrow match at Lord's by knocking up the second highest Etonian score, bowling out Harrow's top batsman, and pulling off a sensational high left-handed catch which featured in several newspapers. ‘I am greatly delighted and rayther [sic] proud’, Barrie wrote to him on July 8th. ‘Your mother used to speak of the possibility [of playing at Lord's] with shining eyes.’ Michael, too, was showing himself to be a promising athlete at Wilkinson's: Captain of Football, in his cricket 1st XI; the only sport that defeated him was swimming – he had always been terrified of water, and was unable to swim a stroke. He was now twelve years old, enjoying the golden year between childhood and adolescence, his last summer as a boy. After recounting how ‘the dazzling creature’ had scored 26 runs in his final prep-school match against Juddy's, Barrie wrote of Michael in Neil and Tintinnabulum:
‘A rural cricket match in buttercup time with boys at play, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead, forever passing along our country lanes on their eternal journey, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile. Let Neil's 26 against Juddy's … be our last sight of him as a child. He is walking back bat in hand to the pavilion, an old railway carriage. An unearthly glory has swept over the cricket ground. He tries to look unaware of it; you know the expression and the bursting heart. … [He] gathers up the glory and tacks it over his bed. “The End,” as he used to say in his letters. I never know him quite so well again. He seems henceforth to be running to me on a road that is moving still more rapidly in the opposite direction.’
George's spectacular catch at Lord's
Barrie treated his boys to an even greater extravagance for the summer of 1912: Amhuinnsuidh Castle, a vast baronial mansion in the Outer Hebrides. ‘The cost must have been fabulous’, wrote Peter. ‘The fishing was to match.’ In his Dedication to Peter Pan, Barrie recounted how he arranged for Johnny Mackay, Michael's gillie at Scourie, to spend the holidays with them in the Outer Hebrides:
‘Nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much’ – Michael, aged 12, with Barrie in July 1912
‘The rebuffs I got from all of you! They were especially crushing in those early days when one by one you came out of your belief in fairies and lowered on me as the deceiver. My grandest triumph, the best thing in the play of Peter Pan (though it is not in it), is that long after Michael had ceased to believe, I brought him back to the faith for at least two minutes. We were on our way in a boat to fish the Outer Hebrides (where we caught Mary Rose), and though it was a journey of days he wore his fishing basket on his back all the time, so as to be able to begin at once. His one pain was the absence of Johnny Mackay, for Johnny was the loved gillie of the previous summer … but could not be with us this time as he would have had to cross and re-cross Scotland to reach us. As the boat drew near the Kyle of Lochalsh pier I told Michael and Nico it was such a famous wishing pier that they had now but to wish and they should have. Nico believed at once and expressed a wish to meet himself (I afterwards found him on the pier searching faces confidently), but Michael thought it more of my untimely nonsense and doggedly declined to humour me. “Whom do you want to see most, Michael ?” “Of course I would like most to see Johnny Mackay.” “Well, then, wish for him.” “Oh, rot.” “It can't do any harm to wish.” Contemptuously he wished, and as the ropes were thrown on the pier he saw Johnny waiting for him, loaded with angling paraphernalia. I know no one less like a fairy than Johnny Mackay, but for two minutes Michael was quivering in another world than ours. When he came to he gave me a smile which meant that we understood each other, and thereafter neglected me for a month, being always with Johnny. As I have said, this episode is not in the play; so though I dedicate Peter Pan to you I keep the smile, with the few other broken fragments of immortality that have come my way.’
‘Where we caught Mary Rose’ – the Ghost Mother, who had first appeared in Barrie's notebook for 1886, was still a long way from being named; but it was here in the Outer Hebrides, while fishing near the Castle on Loch Voshimid, that he pointed out to Nico a tiny island in the middle as bein
g ‘the island that likes to be visited’. People had been known to vanish on such islands, he told Nico. Years went by, and then suddenly they came back; the rest of the world had grown old, but they were as young as the day they disappeared. The story began to combine with his earlier notion about ghosts, which he had written in The Little White Bird: ‘The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare.’ Perhaps it was the thought of Sylvia returning one day to find Michael so changed that she fails to recognize him that led Barrie to conclude, in a letter to Quiller-Couch: ‘No-one should come back, however much he was loved.’5 These thoughts were not restricted to the fantasy of stories and plays: he was actually writing to Sylvia once a year, ‘telling her how things now were with her children’,6 though he later destroyed these letters.
‘The island that likes to be visited’ – Mary Rose's island (left) on Loch Voshimid
Barrie's concern for Michael seemed more pronounced this summer. Nico remembered several occasions when ‘Uncle Jim turned round and found Michael had disappeared – he'd probably wandered off to fish somewhere else. And then we heard this haunting, banshee wail, “Mi-i-ichael-l-l!” It was an extraordinary sound as it echoed through the hills. And of course Michael was always perfectly all right, and wondered what all the fuss was about.’
J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys Page 26