J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  * Kitchener of Khartoum.

  * An expression taught to the boys as children by Mary Hodgson to indicate that they needed assistance in the lavatory.

  15

  1915–1917

  On March 22nd, 1915, seven days after George's death, Rosy Rapture, or the Pride of the Beauty Chorus opened at the Duke of York's Theatre, preceded by The New Word. Nico thought Gaby's revue the most glittering piece of entertainment he had ever witnessed in his life: ‘I must have seen it over twenty times, and knew every song off by heart – particularly “Some Sort of Mother”, which must be the best tune Jerome Kern ever wrote. Of course I was only eleven, but to me it was just about the most wonderful thing Uncle Jim had ever done. Unfortunately no one else agreed with me, and it was a more or less total disaster.’

  Frohman was due in London at the end of May, but Barrie begged him to come earlier in the hope that he might have ideas on how to salvage Rosy Rapture. The ‘Beaming Buddha’ agreed, and booked himself a passage on the Lusitania, despite the threat of attacks by German U-boats. When he boarded the liner on May 1st, he was asked, ‘Aren't you afraid of U-boats ?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘only I.O.U.-boats.’1 Ethel Barrymore sent him a last-minute cable, imploring him not to sail. But Frohman had made up his mind. Barrie needed his help, and he would go. On May 7th, 1915, the Lusitania was torpedoed off the Irish coast, and sank within twenty minutes. When Frohman was offered a place in one of the lifeboats, he refused. ‘Why fear death?’ he is reputed to have said. ‘It is the greatest adventure in life.’2 His body was later washed up below the Old Head of Kinsale and taken back to America for burial.

  Frohman on board the Lusitania

  Frohman was once asked what he would like to have written about him after his death. He replied, ‘All I would ask is this: “He gave Peter Pan to the world.” … It is enough for any man.’3 His claim was fully justified: had it not been for Frohman's daring and vision, there would have been no Peter Pan, and for Barrie his death meant not merely the loss of one of his greatest friends (in Peter Davies's opinion, ‘the only non-Davies whom he knew how to love’), but the end of a unique theatrical partnership. Frohman's faith in Barrie had been absolute; his biographers wrote: ‘It was often said in jest in London that if Barrie had asked Frohman to produce a dramatization of the Telephone Directory, he would smile and say with enthusiasm: “Fine! Who shall we have in the cast?”’ Barrie's grief at the news of Frohman's drowning was genuine enough; but, as with Captain Scott, he took a characteristic pride in his association with another ‘heroic’ death, particularly as Frohman had chosen to echo Peter Pan's ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’ as his last words. They were attested by the actress Rita Jolivet, who survived the disaster and publicized them in an interview. Barrie, however, could not resist changing them to a closer approximation of the text. He wrote to Pauline Chase, ‘His last words … were really, I feel sure, “Death will be an awfully big adventure.”’ 4

  At the end of May, Lord Lucas joined the Flying Corps, despite the handicap of his wooden leg, and Barrie assumed much of the responsibility for the maintenance of ‘Wrest in Beds’. The work was rewarding, but it lacked glamour; he hankered after the opportunity to play a larger role – something that would bring him into contact with the fighting at the Front. There had been various reports in the press of starving, homeless children wandering around the French countryside near Reims. The image appealed to Barrie's imagination: he talked it over with his friend Elizabeth Lucas, and suggested that she might like to set up a temporary orphanage for them. Elizabeth responded to the idea, and Barrie gave her an initial £2,000 with which to set the scheme in progress. She managed to acquire the loan of Bettancourt, a large château to the south-east of Reims, and transformed it into a home for the orphaned children. Barrie now had the ideal excuse to visit the war zone for himself, albeit not the Front Line. He wrote to Gilmour from the Château de Bettancourt on July 26th:

  Barrie and orphan at Bettancourt

  ‘I had very easy travelling all the way, indeed semi-regal, owing to the good graces of the Scotland Yard people. We are about 18 miles from the Front & 120 from Paris. … You can hear the guns from Rheims direction in the north. … Aeroplanes make a great stir over our heads. … The Germans occupied the Chateau in their rush for Paris & it is now becoming a child's hospital. One boy had a leg blown off by a shell at Rheims. His parents wept to see him but they bored him – so he wandered off to play. A significant note – The drummer went round the other night to warn the villagers all dogs must be chained up at nights. This because the dogs have developed a grim hunt for bodies which they scrape up in the night. I'll be back in a week.’

  Barrie returned to England at the beginning of August and took Michael and Nico up to Scotland for their annual fishing holiday. As there were only three of them this year, they moved from hotel to hotel instead of renting a house. Barrie spent most of his time writing letters, in which he gave vivid accounts of his visit to France, illustrated with more macabre details of the wounded children and starving dogs. Nico chronicled the Scottish holiday in a letter to Mary Hodgson:

  Tomdoun Hotel,

  Glengarry,

  Invernessshire.

  Sunday 15th August 1915.

  Dear Mary,

  Thank you very much for your 2 letters. We went to Dhivach last Monday. We saw the fall in the burn and the place where Uncle Jim and George and Jack played cricket. … In the arbour we found the initials of all our names still there. … Was the flicker-show any good? Did you like Charlie Chaplin? I had a long letter from Jack. He went ashore on Gallipoli with a letter to the French Headquarters. … I miss you here very much. I have caught five trout here and Michael 15. But then Michael— — — — — —!!

  Well love from

  NICHOLAS LLEWELYN DAVIES

  Barrie's friendship with the ‘Welsh Lewises’ had been largely confined to a lengthy correspondence with Mrs Hugh Lewis – the mother of the boy who had sent him a drawing of Peter Pan in 1912 – but earlier this summer he had taken Peter to spend a few days at the Lewises' home, Glan Hafren, in Wales. Barrie wrote to her from Scotland on September 1st:

  Dear Mrs Lewis,

  I wish there were a few more like you, but it is perhaps better that you should remain unique. … It has been rather grim in Scotland this year. The highlands in many glens are as bare of population owing to the war as if this were the month before Creation. I have just Michael and Nicholas with me and they feel it too, but they climb about, fishing mostly, and if you were to search the bogs you would find me in one of them loaded with waterproofs and ginger beer. … I wish we could hurl ourselves straight upon Glan Hafren, but we shall be here till the 8th and that only gives us an exact week before Michael returns to school, and we need that time in London. It shows how much we must have talked of you that he (the dark and dour and impenetrable) has announced to me that he wants to go to see you. I was never so staggered.

  Glan Hafren, 1915: Peter Lewis, Barrie, and Peter Davies

  ‘The dark and dour and impenetrable’ was a description that Barrie was fond of using when referring to Michael. It was, of course, only one aspect of his character, but Barrie took a curious pride in it: he liked to boast that Michael had grown out of him, was beyond his reach. It was a form of self-mockery, born of self-defence, and is poignantly evident in the closing pages of Neil and Tintinnabulum, in which Michael is no longer the boy Neil, but the adolescent Tintinnabulum:

  Michael and Nico playing clock-golf

  ‘Tintinnabulum's opinion of himself … is lowlier than was Neil's; sometimes in dark moods it is lowlier than makes for happiness. He has hardened a little since he was Neil, coarsened but strengthened. I comfort myself with the curious reflection that the best men I have known have had a touch of coarseness in them. … He had to refashion himself on a harsher model, and he set his teeth and won, blaming me a little for not having broken to him the ugly world we can make it. … By that time my
visits [to Eton] were being suffered rather than acclaimed. It was done with an exquisite politeness certainly, but before I was out of sight he had dived into some hilarious rumpus. Gladly for his sake I knew my place. … His letters from school tend at all times to be more full of instruction for my guidance than of information about where he stands in his form. … On important occasions he even writes my letters for me, requesting me to copy them carefully and not to put in any words of my own, as when for some reason they have to be shown to his tutor. He then writes, “Begin ‘Dear T.’ (not ‘Dearest T.’), and end ‘Yours affec.’ (not ‘Yours affectionately’).”…

  ‘You readers may smile when I tell you why I have indited these memories and fancies. It was not done for you but for me, being a foolish attempt to determine, by writing the things down (playing over by myself some of the past moves in the game), whether Tintinnabulum really does like me still. That he should do so is very important to me as he recedes farther from my ken down that road which hurries him from me. …

  ‘On the whole, I think he is still partial to me. Corroboration, I consider, was provided at our parting, when he so skilfully turned what began as a tear into a wink and gazed at me from the disappearing train with what I swear was a loving scowl. … He no longer needs me, of course, as Neil did, and he will go on needing me less. When I think of Neil I know that those were the last days in which I was alive.’

  Michael's unhappiness at Eton had lasted nearly two years, but by the autumn of 1915 he had begun to assume a nonchalant façade that masked his inner feelings. Sebastian Earl, a contemporary at Eton, remembered him as having ‘a quite remarkable lightness of touch, lightness of imagination. He had tremendous charm – a romantic charm, never sentimental. I think his greatest gift was his wit. … He was wholly un-Etonian – it didn't seem to rub off on him at all.’5 Another Etonian friend, Clive Burt, described him as ‘a cat that walked alone. He was always very reserved – not a seeker after popularity or great friendships, though both were open to him. He was, of course, quite brilliant – I believe Hugh Macnaghten, his tutor, thought he was the most remarkable boy he had ever taught in all his years at Eton.’6

  While still only fourteen, Michael wrote an essay on ‘What makes a Gentleman’, in which Macnaghten perceived ‘a kinship in spirit to his guardian’. Part of the essay read:

  ‘I believe I am right in saying that John Ball made use of the following couplet in his discourses:

  “When Adam delved and Eve span,

  “Who was then the gentleman?”

  ‘Doubtless Ball used the word gentleman in the more degrading sense, denoting one of the upper classes – I think he was wrong. Adam was no gentleman, not because he was not Lord Adam, but because he gave away his wife in the matter of the apple. …

  ‘Laurence Oates, a very gallant gentleman, went out into the blizzard because he knew he could not live and wished to give his friends a better chance. He was a gentleman because when he knew he was being brave he did not say “I'm a hero and I'm going to die for you,” but merely remarked he was going out for a bit, and left the rest to their imagination.’

  One of Michael's greatest admirers at Eton was another boy in Macnaghten's House, Roger Senhouse. Roger was a year older than Michael, and, in view of his later relationship with Lytton Strachey, clearly had a crush on him. Towards the end of his life, Roger kept a desultory form of Journal in which he recorded occasional scraps of autobiography. In 1967 he wrote:

  Roger Senhouse and Michael at Eton

  ‘Michael Ll. D. … was the one profound influence in my life, from the moment of our first meeting in his room. … I became so wrapped up in Michael that I faltered, soon I began to fail in concentration on my work, believing things would come as easily to me as to Michael, concentrating my energies in trying to please him, my mentor, tho' one year younger than me. … Hugh Macnaghten had been quick to observe the fantastic influence that genius had over me. … He even told J.M.B., who came so regularly to visit Michael, bringing him the most delicious home-made chocolate cakes, how obsessed I was with him. … This led to my taking Extra Books in Trials in a futile attempt to keep some sort of pace with Michael. … Macnaghten was slightly jealous of our friendship, almost worshipping Michael himself & always encouraging me to prevail upon him when depressed “because I know how very close you are to him”.’

  Michael wrote to Mary Hodgson from Eton for her (37th) birthday, enclosing a pen-knife:

  H. Macnaghten's.

  Thursday. [October 14th, 1915]

  Dear Mary,

  I am writing this on Thursday because I shall be so busy tomorrow, to beg your acceptance of this little votive offering, a trivial little token of my regard for you, I assure you, etc etc etc. It is not very pretty, but it is the best Eton & I could do. … Have you seen much of Peter? I expect we shall yet be reduced to calling him, respectfully of course, the Social Subaltern. I've not heard from Jack, tho' I write every Sunday. Tears come to me eyes as I think of this pathetic instance of brotherly loyalty. … Miss J. Mitchell-Innes was kind enough to motor over & have tea with me. I fear alas she was not impressed. … Talking of TEA, I'd like one of those chocolate cakes. You can stick a Belgian flag in it if you think cakes are an extravagance. Now I must work.

  Yrs

  Michael

  December 1915: the second Christmas of the war. Peter Pan was again revived, though only George Shelton as Smee remained from the original 1904 cast. This year it was decided to drop the Lagoon Scene: partly for economy, partly because Peter's curtain line, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’, was felt to be somewhat inappropriate under the circumstances. Barrie spent New Year's Eve alone in his Adelphi Terrace flat, where he had begun work on a new play, A Kiss for Cinderella. He wrote to Mrs Hugh Lewis at Glan Hafren: ‘Here I am all alone as M. and N. are in bed and I've come back to the flat for tonight. Christmas evening was even gayer as I had to come in to town and Brown and his wife were away, so I had to make my own fire and dinner (eggs) and bed. The fire was worst, as there were no sticks, but I found a straw basket Mrs Brown goes to market with – or rather went, for it will accompany her no more.’ His notebook entry took a less frivolous turn:

  Unity Moore as Peter Pan in the 1915/16 and 1916/17 revivals

  —Dream. That in own bed & awakened by unknown horror – dark, know something cautiously moving bed clothes – I move body slightly – movement of thing stops. Long pause. Then it resumes, gentlest possible pushing of me – I resist without pushing back. Pause. Pushing resumed. Elec[tric] lamp near me, I set teeth for courage to turn on light – queer idea I won't be able to do it – I push out hand to – hand is stopped by something limp which doesn't push but just prevents – later it makes my hand always miss lamp – I feel being pushed now – no sound of breathing. Then feel stronger attempt evidently to push me out of bed. At last I rushed from darkness to mother's room (she has been dead many years) & cried to her abt my degenerate self – thing I have evolved into was trying to push me out of bed & take my place. Till that moment of telling I had no idea what the thing was.

  Glan Hafren, 1916. Standing, l to r: Michael, Eiluned Lewis, Medina Lewis. Sitting: Nico, May Lewis, Barrie

  Michael had been intrigued to meet the ‘Welsh Lewises’ ever since the previous summer, when Barrie and Peter had returned from Glan Hafren with glowing reports. Mrs Lewis invited them to pay another visit at Easter, and this time Michael and Nico went too. Peter Lewis's three sisters, Eiluned (variously called Jane or Bittie), Medina and May were home on holiday from boarding school, and Michael was entranced by them: ‘they are so utterly a family out of a book’, he wrote to Mary Hodgson. For Barrie, Glan Hafren provided a regular retreat such as he had not enjoyed since Black Lake. Medina recalled in 1977:

  ‘J.M.B. found The Vicar of Wakefield atmosphere a welcome change to London. He was very nervous that this first Easter holiday with us might be a failure – he was so anxious to give the boys pleasure; but after the visit
he told my mother how much they had enjoyed it, and that even Michael “the dour and impenetrable” (I distinctly remember those adjectives) had said he wanted to come again. I'm sure their visits meant far more to us than to them; and yet I think we made an amusing change for the boys from the sophisticated, theatrical life they were so used to living in London. I feel they looked on us as sisters, which of course they'd never known before. We were girls who were friends rather than girl-friends. Watching us playing on the lawn, J.M.B. once said to my mother, “They're so innocent, it almost hurts.”’7

  Michael, Medina and Peter Lewis

  In September 1916, Nico left Wilkinson's and joined Michael in Hugh Macnaghten's House at Eton. Now that Michael was happier, Barrie alternated his daily letters between the two boys:

  September 24th, 1916.

  Dearest Nico,

  It is great and good and splendidiferous your liking Eton from the start. Michael is to let me know a good day for coming down to see you. … Think of Michael having a fag! I think when I come down we shall have to sit on his head so as to prevent his becoming too uppish. He will be calling out ‘Boy!’ just to show off. … I miss you awfully.

  Loving,

  J.M.B.

  In addition to his daily letters to Barrie, Michael wrote frequently to Mary Hodgson

  Nico was allowed to share a room with Michael, thus forestalling the homesickness that Michael had endured, and Barrie began writing Nico a serial story entitled ‘The Room with 2 Beds’:

  14 Nov 1916.

  The Room with 2 Beds