J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  At the end of the Easter holidays, Michael and Nico returned to the playing fields of Eton, while Peter was dispatched back to the chaos of the Somme. Barrie had long planned to visit George's grave behind the Western Front, and in June he received the necessary permissions from the War Office, together with directions on how to locate it. He had hoped that Thomas Hardy would accompany him, but Hardy declined: ‘I have had to come to the conclusion that old men cannot be young men, and that I must content myself with the past battles of our country if I want to feel military.’11 Barrie therefore set out alone, though under military escort. Although he wrote to a number of friends telling them that ‘the only time I was in any danger was searching for George's grave, which I found’,12 he gave no indication of his emotions. Doubtless Housman expressed them for him (and countless others) in A Shropshire Lad, which Barrie had read ‘year in, year out – over and over again’13 since its publication in 1896, when he spoke of the ‘lads that will die in their glory and never be old’.

  Barrie in his ingle-nook. The sofa had the reputation of being the most uncomfortable in London. The photograph on the far right is of George at Eton; his cricket cap hangs below it

  When Michael and Nico came back to London for the summer holidays, they found that their guardian had moved to the top floor of Adelphi Terrace House. The new flat was considerably more spacious than its predecessor, the largest room commanding a spectacular view of the River Thames from four panoramic windows. Barrie turned it into his work study – not so much on account of the view, but because of its vast fireplace, or ingle-nook, wherein he could curl himself up on a wooden settle. There was an added attraction: being only five foot three, he could clear the chimney beam without lowering his head, while most other mortals sustained mild concussion every time they penetrated the ingle-nook.

  The annual fishing holiday was reduced to a fortnight in August as Michael and Nico had to go off to the Public Schools camp on Salisbury Plain – no longer the ‘bit of a spree’ that it had been in George's day: most of the boys would be putting their training into practice in the near future. Despite his nonchalance, the prospect of the trenches was beginning to weigh on Michael: he would be eligible within a matter of months. Macnaghten wrote in his report that he had been ‘strangely difficult’ during the past term. ‘He never means to be rude, but he is too clever not to see the weak points in his Tutor [i.e. Macnaghten himself] and others, yet his judgement is unerring: the cleverest boy I have had in my house.’14

  In the middle of August, Barrie, Michael and Nico went up to Scotland to fish, travelling by way of Edinburgh for their first glimpse of Jack's inamorata, Gerrie. Barrie gave a fanciful account of the prologue to the meeting in a letter to Lady Juliet Duff on August 14th:

  ‘We were all outwardly calm, but internally white to the gills; Nicholas kept wetting his lips, Michael was a granite column, inscrutable, terrible; I kept bursting into inane laughter, and changing my waistcoats. So the time of waiting passed, the sun sank in the west and the stars came out with less assurance than usual. What is that? It is the rumble of wheels. Nico slips his hand into mine. I notice that it is damp. Michael's pose becomes more Napoleonic, but he is breathing hard. The chaise comes into view. I have a happy thought. They are probably more nervous than we are.’

  Jack

  In 1976 Gerrie recalled:

  ‘I was – well, yes – nervous, I knew he'd come up to vet me, but I don't think I was in awe of him. My mother was horrified that I should marry someone who was mixed up with Barrie – she said, “I don't trust that man.” He didn't cut that much ice in Scotland – he was certainly no prophet in his own country. The only reason my mother tolerated the idea of our marriage was that she adored Gerald du Maurier. Barrie and the two boys came up on the train from London – we met them at the station, had dinner at the North British Hotel next to the station, then they caught the next train to go and fish up in the Highlands. It was an extraordinary dinner: I don't think the Bart said a single word throughout the meal – certainly not to me. Michael talked to me – he was very considerate, tried to make me feel relaxed. He was very attractive, very charming, and had the most wonderful smile. All the boys made feverish conversation, but the Bart never said anything. Nor did I.’

  Barrie's letter to Lady Juliet Duff concluded with a transcript of an imaginary conversation between Jack and Gerrie after the first meeting:

  Gerrie

  Jack. Buck up, Gerrie, that's the worst over.

  Gerrie. Oh dear, I was so nervous and they were all so calm. … I took to Nicholas at once. I feel I can get round him.

  Jack. Rather. What about Michael?

  Gerrie. He alarms me. Did anybody ever get round Michael?

  Jack. I can't say I ever did. … The third chappie [i.e. Barrie] is the important one.

  Gerrie. (gasping). I know. Oh, Jack!

  Jack. Yes, he's a bit like that. His heart's all right.

  Gerrie. His face is so expressionless. … He never smiled once.

  Jack. I bet you he thought he was smiling all the time. That's the way he smiles. … He's really rather soft. We can all twist him round our little fingers. … You see he is essentially a man's man. He doesn't know what to say to women. They don't interest him. I think he's a woman-hater. … What are you to wear for dinner?

  Gerrie. Does it matter? He won't notice.

  Jack. No, but Michael will. He takes Michael's opinion on everything. All depends on Michael. If Michael says ‘Let them marry next week’ … Uncle Jim will fix it up. If on the other hand Michael says ‘Delay for three years,’ it will be fixed that way.

  Gerrie. Oh, if he should say that!

  Jack. He won't.

  Gerrie. How can you be sure?

  Jack. I should kick him.

  Jack and Gerrie were married on September 4th, 1917 – less than three weeks after their ordeal at the North British Hotel.

  * The play, variously entitled ‘The Fight for Mr. Lapraik’, ‘The Fight for Mr. Lapraille’, and ‘The House of Fear’, never progressed beyond the typedraft stage.

  * Jack preferred Gerrie to call him by his proper name, John.

  16

  1917–1921

  In his Dedication to Peter Pan, Barrie wrote, ‘Sometimes … Michael liked my literary efforts, and I walked in the azure that day when he returned Dear Brutus to me with the comment “Not so bad.”’ The play went into rehearsal in September 1917, with Gerald du Maurier directing as well as giving the performance of his career as the jaded, lonely Will Dearth. Each of the eight characters who yearn for a second chance reflects an element of the author's own personality – particularly Mr Purdie, a solitary soul who must always be wooing some woman other than his wife. Psychoanalysis was beginning to sweep into fashion, and Barrie was one of its earliest victims; Dear Brutus, however, makes it clear enough that he himself was his own best analyst, and was under no illusion that a second chance to live his life over again would be any different from the first. He rejected Hardy's theory that people are governed by fate, and drew instead on a maxim from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, as well as on his own theme of the black spot, or ‘Accursed Thing’, in The Will:

  PURDIE. … It isn't accident that shapes our lives.

  JOANNA. No, it's Fate.

  PURDIE. …It's not Fate, Joanna. Fate is something outside us. What really plays the dickens with us is something in ourselves. Something that makes us go on doing the same sort of fool things, however many chances we get. … Something we are born with. … Shakespeare knew what he was talking about –

  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

  But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

  Michael in fancy dress

  The only character to benefit from his second chance is Dearth, who sighs to his wife in the first Act, ‘Perhaps if we had had children–Pity!’ The magic wood of the second Act grants him his wish and he is given a dream-child, Margaret. In an echo from The New Word and Barrie's
last letter to George – ‘more and more wishing you were a girl of 21 instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart’ – Dearth tells Margaret in passing that sons are ‘not a patch on daughters. The awful thing about a son is that never, never – at least, from the day he goes to school – can you tell him that you rather like him. By the time he is ten you can't even take him on your knee.’ The scene also contained an exchange for Mary Hodgson's benefit:

  DEARTH. …I do wish I could leave you to do things a little more for yourself. I suppose it's owing to my having had to be father and mother both. I knew nothing practically about the bringing up of children, and of course I couldn't trust you to a nurse.

  MARGARET (severely). Not you; so sure you could do it better yourself. That's you all over.

  In his review of Dear Brutus in The Times, A. B. Walkley wrote:

  ‘When Mr. Dearth “comes to” and, suddenly realizing the loss of his dream-child, breaks into a sob, you catch your breath. … What Barrie can do with children and the love of them we all know. But surely he has never touched the theme with such tender and delicate felicity as he gives it here?’

  Dear Brutus opened on October 17th; the following day Barrie was writing to Kathleen (now Lady) Scott, trying to persuade her to allow him to become guardian to her son Peter, aged nine. Lord Knutsford had advised Lady Scott that she should appoint a guardian in the event of her death, and had offered himself for the post. Barrie wrote to Kathleen:

  ‘The only change in Lord Knutsford's advice that I should like you to make is to substitute my name for his. If you have sufficient faith in me it is my earnest wish that you should do so. … He can't possibly love Peter more than I do, but he has the advantage of having [a] daughter, while I have no woman to work with me or to fall back upon should my end come before too long. Experience teaches me that the one drawback in my tending my boys is that I have no female influence for them; the loss to them is very great and I must tell you this bluntly, as I think its value increases as the boy grows into a man.’

  Barrie wrote again to Kathleen a week later:

  ‘If it were just between [Lord Knutsford] and me I would beg you to risk making it me, but it would not be wise to make it either of us without further arrangements in case of our death. … This is so important to Peter that I think I am quite out-weighed. But I should like you to say in your will, or whatever the paper is, that it would be a pleasure to you to think that I was looked upon as an uncle to Peter to whom he would come whenever he wanted. I should try to be a good uncle to him.’

  Peter Scott, aged 10

  Kathleen took Barrie's advice, and neither man became guardian. However, Peter paid his godfather frequent visits at Adelphi Terrace House, writing in his autobiography, The Eye of the Wind:

  ‘The room in which he wrote was dominated by a huge open hearth piled high with wood ash, and with a high-backed settle in the inglenook on one side of it. … It was full of pipe smoke and books. As a very small boy I used to go there for tea, sometimes with my mother, sometimes alone and feeling very independent. … Barrie knew all about how to get on with children. Although there were often long silences I cannot ever remember feeling shy in his company.’

  Barrie in the doorway of his Adelphi study. Relics of the Five are scattered about the room: Sylvia, George and Jack in the oval frame (see p. 54), George's catch at Lord's on the piano (p. 203) next to a drawing of Sylvia, and photographs of George, Michael (p. 296) and Nico (p. 200), hanging on the wall to the left

  Jack's wife, Gerrie, was now staying with Barrie at Adelphi Terrace as Jack had been transferred to Portsmouth:

  ‘I used to sit in a corner of that huge study, as quiet as a mouse. Sometimes Barrie would talk a lot; at other times he'd be wrapped in silence, except for his cough. Most of the time he paced up and down the room, as if I wasn't there, and then suddenly he'd say something. I can't now recall the context, but I remember him asking me if I knew how Guy du Maurier had been killed. I said something like, “Yes, wasn't he shot?” And Barrie said, “Yes. He was shot. And he wandered about the battlefield for half-an-hour with his stomach hanging out, begging somebody to finish him off.” I was quite horrified. Why did he tell me? Was he deliberately trying to shock me? I never told my husband, I never told anybody because it struck me as being so queer, so cruel. Perhaps he had something on his mind, I don't know. He just told it to me point-blank, then went on with whatever he was doing.’

  Another unpleasant surprise was in store for Gerrie. Although Mary Hodgson had been at Jack's wedding, she had stood at the back of the church, and had avoided meeting his new wife:

  ‘While I was staying at the flat, Barrie took me to meet Mary Hodgson at Campden Hill Square. We waited in a room for her, and then she came in and Barrie said, “Mary, this is Gerrie, Jack's wife –” She gave me a paralysing look but didn't say anything, so I tried to be pleasant and said, “Oh, Mary, do look at this something-or-other we've been sent as a wedding present”, whereupon she wheeled round and walked out of the room. Barrie didn't say a word to her; I think he was absolutely terrified of her. He knew how Michael and Nico loved her, and he wasn't prepared to put a foot wrong in their books.’

  Peter had been expected back on short leave from France in the second week of October, but had failed to materialize at either Campden Hill Square or Adelphi Terrace. Barrie was just beginning to get anxious when he received word from him that he was staying with a married woman and her daughter at their home in Epping Forest. Knowing Barrie's ‘safety-curtain’ to the ways of the flesh, it would have been easy for Peter to have left it at that. Instead, he chose to acquaint his guardian with the truth. He was having an affair, not with the daughter, but with her mother, Vera Willoughby, a professional artist who was almost twice his age.

  Barrie was ‘shocked to the core’.1 Apart from the moral considerations, he felt that such a relationship could only lead to unhappiness: Gilbert and Mary were proof of that. Peter, however, had made up his mind. He wrote to Mary Hodgson from Flanders on October 27th:

  Peter in 1917

  My dear Mary,

  I don't know whether you have heard anything about my fall from the path of righteousness, but I presume you have. If it is so, I'd like you to know that I don't myself look upon it as a fall at all – that I know I'm doing right, in fact, and that though you will never be anything but very distressed about it, you will be wrong to be so. I'd sooner have had your approval than anyone else's, and that not only because you know me better than anyone else. But I'm afraid I never shall. Please don't worry about me more than you can help – I'm more pleased with the prospect of life than ever before, and rightly so, believe me. I seem to have made rather a mistake in being so open about it, but I really do believe you'll agree with me there. In any case, this is a sincere apology for not coming to see you when I was on leave. I think you will be able to understand that.

  Yrs,

  Peter.

  Mary's disapproval of Peter's affair was about all that she and Barrie had in common. They had known each other for a quarter of a century, but despite all they had gone through, she no more approved of him now than she had during the boys' childhood days in Kensington Gardens. She admired him as a writer, respected him as a Baronet, but her disapproval of him as an influence in the boys' lives was as firmly rooted as ever. Her niece, Mrs Mary Hill, wrote in 1976:

  ‘When it was made known that J.M.B. had been made the children's Guardian, she was extremely upset. She only agreed to continue the running of the Campden Hill Square household because she had promised to do so to Mrs Arthur, and her motto in life was “A promise is a sacred thing.” This task she did not enjoy since she was responsible to J.M.B. … He indulged their every wish, and this she considered detrimental to their upbringing. Eventually the time arrived when she considered she had fulfilled her obligation to Mrs Arthur, and that the boys should be handed over to the sole charge of J.M.B. However, her resignation was not
accepted, and for the sake of the two youngest, whom she always spoke of as “my babies” or “my boys”, she stayed on for as long as she could tolerate the situation. Her main concern was that her presence would become more of a hindrance than a help to the boys when they found their loyalties being continually divided between herself and J.M.B., particularly in the case of Michael.’2

  Mary Hodgson

  Mary Hodgson had offered her resignation in December 1916, but it had taken Barrie by surprise; Jack was still unmarried, Peter was one of the family, and Barrie did not relish the prospect of finding a replacement to run Campden Hill Square. The alternative was for the boys to move into Adelphi Terrace, but at that time he was still living in his comparatively small flat on the second floor. It is probable that this was the motivating factor in his acquiring the spacious top-floor flat – in readiness for Mary's next offer of resignation. But the offer was not forthcoming. Mary seemed to have readjusted to the situation, and looked set for a long sojourn at Campden Hill Square. Naturally any suggestion of her going would have to come from Mary herself: Michael and Nico would never forgive him if they felt he had compelled her to leave against her wishes.

  An Etonian letter from Nico to Barrie

  Whether by accident or design, Barrie now put into motion a scheme that could not fail to sting her into action. He proposed that the unsuspecting Gerrie should assume full responsibility for the running of 23 Campden Hill Square: she would be the new mistress, with Mary acting on her instructions. The arrangement was to begin shortly after Michael and Nico arrived back from Eton for the Christmas holidays. Gerrie herself had no suspicions that she was being used as a pawn: ‘He simply said, “You'd better go and live at 23.” My husband was due home on sick-leave over Christmas, so the idea was that we should move our things in when he got back.’