MR DON. What did you nickname him, Dick?
DICK. It was his fags that did it! … His fags called him K.C.M.G.
MR DON. Meaning, Dick?
DICK. Meaning ‘Kindly Call Me God!’ … Father, don't feel hurt though I dodge the good-bye business when I leave you. … I'll just slip away.
MR DON. What I'm afraid of is that you won't come back. … When will you come again?
DICK. There's no saying.
As at the end of Peter Pan, Dick returns to the Neverland beyond the veil. The critic W. A. Darlington observed that in A Well-Remembered Voice ‘for once in Barrie's writings there is an admission that the feeling between father and son can be deeper and truer even than that between a son and his mother’.4 Or, perhaps, a boy and his nurse.
Michael was now in Pop, VI Form, Football XI, and co-editor of the Eton College Chronicle – ‘writing leaders and poems galore’,5 boasted Barrie with pride to Charles Turley Smith. To enter more fully into his life, Barrie took out a regular subscription to the Chronicle, which enabled him to follow the boys' activities. Michael had implied to Mary Hodgson that the Easter holidays at Barrie's flat were being looked upon as a ‘trial period’. In his only surviving letter to Michael, Barrie was clearly at pains to make the flat as attractive as possible for their return:
Michael in Pop at Eton
29 March 1918
Dearest Michael,
Pretty lonely here for this week-end, ‘Bank holidays’ are always loneliness personified to me, but I think that you & Nico are almost on the way [home] and rejoice with great joy. Nico said you might get off on Monday after all, but I'm not counting on it, too good to be true. I got your dressing-table out [of Campden Hill] all right & have been trying various plans to make the rooms nice. I have brought a few – very few – things from 23, but of course everything I've done is very open to re-arrangement – in fact it is wanted. … Your account of the boys' musical in the Chronicle makes me want to see the M.S. thereof. Would it be possible for you to get the loan of it?
Loving,
J.M.B.
Michael
Nico was now fourteen, and the last of the Five to overtake Barrie in height, reaching five foot four in May, which allowed him the distinction of wearing tails at Eton instead of a bum-freezer. Barrie wrote to him from Adelphi Terrace:
‘I must say it is pretty awful to think of you in tails. “Bringing his tails behind him” doesn't Mary say about her lamb? I would really rather you grow down instead of up, back into the blue suit & the red cap, heigho! You will have to be more of a comfort than ever to me in my old age, especially when I give at the knee permanently. … I want to come down as soon as M & you fix a good time. Could you wear only one tail the first time so that I can get used to the idea gradually?’6
Barrie communicated the ‘painful news’ of Nico's tails to various friends, adding to Elizabeth Lucas: ‘Seems so little time since he was in blue and red, and we were all flying about in Kensington Gardens.’7
Michael was due to enlist on November 12th, 1918. On November 11th, Germany capitulated with a suddenness that caught the world unawares – not least Barrie, who was in France on an official tour, and spent Armistice night in Paris. He wrote to Mrs Hugh Lewis on November 22nd:
‘So it actually is ended! … “It is finished” rather than “we have won” . … It was dear of Peter [Lewis] to say that about Michael. You can guess how thankful I am. I don't think he will be wanted for the army now, and I'm going to Eton on Sunday … to “go into his future”. He writes “I'll do anything you like. P.S. How about my going round the world?” They marched at Eton with their bath-tubs as drums and the night ended with Michael getting 500 lines (for standing on his head on a roof when he should have been in bed!).’
Nico in the Eton O.T.C.
Michael's suggestion of going round the world was indicative of his mood: he had no desire to break away from Barrie, whom he still loved as few sons love their father, but he had a not unnatural desire to roam before deciding on a future. E. V. Lucas later wrote, ‘He seemed to have everything at his feet, and one used to look at him and wonder what walk of life he would choose; but he gave few signs, being, for all his vivid interest in the moment, more in the world than of it, an elvish spectator rather than a participant.’8 Eiluned Lewis recalled that Michael wanted to go to Paris, as his grandfather, George du Maurier, had done, living the Bohemian life in an artist's studio and developing his passion for drawing. Macnaghten and Barrie did not agree. They felt he should first go to Oxford and secure a degree; to please Barrie – always Michael's priority – he conceded defeat, matriculating at Christ Church in January 1919. In return, Barrie gave him a motor car and a country cottage as a token of independence, though the cottage was rarely used.
Barrie and Cynthia Asquith
During the summer of 1918, Barrie had engaged a secretary. That she could neither take shorthand nor type was of small account, since the woman in question was Lady Cynthia Asquith, the daughter-in-law of the former Prime Minister, whom Barrie had met at a dinner party. Lady Cynthia was aged thirty – the same age as Sylvia had been when Barrie met her at Sir George Lewis's dinner party in 1897. Like Sylvia, Cynthia had an elusive beauty that artists strove to capture but rarely achieved; like Sylvia, she had, at that time, two boys – the younger, Michael, being the same age as George had been when his red tam-o'-shanter first caught Barrie's eye in 1897; unlike Sylvia, she had tremendous ambition: to write, to paint, to act – to do virtually anything that would bring her in enough money to maintain her expensive family. She had been married seven years to Herbert (‘Beb’) Asquith, the eldest surviving son of H. H. Asquith. Like Arthur, he had studied for the Bar; unlike Arthur, he had failed, and had turned to more artistic pursuits, none of which brought in much money. He had enlisted in 1914, and was now serving as a gunner in the army, fighting in France.
The entry of Cynthia Asquith into the scheme of Barrie's life was a gradual process,* which at present held decidedly less significance for Barrie than for his new secretary. His life still revolved around ‘my boys’.
Peter was demobilized early in 1919. He had won the Military Cross in the previous year, but it was little compensation for his three-year ordeal. Mackail wrote, ‘He had been through something more than a furnace, and what was left of him was for a long while little more than a ghost; a shattered remnant that even Barrie couldn't help.’ Peter continued to live with Vera Willoughby, helping her to run an antique shop in Soho. Barrie wrote to Nico at Eton:
‘Michael has told you of the trouble connected with Peter, but I want you to know that tho' it is a real trouble which has caused me much pain for a long time, I hope it will all vanish by and by. Also I love him just as much as ever, and he has all his old dear ways and he comes here a good deal & will come more, and I look forward to us all being all together again. He is as fond of you as in the old days. … He speaks a lot about you to me, and I tell him you are a joy and a pride to me, but of course I never mention such things to you. No, no, I keep it dark. … Michael speaks of learning to swim when he comes back [from Oxford], as he is to have a punt at Christ Church next term. He rode his machine to Berkhampstead on Saty and was escorted over Egerton by the lady now there. … Alas once more the Savoy looms without my favourite company. I think I shall ask for potatoes with a Nico in them and a half bottle of Michael 1900 vintage.’9
Michael
Nico, like Michael, shared most of his adolescent problems with Barrie. He wrote to him from Eton on March 23rd:
Dear Uncle Jim,
…I am afraid this has not been a very happy half for me. I expect my tutor will tell you in my report, which I expect will be bad. Otherwise I will tell you everything. It is a long affair. My tutor is very sick about it but I don't think you would mind. I hope to heaven you won't. It is about me going about with a smaller boy named Wright. He is under 2 years younger and a good bit lower in the school. My tutor says it does both him and me ha
rm, which I will never believe. He jaws about Sentimentality also, which is rot. Wright's people don't object in the slightest and I don't think you will. … I can quite see there would be a lot of harm if I led him into bad ways and used bad language, but as I do neither of them in any way and nor does he, where's the harm? It enfuriates me. In these sort of cases I feel quite helpless without Michael here. … The chief reason why I go about with him so often, and is the only reason, is that I like him better than anyone else in my tutor's. He is good looking, and because of that my tutor says I am so to speak in love with him, whereas it is just perfectly natural friendship. I have been in despair about everything lately.
Loving
Nico
Nico recalled that Barrie's response to such problems was invariably calming and sympathetic:
‘He was never harsh or critical – he always tried to offer advice as a friend, not as a parent, even when I was very young (which, incidentally, is one reason why he got on so well with children – he always treated them as equals). From the time Michael left Eton, I wrote to Uncle Jim every day, which led to my pouring out my thoughts and problems to him – not to a father, not to a brother, rather to a very intimate friend. I think Michael looked on him in much the same way. He was always extraordinarily easy to talk to – I never remember thinking, “Oh, Lor – what's Uncle Jim going to say when he finds out?” On the other hand, we never talked about the so-called “facts of life”, and when, a year or so later, I did go through a more or less bi-sexual stage, I never mentioned it to him. But then how many boys would mention such things to their parents?’
Oxford had one great consolation for Michael – a renewal of his friendship with Roger Senhouse. Another Eton contemporary who had joined him was Robert (later Lord) Boothby:
Michael and Barrie at Glan Hafren
‘Michael was the most remarkable person I ever met, and the only one of my generation to be touched by genius. He was very sensitive and emotional, but he concealed both to a large extent. He had a profound effect on virtually everyone who came into contact with him – particularly Roger Senhouse, who was also a great friend of mine. I don't think Michael had any girl-friends, but our friendship wasn't homosexual; I believe it was – fleetingly – between him and Senhouse, yet I think Michael would have come out of it. Michael took me back to Barrie's flat a number of times, but I always felt uncomfortable there. There was a morbid atmosphere about it. I remember going there one day and it almost overwhelmed me, and I was glad to get away. We were going back to Oxford in Michael's car, and I said, “It's a relief to get away from that flat”, and he said, “Yes it is.” But next day he'd be writing to Barrie as usual. … It was an extraordinary relationship between them – an unhealthy relationship. I don't mean homosexual, I mean in a mental sense. It was morbid, and it went beyond the bounds of ordinary affection. Barrie was always charming to me, but I thought there was something twisted about him. Michael was very prone to melancholy, and when Barrie was in a dark mood, he tended to pull Michael down with him. … I remember once coming back to the flat with Michael and going into the study, which was empty. We stood around talking for about five minutes, and then I heard someone cough: I turned round and saw Barrie sitting in the ingle-nook, almost out of sight. He'd been there all the time, just watching us. … He was an unhealthy little man, Barrie; and when all is said and done, I think Michael and his brothers would have been better off living in poverty than with that odd, morbid little genius.* Yet there's no doubt that Michael loved him; he was grateful to him, but he also had an affinity with him that ran very deep.’10
Barrie on the roof of Adelphi Terrace House, photographed by Jack
In the early summer of 1919, Cynthia Asquith took a temporary respite in her secretarial duties as she was expecting a third child. She and her husband had been lent a house at Thorpe, in Suffolk; she wrote to Barrie, inviting him to stay. Barrie replied on June 20th:
Dear Lady Cynthia,
I don't suppose I shall be able to get down. I want to come but I shd have done it before Michael got back. They shrink, these boys, from going anywhere, the death of their parents is really at the root of it, and down in my soul I know myself to be so poor a substitute that I try to make some sort of amends by hanging on here when there is any chance of my being a little use to them. Even in admitting this I am saying more to you than I do to most.
Yours
J.M.B.
The excuse was both for Michael's sake, and for his own. Michael was due to set off for Paris at the end of the month, and Barrie liked to be with him when he was in London. A fortnight later he wrote to Nico at Eton (2 July 1919): ‘Michael, [Clive] Burt, Senhouse and Boothby are actually off to France! They are at this moment dining together early at Waterloo. I can't conceive easily a more delightful prospect for four happy undergrads.’ Boothby recalled, ‘We had tremendous fun. We climbed a tree in the Champs Elysées and sat in it all night and waited until the peace procession marched by. … Michael loved Paris: he could speak fluent French, and I think he had a romantic idea of setting up his easel on the left bank and becoming an artist.’11 ‘Paris was choc-a-bloc, you couldn't get a room anywhere’, remembered Clive Burt. ‘Then Michael suggested we try the Hotel Meurice as Barrie always used to stay there, and Bob Boothby thought he too could pull a few strings as his Uncle was “well-known” at the Meurice. We went along, presented our credentials, and were summarily ejected; retired to a turkish-bath, and eventually ended up in one of those rooms favoured by prostitutes where two could sleep while the other two roamed the streets, then changed over.’12
Barrie's first left-handed letter
When Michael returned from his Parisian exploits, he found Barrie absorbed in writing a new play. The first notes had been made in 1892: ‘Play: The Haunted House – on all ghosts really mothers come back to see their children.’ The theme had recurred at regular intervals throughout Barrie's notebooks and works during the intervening twenty-seven years, and he was now distilling them into Mary Rose, the story of a young mother who disappears on an island in the Outer Hebrides, returning years later to search for her son. Like Peter Pan, she has remained the same age as on the day she vanished, but her son has grown into a man, whom she no longer recognizes. Although Barrie was gripped by the subject, he found the writing physically painful as he had developed a form of writer's cramp in his right hand. He had been naturally left-handed as a child, and therefore found little difficulty in the switch. For the first time since his school days, his handwriting became legible, though he liked to claim that he thought more darkly down his left arm.
The Paris visit had whetted Michael's appetite for freedom, and throughout his next year at Oxford he was restless and dissatisfied. Senhouse introduced him to some of his Bloomsbury friends, taking him to Ottoline Morrell's home, Garsington Manor, for week-ends. Lytton Strachey found Michael ‘a charming creature – and what is rarer, an intelligent one … the only young man at Oxford or Cambridge with real brains’.13 But Michael shied away from becoming part of a set. Dora Carrington later wrote to Strachey of another boy who ‘reminded me of Michael Davies. He had a strange character: he hardly expanded even when the whole party became wild and tipsy. He was very anxious to be thought a man and put on a charming expression trying to look severe and unconcerned.’14 In the spring of 1920 Dora Carrington wrote to Strachey from Oxford observing that Michael was ‘unhappy and moody. Perhaps that is just the gloom of finding Barrie one's keeper for life.’15
Mary Rose began rehearsals at the beginning of April 1920, with Nico, now aged sixteen, in constant attendance. Michael, however, had set off on a forty-mile hike with a new Oxford friend, Rupert Buxton. Buxton had been head boy at Harrow, with as many academic distinctions to his credit as Michael had acquired at Eton. Clive Burt remembered him as having ‘a kindred spirit to Michael: very musical, very poetic’.16 Robert Boothby had a different opinion:
Michael at Garsington Manor with (left) Dora Carrington and Ju
lian Morrell
‘Buxton was exceptionally clever, but he had a morbid influence on Michael: he was dark, gloomy, saturnine, with an almost suicidal streak in him. I remember Michael asked me, “Why don't you like my being friends with Rupert Buxton?” And I said, “The answer to that is doom – I have a feeling of doom about him.” My friendship with Michael and Senhouse was almost perfection, and those Oxford days were the happiest of my life. We were gay together, always gay; but when Buxton came along, the gaiety left.’17
Fay Compton as Mary Rose
Meanwhile Mary Rose had opened at the Haymarket, with Fay Compton in the title role giving the performance of her career, and many of the critics hailing the play as Barrie's finest work. He had also started work on a murder play, which he was writing to please Michael, who had first suggested it. But Michael appeared to have lost interest; or rather, was preoccupied with establishing his own independence. ‘Barrie tried not to see it,’ wrote Mackail, ‘and was wretched and miserable when he did. … He needed this boy's love also, more than anything on earth, and had known for years that he had it. But now, though [Michael] still only wanted to help him, he seemed to be shying away. … Poor Barrie again. And this time poor Michael. Seven when his father died; an orphan at under ten. So quick, and clever, and so extraordinarily attractive. But now so unhappy too.’ At the end of June, Michael took matters into his own hands: he informed the authorities that he would be leaving Oxford and going to the University of Paris in the autumn. Barrie's reaction is unrecorded, but he can hardly have welcomed the thought of Michael spending most of the year in France. Perhaps he would change his mind, as he had done over a similar impulse to leave Eton. Barrie determined to make this year's summer holiday an outstanding success. He rented an entire island for August and September: Eilean Shona, off the west coast of Scotland. ‘A wild rocky romantic island it is too’, he wrote enthusiastically to Cynthia Asquith on August 13th, ‘it almost taketh the breath away to find so perfectly appointed a retreat on these wild shores. … Superb as is the scene from the door, Michael, who has already been to the top of things, says it's nought to what is revealed there – all the western isles of Scotland lying at our feet. A good spying-ground for discovering what really became of Mary Rose.’
J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys Page 36