Millions of people were spiritualists in Britain at this time. Members of the SPR included Prime Minister Arthur Balfour; philosopher William James, the brother of novelist Henry James; naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace; and scientists William Crookes and Oliver Lodge.
There were all sorts of tricksy and malevolent figures in the superstitious culture of the area of Barrie’s childhood, such as the Kelpie, whose appearances were generally timed either to give warning of death by drowning, or to lure men to a watery grave, and tales of ‘ghaists’ or wraiths of the sort reported at Ballechin House at Strathtay: ‘These are the ghosts that go wailing about old houses,’ wrote Barrie, who before long would be writing about them in plays such as A Well-Remembered Voice and Mary Rose.
Small wonder then, as he was developing an idea about the dead returning to move among the living, that he had chosen as the boys’ introduction to Scotland the very fount of the supernatural in Fortingall.
Michael, who will have enjoyed Barrie’s magical and heroic tales of the region as much as his brothers, felt immediately at home for another reason, however.
At Fortingall he was for the first time really in the wild. The contrast with London and even rural Surrey and Sussex-by-the-sea was immense. The first sight of highland Scotland must have moved him even at six, as it had Pamela Maude a few years earlier:
Late at night a private bus pulled by two horses took us in darkness to a great station [King’s Cross, London]. There was a load of trunks and bicycles with us, a fishing rod … We saw the fitful lights of the streets and then the station; smelt the puffing smoke and heard whistles and shouts through a haze of drowsiness. Suddenly we were awake form [sic] a deep sleep and sitting up in our bunks. Someone had pulled up a blind and said: ‘Look children! You’re in Scotland!’
It was soon after dawn and the light was strange to us. We looked through the carriage window and saw a new world below, great moors of heather stretching far and lonely into the distance. The sound of the train was different now and its pace slower; it climbed over the purple moorland as though it were looking about it. We saw rivers that swirled and thundered against great boulders of stone, with foam and spray like smoke from a witch’s cauldron, and we saw lochs lying still and small. All day long, in Scotland, the light seemed to be the same – that of the early morning.
When one of the party lowered the train window never before had such freshness blown in their faces. With Rannoch Moor to the north and Breadalbane to the south, Fortingall was on the doorstep of the Scotland of one of Barrie’s favourite correspondents,32 the Scotland of ‘huts and peat smoke and brown swirling rivers and wet clothes and whisky, and the romance of the past, and the indescribable bite of the whole thing at a man’s heart which is, or rather lies, at the bottom of a story’. How Robert Louis Stevenson would have loved to entertain the boys here.
Nature was all around them. For the first time they felt free, truly liberated. No demands, no human habitation in sight. Michael’s appreciation of natural beauty and enchantment was with him from the start, but it was at Fortingall that he first participated in primitive beauty, fishing it like the native hunter gatherers had in Fortingall thousands of years earlier.
Over the next fourteen years the Highlands of Scotland became Michael’s Neverland. Yet this was no land of dreams, it was reality. Here were the waters with which his boyhood feelings first truly engaged, the Lyon and the Tay. People have always fished these rivers because they love the places of beauty where trout and salmon feed, but as the poet said, ‘the only real experiences in life [are] those lived with a virgin sensibility … All life is an echo of our first sensations, and we build up our consciousness, our whole mental life, by variations and combinations of these elementary sensations.’33
Four boys under fourteen and Barrie and Sylvia (who proved herself an intuitive fisher, as so many women do) participated with rod and line. The Lyon in particular was fun because it was a short walk from the house to the well-named Peter’s Pool. Here Michael first saw salmon rising.
Fishing was not yet the solitary occupation it would become for him. As often as not, he fished sitting astride Barrie’s shoulders, the master ‘knee-deep in the stream’, while Arthur watched from the bank through his dreadful death mask.
We do not know that he was watching from the bank; no photographs were taken of him anywhere. Perhaps he was sitting reading in the beautiful garden enclosure of Glenlyon House, with its stair tower, octagonal dovecote on the farm steading and views of the mountains.
What we do know is that this was the last holiday he would ever have, and that Michael will have been deeply distressed by the presence of the man who had left for hospital as his father and returned from a nursing home with a failing, artificial jaw and a voice that carried no consonants at all.
No doubt Arthur will have been distressed too that Michael resisted sitting on his knee to listen to him reading the Biblia.
28 Ley-lines are supposed to form a network of energy highways of historical and mystical significance on the earth’s surface. Alfred Watkins, 1921.
29 Duncan Campbell, The Lairds of Glenlyon (1886).
30 Auld Licht Idylls, A Window on Thrums and The Little Minister.
31 Sir George Douglas, Scottish Fairy & Folk Tales (1900).
32 Until his death in 1894.
33 Herbert Read, The Innocent Eye (1933).
Chapter Fourteen
1907: The Widow Sylvia
SIX IS YOUNG for a child to lose his father, let alone to a death so diabolical and lingering as this. For Michael it was not the first time he had thought deeply about death. Barrie had opened the innings with their creative session down by the mermaids’ lagoon, with Peter Pan excited about death being an awfully big adventure. Now his own father was actually dying in a way that couldn’t look less of an adventure.
We know from notes written by Arthur to his sister Margaret that Barrie had advised Arthur to tell the oldest boy, George, everything. So Arthur had told George that ‘probably’ he was going to die, ‘tho’ always a chance’ not, and it hadn’t gone well. George was thirteen.
Margaret gave her advice – ‘better talk to G of other things’, she told him. He turned to Peter. He did not think of death as a glorious thing, rather it ‘was the end of a glorious thing, Life’. No. 3 son Peter said that he did see this.
Jack, it seems, had not been invited to give his opinion at all, having been reduced to floods of tears when his father had told him he was off for the big operation – ‘I remember very clearly indeed father walking me up and down the right hand (looking up the garden) path & telling me more or less what he was in for,’ he told Peter. ‘He drove me to tears – an easy matter!’ Michael wasn’t told that his father was about to die either – he hadn’t needed to be. When Arthur asked him ‘what gift [the boys] would like best’, his answer was simply: ‘Not to die.’
Barrie chose the holiday to address Jack’s future. He announced that he had received a letter from Captain Scott, telling him that he was thinking about another expedition to the Antarctic and asking him if he knew of a boy who could fill a vacancy at Osborne Naval College, the ‘under’ college in the grounds of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight where naval cadets spent two years before joining the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth.
Barrie replied on 6 September, ‘My dear Scott, I know the right boy so well that it is as if I had been waiting for your letter.’ He had then pursued the project with gusto, recommending Jack to Scott for his heroic qualities, as ‘a fine, intelligent, quick boy with the open fearless face that attracts at first sight’. Thus was Jack, the only one to voice concern at Barrie’s increasing control over the family – Jack who adored his mother and, as Peter wrote, ‘loved and worshipped his father’ – removed from the scene. He endured a terrible time at Osborne – ‘The ragging and the bullying that went on was intolerably horrible,’ his wife later told the film maker Andrew Birkin, ‘and a little boy who had never been away from
home was easy meat.’
Barrie’s arrangement effectively put Jack out of the family from 1907. He would always holiday at different times to his brothers – no holiday at Easter, one week at Christmas, six at the end of summer was the order at Osborne – so that they were rarely all together. His four brothers trod a different path – Eton and Oxford. And that cultural difference also left its mark – Jack matured earlier than the others and was always a little the outsider of the family.
The way did seem to be increasingly clear for Barrie, what with Arthur dying and Jack on the Isle of Wight. No one now stood in his way. Only the du Mauriers could have done, and other than Emma, none of them did.
The du Mauriers kept out of the picture all through the period in which Arthur was ill and dying – ‘I fear because it was “their side”,’ as Daphne wrote to Peter in 1963, meaning the Llewelyn Davies side, ‘so they did not feel responsible … I have a disquieting feeling that Daddy [Sylvia’s brother Gerald du M] mocked at them. Why? Some old resentment? Obviously the two families were never close.’
Did it matter much? Possibly not emotionally at the time. Half the problem for children in such a situation is being the centre of excessive attention. A child of a parent with a terminal disease is invariably the focus of endless activities and kindnesses, which can make the burden almost heavier to bear. What you want is the impossible return to normality.
While for Arthur,
[Sylvia] & all the boys were never so desirable to me as now, & it is hard if I have to leave them … But whatever comes after death, whether anything or nothing, to die & leave them is not like what it would be if I were away from them in life, conscious that I could not see them or talk to them or help them,
as he wrote to his father towards the end of September.
In early November there was one rare moment – real hope for remission, some new-fangled electrical treatment – and Barrie brought fireworks down to Egerton House to celebrate Guy Fawkes’ Night on the 5th.
But it was a mirage in the desert landscape of Arthur’s final days. The cancer spread.
Barrie was in almost constant attendance now, ‘lurking in the background’ as Dolly put it, and his notebook entries benefited: ‘A dying man’s fears of breaking down at the end’, ‘his wish for a second chance’, ‘The Widow’s Mite (Little man’s devotion to widow)’ … and so on. We shouldn’t be surprised. Writing was what he did. All life was his inspiration. Although Peter, as family historian and the first after Barrie to read all his notebooks, must have wondered at the extent to which his family had been used by him as material.
In February, Arthur suffered a serious haemorrhage, but rallied. Barrie repeatedly assured him that he would look after his family financially, an incredible commitment when one considers that four of the five would be seen through Eton College, the famous English public school. But of course the money kept pouring in, with new plays and Peter Pan repeating every Christmas season, and soon he would be single again.
At Easter, Jack, Peter and Michael, who again was suffering from a cold, were taken to Ramsgate to stay with Granny Emma, where before long Michael received a letter from his father:
Egerton House, Berkhamsted
April 15, 1907
My dearest Michael
My letters from my boys are indeed a pleasure to me when they arrive in the morning. I hope my boys are getting lots of happiness out of other people’s kindness to them and their own kindness to other people every day. It would be fine to have a magic carpet and go first to London, across from Euston to Holborn Viaduct or Victoria, & on to Ramsgate, and find what is going on at Royal Viaduct and all the other jolly places at Ramsgate. I expect you are having penny of fun and very fine weather, but that we are getting more flowers, especially primroses. My nurse is very good at finding primroses and violets.
Your affectionate Father
It was the last letter of Arthur’s life; he died three days later, aged forty-four. It was the du Maurier family’s unlucky number. Curiously, the telephone number of the clinic where he died was 4444.
It is unclear when Michael realised that his father had died. A few hours after the death he received a letter from Sylvia.
18 April 1907
Darling son Michael,
I hope your cold is not bad – get it quite well quickly for my sake. Here are some silkworm eggs from papa Gibbs – I don’t know what you do with them, but I’ve no doubt Mary [Nanny] will know … George is just going to Mr Timson to have his knickerbockers mended, but they look almost too bad to mend. What a pity it is that you all have to wear things – how much better if you could go about like Mowgli – then perhaps you would never have any colds.
Goodbye now darling – write to me soon
Mother
Papa Gibbs was the local chemist in Berkhamsted. Peter described how first Jack (twelve) and then he (ten) was informed of Arthur’s death by Granny Emma, who was sitting up in her bed with a lace nightcap on her head. The news was delivered
very simply, without circumlocution or excessive emotion … It was, as I remember it, a dull and windy day, and I recollect wandering up to the night nursery and staring out of the window for long minutes in vague wretchedness and gloom, at the grey sea and the distant Gull lightship … as likely as not I was digging on the sands as usual the next morning.
The strain on Sylvia after a whole year of Arthur in suffering and turmoil must have been considerable. As was the way, she went into mourning, dressing in black with a hat and lace veil over her face. Photographs show her despair. She was prescribed a sedative by the family physician, Dr Rendell. Two weeks later she had regained control over the conflict of emotion she will have been feeling to write plausibly enough to Dolly:
Dear darling Dolly,
I think of you so often & I know how you love Arthur and me & that helps me in my sorrow – you will love me always won’t you – and help me to live through these long years. How shall I do it I wonder – it seems to me impossible. We were so utterly and altogether happy & that happiness is the most precious thing on earth. We were not going to part. I must be terribly brave now & I know our boys will help me. They only keep me alive & I shall live for them and as always what Arthur wd most like in them. How he loved us all & he has been taken from us.
Kind Hugh Macnaghten – a dear friend of Arthur’s is going to have George in his house at Eton in September. This was a promise made by Arthur to Hugh some time ago & I am so grateful to Hugh for his love and generosity. I am grateful to many many friends. I will show it one day I hope, but just now I am full of deadly pain & sorrow & I often wonder I am alive. The five boys are loving & thoughtful & I always sleep with my George now – & it comforts more than I can say to touch him & I feel Arthur must know. He will live again in them I feel & that must be my dear comfort until I go to him at last. We longed to grow old together – oh my dear friend it is all so utterly impossible to understand.
My Jack is at Osborne [naval college] now & writes happy letters to me – I am going to pay him a visit when I am strong enough – I miss him very much – but they have all got to be men & love me & for Arthur’s sake I must fight that fight too.
I shall come to London later on – we are trying to let the house – it is too big for me and too full of pain & sorrow. I think of him almost always now as he was before the tragic illness & God gave him the finest face in the world.
Lovingly
I am Sylvia
The letter is remarkable in that Barrie’s name is absent from every context in which he made a significant contribution.
According to Mackail, Arthur left virtually no money at all. Egerton House was leased, there would have been next to nothing to finance Eton for George, who had sat for a scholarship and failed to win one. Again, Barrie’s plan was for Sylvia and the boys to move from the leased house in Berkhamsted to 23 Campden Hill Square, a three-storey terraced house a short walk from Kensington Palace, a very good address. The house curre
ntly has a value in excess of £8 million and even at 1907 prices would have been out of the question for Sylvia without serious financial input from the millionaire Barrie.
Yet she never mentions his name to Dolly in her letter, knowing her concern about Sylvia’s friendship with Barrie. Knowing that Dolly might think that it should be a matter of concern was an added burden for someone whose mind was already swimming with sorrow, self-recrimination and loss.
In these difficult circumstances Barrie did the best thing to settle everything down. He took the family to Scotland. From 23 July until September he rented Dhivach Lodge near Drumnadrochit, Invernesshire. Drumnadrochit lies many miles farther into the Highlands than Fortingall, between Fort Augustus and Inverness in the wooded hills high above Loch Ness.
Dhivach couldn’t have been a better choice – all wooded glades and becks and rushing falls, and magical gates leading to who knows where – vignettes which were always going to return in the boys’ dreams. To all except Nico, that is, for Nico never got beyond the perimeter of the magic wood: ‘When one – I at any rate – gets on to dreams, one is in a world of lovely non-comprehension,’ he wrote, though as it turned out Nico was the only one of the boys really to return, with great nostalgia, to the Scottish haunts as an adult.
Among Barrie’s many guests during the two months here in 1907 was George Skelton, whom he had come across in 1876 when he was writing plays to put on at school and Skelton was a young actor at the Dumfries Theatre nearby. Now he played Smee, Captain Hook’s bosun in Peter Pan, the human side of pirating – ‘a man who stabbed without offence’, as Barrie put it.
The Real Peter Pan Page 11