The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Also the actress Lilian McCarthy and her husband, playwright Harley Granville Barker, whose play Waste had been refused a licence by the Censor, which had made Barrie so furious he’d helped establish a committee to abolish the office. And Captain Scott, whose rousing conversation about a new expedition to Antarctica led Barrie to draft notes for a play about ‘the North or South Pole’ about an explorer returning to Antarctica in old age and dying in the snow: ‘We see his dream – succeeding ages represented by individuals getting nearer & nearer Pole, always having to turn back & die.’ All oddly predictive.

  During the day and in spite of a great deal of rain, the boys did enjoy themselves hugely, ‘sometimes still chasing butterflies but fishing madly with worms most of the time in every burn within walking distance’, as Peter recalled. Barrie wrote to the actress Hilda Trevelyan on 26 August, ‘I do nothing up here but fish & fish & fish, and we ought all to be fishes to feel at home in this weather.’

  Barrie made a note that ‘Michael coming to me cried one tear at Dhivach – I picture it remorsefully alone among hills & streams – Send his laugh to be friends to it & gay together.’

  The boy now had a rod of his own and photographs show him dressed for the part – glengarry on head, trout basket slung around his shoulder, thigh-high waders and Harris Tweed jacket. In fact Barrie, with his guest list constantly on the turn, did much other than fish, leaving Michael to spend hours at a time fishing on his own, enjoying being apart from the world of death and distress in an activity which came naturally to him and was fun.

  The main river forms the boundary on the eastern edge of the Lodge. One day Luath was swept into it and would have drowned, had not Sylvia run along the bank and got hold of him before he whirled past.

  Next to the Lodge was a field with two donkeys, called Togo and Dewet, which the boys would ride, and sometimes they’d attach one to a donkey cart and drive down through the gorge at the back of the house covered with a magnificent, ancient woodland of oak and birch and dissected by a 30-metre high waterfall cascading into the river below. Otherwise, there were games of cricket and stories. ‘Michael, seven now, was at the best age for listening,’ records Mackail, especially when the stories were about a particular character that Barrie had started to call Michael Pan.

  There were also outings to the Beauly, a river rising near the village of Struy and spilling into the sea a few miles west of Inverness beyond the town that gives it its name. Naturally, Barrie and the boys came here to fish. On a still, sunny day in July sitting on the banks of the Beauly at Eskadale you could believe you were 1,000 miles away on the Helford Estuary in Cornwall – wooded banks, blue water, undisturbed, here is enchantment of a gentle sort and would have appealed to the du Maurier soul in Michael for sure.

  Barrie’s memory was of a different sort.

  We had one exciting day with – the cows. I may tell you that up there they are terrific. They had been separated from their calves a few days before and the glens were full of their moanings and stampings. On this day I was watching a fisherman when the cows got beyond all control and swam the river – a roaring torrent in which no man could live – one hundred or more of them, then formed in battle array and thundered down the glen after their calves, which were some miles away. I leapt into a tree … It was as wild as though they had been Highland men rushing to the standard of Prince Charlie.

  At last, maybe because it was the end of an era, what with George and Jack bound for Eton and Osborne Naval College respectively, all the boys carved their initials on a tree in ‘the arbour’, which is still there today.

  But that was not the whole story of course, because the shadow of Arthur’s death remained over them, with Sylvia appearing in some of the photographs still in mourning. For all the fun and games, Peter Davies wrote that ‘the whole pattern of the Dhivach holiday seems to me to have had something rather deplorable about it’. The years 1907–10 he referred to as the seat of all his later neuroses. He was to commit suicide sixty years later by throwing himself under a train at Sloane Square tube station in London.

  Seven-year-old Michael was further troubled now by his mother’s distress, the full depths of which may have been unfathomable to an adult, but were etched on her face as clearly to him as if she had written them down.

  He started to react badly. ‘It was always the same nameless enemy he was seeking,’ wrote Barrie of his nightmares, ‘and he stole about in various parts of the house in search of it, probing fiercely for it in cupboards, or standing at the top of the stairs pouring out invective and shouting challenges to it to come up.’

  The nightmares would become worse in his early teens, when Michael’s cousin Daphne would overhear her nanny saying to Mary Hodgson: ‘Michael has bad nightmares. He dreams of ghosts coming through the window.’ (The Rebecca Notebook, 1981)

  But back in 1907 they proved useful to Barrie who, following Arthur’s death, was already making numerous entries about the boy in his notebook for a new work – story or play – provisionally entitled ‘Michael Pan’ to be written about Peter’s brother.

  The work never came to anything, but the material didn’t go to waste, for Barrie had begun to incorporate Michael into Peter Pan himself as he developed the novel Peter and Wendy:

  Sometimes … [Peter Pan] had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence. At such times it had been Wendy’s custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he quite woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she had subjected him.

  More unsettling is another notebook entry, perhaps because it suggests his view that children, on account of their remoteness from the world, are not as vulnerable to negative emotional experience as adults (hence his earlier suggestion that they should be told about their father’s impending death): ‘Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them. For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event happened, that when they were in the wood they met their dead father and had a game with him.’ This sort of suggestion, whether dreamed up by Michael or by Barrie, shows a level of unrest less than healthy.

  Barrie would write that there was ‘a horror looking for Michael in his childhood’. Neither of them thought it might have anything to do with Barrie.

  Dhivach Lodge was followed by a break for Sylvia and the boys with Emma du Maurier in Ramsgate, where Michael continued to fish. On 8 October he wrote to Barrie:

  DEAR MR BARRIE

  I hope you are quite well.

  I HAVE SENT YOU A

  Pictures of a Pirate he has

  GOT PLENTY OF WEAPONS

  and looks very fierce. Please

  COME SOON TO FISH

  from Michael with Love

  FROM NIC-O THE END

  Chapter Fifteen

  1908: Dependence and Uncertainty

  THEN CAME THE move back to London, to 23 Campden Hill Square, which was made ready for them by Christmas 1907. The boys were ecstatic to find on the first floor, in what became known as the schoolroom, a long table which when flipped over was transformed into a three-quarter-sized billiard table. Billiards became of fanatical interest, particularly for Michael and Barrie, whose games on this table would be scored on a board and photographed for posterity. Of course, as with other games, Barrie developed his own versions. There was one called Slosh, a cross between billiards and pool, and another called the Cue Game, which involved four cues and a rest being placed across the table and what Nico described as ‘a mysterious game when the table was covered with books’. Later came puff-billiards where each player had a hand-held puffer and squeezed it frantically to blow the lightweight ball into an opponent’s goal, though this was a long time in the future.

  They loved every minute o
f it. They were all by nature good games players, Nico judging Michael both as the ‘the best all-rounder as he was very good at all games’, particularly cricket in the years to follow.

  The point is that, when he wasn’t drawing them into his work psychologically and emotionally, and when he wasn’t making Arthur sad and splitting the camp as it were, which of course he couldn’t any longer, Barrie was almost everything the boys wanted. He was in his element now that he had them in ‘his’ house, which naturally sported one of his stamps on the dining room ceiling from the very first day.

  The rest of the layout of the house had Sylvia’s bedroom next to the schoolroom on the first floor, the nursery and night-nursery on the second where Michael, Nico and Nanny Hodgson slept. The third floor had Peter’s room, a two-bed servants room and a two-bed room for George and Jack for when they came home from Eton and Osborne, though their visits coincided infrequently.

  At this stage Barrie appears not to have had a room of his own even for occasional use, though that would change. For now he was still married and living with Mary at Leinster Corner.

  Shortly after Arthur’s death, Sylvia had made notes for a will. If anything happened to her she would like Florence Gay, a family friend, to look after them, along with Nanny Hodgson (‘I hope she will stay with them always’), calling upon Arthur’s sister Margaret, Barrie, and her own sisters and brother Gerald to give advice. But she ended the document, ‘Of one thing I am certain – that J. M. Barrie (the best friend in the whole world) will always be ready to advise out of his love for…’

  Sylvia was now completely dependent on Barrie, but one might say that he was also dependent on her, or at least on her boys – life without them was unimaginable, Michael in particular.

  Dolly remarked in her diary, ‘it is extraordinary to see how [the boys] fill his life & supply all his human interest’.

  Sylvia never finished the last sentence of her draft will, but the missing word had to have been ‘Michael’, for he was, as all agreed, the focus of Barrie’s love more than any other. He was ‘The One’, as Nico had said.

  The boys had all been attending day school in Berkhamsted. In September George had started at Eton and Jack at Osborne Naval College, both boarding. Now, in the New Year of 1908, following the move to London in December, Michael and Nico started together at Norland Place, the primary or pre-prep school that George and Jack had attended before the family moved to Berkhamsted. Norland Place was a short walk with Nanny from Campden Hill Square to Holland Park Avenue.

  Occasionally Sylvia did put in an appearance, her rather sad presence remembered by a fellow pupil, Betty Macleod, and recorded in the school’s 1976 centenary magazine: ‘On Visitors’ day, twice, we noticed, watching drill [marching to a brass band was a core tradition of many a school in those days] – a lady with two really beautiful little boys. She had one of the saddest expressions on her face we had ever seen.’

  Enquiring who she was, Betty learned that she was a friend of J. M. Barrie, who had based Peter Pan on one of her boys. But how sad a picture of Sylvia, so very different to Dolly’s picture of ‘the extraordinary charm, and beauty, and grace, and wit, and sense of humour, which she possessed as a girl and in early married life’. Michael turned eight on 16 June. Barrie was in Paris at the time, staying at the Hotel d’Albe with Frohman, presenting Peter Pan for a summer run at the Théatre du Vaudeville. He sent Michael a letter and an American Indian outfit, complete with wigwam, bow and arrows, and peace pipe. The letter read:

  My dear Michael,

  Paris is looking very excited today and all the people think it is because there were races yesterday, but I know it is because tomorrow it is your birthday. I wish I could be with you and your candles. You can look at me as one of your candles, the one still burning. I am Michael’s candle. I wish I could see you putting on the redskin’s clothes for the first time. Won’t your mother be frightened. Nick will hide beneath the bed and Peter will go for the police.

  Dear Michael I am very fond of you. But don’t tell anybody.

  The End

  J. M. Barrie

  Then back to London and Black Lake Cottage, where he learned some news that took him aback. The sculptor Kathleen Bruce, who had been staying there with a friend, suddenly announced that she was engaged to Captain Scott. Barrie had been unaware that Bruce had been seeing both Scott and Gilbert Cannan, who was Secretary of Barrie’s committee to abolish the Censor, its headquarters at Black Lake Cottage, and when some in the Black Lake party had expressed doubts that Scott would ever marry, she decided on the spur of the moment to make her announcement.

  Barrie was startled and deeply upset when he discovered all this from Mason; and Scott had been so worried as to how he would react he had not dared approach him about it.

  When Barrie and Scott first met in 1905, they had taken to one another ‘instantaneously’, according to Mackail – ‘something more than a response on both sides’.

  Barrie’s interest in explorers had been there since he was a boy, but there was something special about Scott that magnetised Barrie. He had, like D. H. Lawrence’s fictional explorer Gerald Crich in Sons and Lovers, ‘a northern kind of beauty, like light refracted from snow … In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing.’

  There is no evidence that Barrie was stirred by Scott sexually, but if not there was certainly a male bonding of a sort less common today. Whether Scott measured up to Barrie’s view of him is unlikely, but that did not concern Barrie: ‘I doubt if he brought out or even recognised (or wanted to) the true characteristrics [sic] of anyone he made much of,’ Peter would write.

  Scott did play up to the heroic fantasy that Barrie wove about him, no less in their intimate dealings than with Michael and Nico in Kensington Gardens. He was even a bit carried away by it, one reason perhaps why his expedition in 1911 would fail. Scott became such a slave to the heroic ideal that he insisted on the sleighs being dragged by his men not by dogs, irrational, unnecessary, an emotionally motivating ideal that turned out a fatal burden on his team.

  ‘When Barrie was strongly attracted by people, he wanted at once to own them and to be dominated by them, whichever their sex,’ wrote Peter, martialling all his evidence from mountains of papers appertaining to the man. Scott, though amiable, held command by force of personality, and had enjoyed Barrie’s need to be dominated, their first conversation being ‘largely a comparison of the life of action [Scott’s] with the loathly life of those who sit at home [Barrie’s],’ as Barrie himself noted.

  So, over the three years they had known one another Barrie and Scott had developed an almost heroic bond, in which Scott’s force of personality was the venerated god. It wasn’t a unique bond exactly, as deep relationships between men were a feature of the times. Nor did it need to be sexual. If they burned for each other inwardly they would never admit it. They were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any sentimentality into it. But you could call it love nonetheless, as love between the old German knights, who used to make a wound in their arms, rub each other’s blood into the cut and swear a Blutbrüdershaft.

  In this context we can begin to see why, when so personal a departure as Scott’s engagement to Kathleen Bruce became public knowledge, it seemed a betrayal to Barrie.

  Scott realised he’d made a terrible mistake not telling him first. Kathleen advised him: ‘Please write quite by return of post … As nice a letter as ever you can think of.’

  But the deed had been done and was irretrievable. There would be bitterness between them even after the marriage the following September, only partly assuaged after the birth of their son, Peter (to become the famous naturalist), when Scott asked Barrie to be godfather and he accepted.

  When Scott lay dying in his tent in Antarctica, his last action was to write a letter to Barrie, saying:

  It hurt me grievously when you parti
ally withdrew your friendship or seemed so to do – I want to tell you I never gave you cause … Give my memory back the friendship which you suspended – I never met a man in my life whom I admired and loved more than you but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me, as you had much to give and I nothing.

  The letter was found on Scott’s body and posted to Kathleen, who sent it to Barrie in 1913.

  As if all this wasn’t enough, Barrie’s relationship with Sylvia’s actor brother Gerald also broke down in 1908. As with Scott, according to Nico, Barrie ‘thought Gerald irresistible’. He first employed him in The Admirable Crichton in 1902, after he had come down to Black Lake Cottage and Barrie had enjoyed his ‘gay, happy go lucky flair’ and reputation as a practical joker.

  That play made Gerald’s name in the theatre. Barrie then cast him in Peter Pan as Captain Hook (Barrie’s dark side) and Mr Darling (the ‘Arthur LlD’ role). Gerald played them in the same production for a few years, and other roles besides.

  So empathic did the relationship between actor and playwright become that, as Mackail put it, Gerald made Barrie’s plays ‘even more like Barrie-plays than they were already, though Gerald hated, or thought he hated, everything fanciful and whimsical, and swore by whisky and cold beef and golf’.

  There was an almost perilous intimacy between them, which could as well be described as enmity as love. ‘They thought they saw through each other, and then again they weren’t at all sure that they weren’t being seen through themselves,’ commented Mackail. ‘There was often a kind of jealousy, too, when each found himself wanting the other’s more special and peculiar gifts – though of course as well as his own…’