Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  H. G. Hibbert, a sub-editor on the paper, described him as ‘shy and painfully sensitive’.14 He made no friends in Nottingham other than Thomas Gilmour, a journalist who would later be Lord Rosebery’s private secretary and a flat-mate of Barrie’s in London. Hibbert noted Barrie’s ‘immense sense of his importance’, which concealed his low self-esteem, but Barrie backed it with exceptionally hard work, turning out twelve columns a week and sending articles to London magazines.

  According to W. A. Darlington, the Nottingham experience gave Barrie ‘the true journalist’s knack of being able to turn out a readable article on anything or nothing’, while his separateness from the world gave him a sometimes chilling objectivity. He took surprising standpoints on mundane topics, his increasingly cynical mind challenging the reader’s routine thinking. But cynicism could descend into cruelty and some of his humour was too cocky by far, as this article, ‘Pretty Boys’, proved:

  Pretty boys are pretty in all circumstances, and this one would look as exquisitely delightful on the floor as when genteelly standing, in his nice little velvet suit with his sweet back to the fireplace, but think of the horror and indignation of his proud and loving mother... When you leave the house, the pretty boy glides like a ray of black sunshine to the door and... holds up his pretty mouth for a pretty kiss. If you wish to continue on visiting terms with his mother you do everything he wishes; if you are determined to remain a man whatever be the consequences, you slap his pretty cheeks very hard while the mother gazes aghast and the father looks another way, admiring your pluck and wishing he had the courage to go and do likewise. It would on the whole be a mistake to kill the child outright, because, for one thing, he may grow out of his velvet suit in time and insist on having his hair cut, and, again, the blame does not attach to him nearly so much as to his mother.

  His provincial Nottingham audience did not find this amusing. Eventually, he got the sack; his last article for the Journal appeared on 27 October 1884. His talent was to mix satire with sentimentality and humour, but sometimes the balance didn’t work, the mask slipped, and his cruel self – the side of him that announced his distorted contact with reality – peeped through. Sentimentality was the balm that kept the lid on the truth about Barrie, and he knew it. He hated sentimentality ‘as a slave may hate his master’, but true feelings had not been on his agenda since he was a boy of six.

  Sentimentality meant mawkishness certainly, insincerity, exaggeration, but ‘far more often – he has a cruel side – [it is] satire that does not quite come off’, as the writer Sir Walter Raleigh observed. At the far end of this spectrum of affectation came the gushing adoration which developed between mother and son when he became a professional writer:

  My dearly beloved Jamie my heart keeps blessing and thanking yoou [sic] but my love no words can say, and especially your present my head fails words for my best birthday gift. My dear beloved son God bless you and prosper you are a precious God given son to me the light of my eyes, and my darling Maggie is safe with God and you till we meet.

  This is the only letter Barrie saw fit to save for posterity. It has an unnatural character, a troubled, forced intensity, as has Barrie’s biography of his mother, published after her death. A peculiar feature of the purportedly eulogistic Margaret Ogilvy is that in it Barrie depicts his mother as arrogant, pettily snobbish, manipulative, jealously possessive, obstinate and, as W. A. Darlington concluded, ‘a very tiresome old lady indeed’, someone who ‘accepted her daughter Jane Ann’s life-long devotion and her son’s adoration without a qualm’.15

  What drew some reviewers to it originally, and convinced them of the son’s great love for the mother, was Barrie’s genius for sentimental engineering. Every chapter ends with a rescue operation designed to keep a place for Margaret in our hearts. But it cuts little ice today.

  Why then did he persist with her, and tell the world how wonderful she was, after she rejected him? I believe it had something to do with guilt.

  There are some oddities about the death of Jamie’s brother David, which indicate that there was more to it than we have been told.

  First, I wondered why biographers have accepted at face value Barrie’s sentimental version of what happened in his mother’s darkened bedroom. One has to question how so small a boy could have dressed up in the clothes of David, who was twice his age and well on the way to becoming more the size of his burly father than his minuscule mother. And the whistle. Why would Jamie need to find out what his brother’s whistle was like from his friends? Wouldn’t he already know?

  Why was Barrie making things up about something so personal and significant? And why was he so frantically concerned about how his mother had taken the news anyway – more so than the other children? Jamie felt a very strong need to put himself in front of Margaret, after David’s death, almost to plead his filial position with her. Why? And why did she resist him so?

  It was never Barrie’s habit to throw into question his view of things, even when an event he was describing occurred before he was born. Yet, when discussing David’s death, he is at pains to distance himself from it: ‘I remember very little about David . . .’ ‘I have been told . . .’ ‘I only speak from hearsay . . .’ ‘But I speak from hearsay . . .’ – all in a matter of a few lines of Margaret Ogilvy. This is so out of character that it pulled me up even before I discovered some intriguing inconsistencies in reports concerning David’s death.

  Alick set up his private school, the Bothwell Academy, in what was then Academy Crescent, Bothwell and is now Silverwell Crescent, in 1862. The 10-year-old David was sent as a boarder there in 1863. The accepted version of David’s death is the one Denis Mackail tells us:

  On the eve of his fourteenth birthday [29 January] there was a frost, and not even while skating himself, but standing watching a friend set off on the one pair of skates which they shared, he was accidentally knocked down by this boy, fell, and fractured his skull.

  There was little if any hope for him. His brother [Alick] telegraphed immediately to their parents, and they set off at once for the station... The telegraph office was there in those days, and before boarding the train David Barrie the elder thought to ask if there were any further message. A second telegram had just been received. It told him that his son was dead.16

  This is essentially the story told in every biography of Barrie, from J. A. Hammerton’s Barrie: The Story of a Genius in 1929, right up to Lisa Cheyney’s Life in 2004.

  However, David’s death certificate tells a different story. It confirms that the boy died on 29 January 1867, at two o’clock in the morning in Academy Crescent in Bothwell, but it reveals that he had been suffering from an inflammation of the brain for one week before he died. Column six of the death certificate, which lists cause of death, reads: ‘Inflammation of brain one week. As Cert. Bruce Goff MD.’

  I noticed another oddity. According to the certificate the tragedy was reported not by Alick but by a man named William Keith, who is described as ‘Guardian and occupant of house in which death occurred (present)’. William Keith had been present when David expired. Where was Alick? What could have taken the headmaster of the Academy, David’s elder brother, away from Bothwell close to the beginning of the Easter term with David lying at death’s door upstairs?

  I then discovered that a Dutch writer and broadcaster, Hans Kuyper, had been looking into David’s death too. We corresponded and met in London in 2007. I told him rather dramatically that I smelt a rat, and immediately he agreed, saying, ‘It is a very smelly rat indeed – but what is the reason for all of the mystifications and what could Barrie have gained by them?’

  Kuyper discovered that David’s death had been reported in two newspapers: the Hamilton Advisor for 2 February 1867, and the Dundee Courier and Argus for 1 February 1867. The first announced it very simply:

  At Bothwell Academy, on the 29th ult., David Ogilvy Barrie, aged 13.

  The second was very different in tone:

  At Rothesay,
on the 29th ultimo., David, aged 14, second son of Mr David Barrie, manufacturer, Kirriemuir. Deceased was a very promising young lad, and is deeply regretted by a large circle of acquaintances.

  According to the death certificate, the first announcement is factually correct. My guess is that it was posted by Alick. However, the second has errors in it. David did not die at Rothesay, a seaside resort on the Isle of Bute some forty miles away from Bothwell. He died in Academy Crescent, Bothwell, as the certificate shows. And he was 13, not 14.

  David’s age is not significant: the accident occurred on the eve of his fourteenth birthday. But the introduction of Rothesay is interesting. Could it be that the accident happened there? Kuyper went to the resort and discovered ‘a sheltered little lake just to the north of Loch Fad there, called the Curling Pool’. Curling is of course a game played on ice, so it is likely that the pool is often iced over in winter. Perhaps the whole celebration – new skates, a trip to Rothesay – had something to do with it being David’s fourteenth birthday on the 30th. Kuyper then spoke to Mrs Sweeten Barrie, the daughter of Alick’s son, Charles, who confirmed that this was her understanding of what had happened.

  On Rothesay, Kuyper met a Mrs Jess Sandeman, ‘a walking encyclopaedia of the island’, who remembered some Barries living there, which suggests that David may have been staying there with family. Mrs Sandeman put Kuyper in touch with one of the children of that branch of the family, a Mrs Martha Smith of Port Bannatyne, who told him a story that had come down to her ‘of two brothers Barrie’ holidaying there with Alick.

  Suppose Jamie had travelled from Kirriemuir to Bothwell Academy with Alick and David at the end of the Christmas holiday in order to celebrate David’s birthday with him, in particular to go skating with him, taking a brand new pair of birthday skates to Rothesay. Suppose Jamie had been the ‘friend [who] set off on the one pair of skates which they shared’, and ‘accidentally’ knocked David down and was the one who ‘fractured his skull’.

  If so, both boys might have returned the forty miles to Bothwell after the accident, and Alick might have accompanied Jamie on the hundred-mile trip home to Kirriemuir at the weekend, Saturday or Sunday, 26 or 27 January. Then the telegram had come saying that David had fallen ill, perhaps on the Sunday or the Monday, early enough to change Alick’s plans to return and make arrangements for Margaret to travel with him back to Bothwell. No alarm at this stage. The second telegram, announcing his death, had arrived on Tuesday morning (David had died at 2 a.m.) while they were at the station awaiting the train.

  This would fit in with the report that David was ill for a week before he died. It would explain Alick’s absence from Bothwell on the day of David’s death, the 29th, and why there was such a painful situation, guilt and recrimination, between Margaret and Jamie. How desperate would Jamie have been to put things right with his mother, and how difficult would Margaret have found it ever to forgive him.

  It is of course highly speculative, but it explains the emotional dynamic between mother and son, Margaret’s alienation from Jamie, and why Jamie continued, throughout his life, to make reparation. Moreover this worrying emotional dynamic between mother and son turns out to be replicated in the story of Peter Pan.

  In The Little White Bird, the novel that preceded and set up the story for the play, Peter Pan, Peter, an ordinary child, flies out of the window of the nursery and goes to live on Birds’ Island with Solomon Caw, becoming a ‘betwixt-and-between’; part boy, part sprite. In time, however, he resolves to go home. His intention is to fly back through the nursery window, which it was understood that his mother would always keep open for him –

  But the window was closed, and there were iron bars on it, and peering inside he saw his mother sleeping peacefully with her arm round another little boy.

  Peter called, ‘Mother! mother!’ but she heard him not; in vain he beat his little limbs against the iron bars... What a glorious boy he had meant to be to her! Ah Peter! We who have made the great mistake, how differently we should all act at the second chance. But Solomon was right – there is no second chance, not for most of us. When we reach the window it is Lock-out Time. The iron bars are up for life.

  For Peter, there is no second chance, no way ever to reclaim his mother’s love. The desperate hammerings of his little fists on the window are Jamie’s frantic attempts after David’s accident to get back into his mother’s love. The iron bars were, indeed, up for life.

  And yes, there is a sense of Peter Pan’s guilt. His mother has been crying, ‘and he knew what was the great thing she cried for, and that a hug from her splendid Peter would quickly make her to smile. Oh! He felt sure of it . . .’ But the ‘great thing she cried for’ was ‘the great mistake’, which Peter had made and we are never told about, so big a mistake that a hug is not going to be enough, any more than it was in Jamie’s case after David’s accident.

  Following his dismissal from the Nottingham Journal, Barrie’s success in London was in no small way due to Margaret: she gave him the stories that made his name, a series of articles, beginning in November 1884 with ‘An Auld Licht Community’, which would later be used as the basis of a novel,17 and the tactical thinking and ‘a certain grimness about not being beaten’ that leaked out of the sump in the engine room of their otherwise barren relationship. In the end, Jim articulated what they both knew, that they were ‘very like each other inside . . .’

  You may picture the editor in his office thinking he was behaving like a shrewd man of business, and unconscious that up in the north there was an elderly lady chuckling so much at him that she could scarcely scrape the potatoes.18

  When he first asked her how he should net a sympathetic editor, Margaret rocked her head back on the pillows and laughed:

  ‘I would find out first if he had a family, and then I would say they were the finest family in London.’

  ‘Yes, that is just what you would do, you cunning woman! But if he has no family?’

  ‘I would say what great men editors are!’

  ‘He would see through you.’

  ‘Not he!’

  ‘You don’t understand that what imposes on common folk would never hoodwink an editor.’

  ‘That’s where you are wrong. Gentle or simple, stupid or clever, the men are all alike in the hands of a woman that flatters them.’

  ‘Ah, I’m sure there are better ways of getting round an editor than that.’

  ‘I daresay there are,’ my mother would say with conviction, ‘but if you try that plan you will never need to try another.’

  ‘How artful you are, mother – you with your soft face! Do you not think shame?’

  ‘Pooh!’ says my mother brazenly.

  ‘I can see the reason why you are so popular with men.’

  ‘Ay, you can see it, but they never will.’

  Mother and son, unrestrained by unconditional filial love, had become coconspirators with a cynical disrespect for the world. He had found her cynical nature, or, luxuriating in her domination of him, planted it in her. Together they rehearsed the stratagems with which Barrie would turn society to his advantage, leaving people marvelling at his genius. It was a philosophy of self-interest, justified on the altar of expediency. According to Jamie, it was Margaret who affected one response while showing another ‘in her eye’. But whoever was behind it, the stratagem to dissemble came with no homily on moral virtue attached. In their book, ‘finding a way’ was the priority, a matter not of solving a problem, but of manipulation and control.

  Margaret could not see beyond Jamie now. Their pact was Faustian, a loveless blood pact, inescapable. If he had cast her off now, she would have withered like an amputated hand.

  I had no idea how desperate things had got until I came across a handwritten manuscript sheet of Mackail’s official biography of Barrie. It is a remarkable document because it completely rewrites the accepted view of the Barrie home. The text is scarred by two pens, one of them certainly wielded by Lady
Cynthia Asquith. A blue pen describes in two-inch letters scrawled across the page: ‘KILL THIS’; the other, a more sober brown, finds its way less dramatically diagonally across the middle, from bottom left: ‘Re-write this page’. Mackail’s text, which was withheld from publication, paints a bleak picture.

  Jane Ann forty-six, as austere and as self-sacrificing as ever. Plain, already elderly in appearance, with no chance now to develop her mother’s conceit, and morose and difficult in her scant life, for – it’s no use hiding it any longer – she wasn’t the only member of the family... to yield at last to deadly temptation. There were two [pitfalls] that lay in wait for Margaret Ogilvy’s children, and only the very strongest could resist them both. Hypochondria and drink. Jane Ann, with an example and warning against one of them always under her care [i.e. Margaret, who was permanently in bed], had fought against it and had won. But only, it now seemed, by giving way to the other. Her brother [Jamie] knew, just as he knew about what was happening elsewhere, and in turn the whole unfortunate business told him what he must guard against himself. He did guard against it. Once or twice it [drink] offered him brief comfort, when one of his worlds fell to pieces, but that is the worst and frankest that can be said. It never mastered him; and though hypochondria [hung] round him all his life, he could always beat it when he chose. For he was slippery as well as courageous, even where heredity had all but got him down. But the others were weaker and more vulnerable. The stimulus of fame and position could only reach them at second hand. So they drank, & they took to their beds and refused to get up. Again it is one of those... biological mysteries in the union of that hand loom weaver and that stonemason’s daughter. Inexplicable. Horrifying and haunting. Somehow, apparently, and whether guilty or innocent, every one of their children must pay a remorseless price.